what's up everybody it's tr with earth angel mushrooms it's been a while and i don't have my selfie stick with me sorry but i said i would make a video on these so here i am going to make a video let me set my camera down here get back here um first a couple things um maitake are extremely difficult i don't have a full grasp of maitake and the ins and outs like i do on shiitake or oyster or some of the other easier varieties what i will say is i'm growing about 700 750 pounds a week now so i have a little bit of a grasp i have the tiger by the tail let's see if i can uh keep hanging on i debated and debated whether i was going to make this video and share um via youtube um what i know so far and some of the other mayataki growers that are my colleagues are like i don't i don't want to share any of this i don't want to share any of this but up to this point in my mushroom growing career um me sharing stuff has only benefited me and so i feel that by helping everybody else out um you know it's going to help me as well so here we go mayataki i am growing exclusively one strain known by m4 or 9827 originally i got the culture from my good buddy at high five mycology corey nelson and i was making my own swan now i'm buying g1s from cap and stem still making my spawn but buying g1s from uh the guys of main cap and stem saves me a ton of time um so if you're gonna buy spawn g1s whatever main cap and stem i still still spawn as well so let's get back on track 9827 or m4 you'll hear it go by both both names and again i'm prefacing i don't know everything about mayataki i know a little bit i'm still learning almost every week something about them but there are some consistencies that i do know so let's start off i'm using a mix of spawn that's sawdust and grain shiitake and mayataki both love sawdust in the spawn so i add ends up being about 10 or so on both of those species so it's millet wheat and about 10 sawdust there's a lot of sawdust but they love it so anyway let's go uh look at some blocks here so here i have a progression of blocks starting with colonized you can see starting to get a little ring around a dark ring and i'll go into more detail with these and then it's growing up the bag and then i have some over here i'm in the grow room right now i've switched up my grow room specifically for mayataki and i'll get to there look at that rack oh yeah it looks nice anyway so um it takes between six and eight weeks i'm using 10 pound blocks i'm growing on sawdust and 35 soybean holes um the moisture content i shoot for is 57.5 57.5 um it's a little bit on the dry side but that's what i go for every single week and as you can see per this room and i'll show you some blocks that are ready to pick let me shut that off real quick so you guys can hear me i'm going to go over here it's my new humidification system right here got the air atomizing nozzle now you can see it right up there it's new you guys haven't seen that yet so i'm going to drop this down to turn it off then i'll turn it back up whenever i'm done with the video okay so i'm growing on sawdust and soybean holes but it is 35 57.5 moisture and a lot of you guys are like well that's bone dry a moisture percentage is dependent on your sawdust right so i could get it i could go really in depth on uh moisture content of substrate and how it differs from sawdust to sawdust based on how big the particle size is uh of a given sawdust so for those of you growing on pellets 57.5 would be bone dry for fresh sawdust depending on the mill you're getting it from and this the size of the particles of sawdust themselves it's it's it's just right for mine um so based on the mill that i get the sawdust from and how it how it holds water so imagine like comparing peat moss to sand peat moss is going to hold a massive amount of water but if you put that same amount of water in sand it's going to feel like waterlogged draining water to the bottom the same thing applies for our substrate so by giving you a certain moisture content it might be different a little bit different for um your sawdust or your substrate so i'm doing 10 pound blocks of course i'm using my autoclave so anyway we're inoculating them i use six pound bags of spawn and i inoculate about 25 10 pound blocks per six pound spawn bag and again my spawn is millet wheat and sawdust for mayataki and shiitake so then i inoculate them put them in incubation in incubation incubation holds about 68 degrees in there and then so here's one that's just dense white 12 24. so what is that three weeks um ish three weeks and then you'll start seeing the next phase and jordan gent of texas fungus coined the term spider eyes and it starts to get dark all over the top and you probably can't see the spider eyes on there but they look like spider eyes there's little dark water droplets on all of the masses of mushrooms so what they're doing is they're starting to fruit in the bay and then of course from here as long as the conditions are correct they keep growing up the bag the beautiful thing about mayataki is they're already in the back we don't have to create any additional environment changes for them because they got a 100 humidity and they have what they want one of the huge things in being successful or semi-successful growing mayataki is when you fruit them when you fruit them there is like a magic week or so and if you go over that week then they grow a little bit differently in here if you go under that week there's a huge chance that they will abort so the biggest thing is identifying that week of when they're ready so before i tell you that stuff what you will have an incubation to your grow room is you'll have rollover blocks that should have been ready but they're actually ready a week late and then in turn you'll have other blocks that are ready a week early that you bring in so you have this constant shuffling of blocks based on when they're ready so you'll have early blocks you'll have your main blocks you know the huge chunk of them that are actually on schedule early ones from the next week and then you'll have blocks that are stragglers that you have to roll over to the next week because if you bring them to the grow room they won't want they'll either abort or they'll grow and not look correct or they'll be in there forever even if you can get them to fruit correctly so this was a rollover block this was started on 12 1 this is the week that predominantly all of my blocks in here that are fruiting right now are on so this block got rolled over to next week so it'll be cut open next week and i'll get to how i cut open the bags um so the biggest thing you're looking for and i say about six weeks so it's actually like six seven eight weeks depending on the block and it's all block dependent it's the only thing we're abiding by is what the block is telling us how is it growing how are we going to get this to fruit we want to listen to it we are uh it's the master we're the slave we're doing what it tells us to do and as long as we do what it wants it will give us my title um so you can see that it is growing up the bag right up the side of the bag they love to go around the ring of the bed why i don't know and a lot of people don't like them to fruit around the bag they want to get one big mayataki i want that too and i'm working on that part to figure out how i can get that but right now i don't know that i don't know how to get one beautiful mayataki i know how to get lots of smaller beautiful mayatakis so it's growing up the side of the bag and i wish you guys could really see inside the bag but you can't but it grows from of course the spider eyes to all it starts growing up the side of the bag making these big like balls knobs and the magic time to fruit them is when they are starting to make fingers so when they go from knobs to just barely starting to make fingers when they start to make fingers that is to go ahead so this was a rollover block and you can see that it's not making fingers like the other so now let me grab a block that we did freeze grab the camera here we brought these in yesterday hopefully it's focusing see how there's fingers i call them fingers fingers fingers [Music] fingers see how there's all kinds of little fingers in there i have little water droplets so let me put this back down so you're looking for fingers it's going to fruit in the bag until it makes fingers these were literally cut open yesterday i'll put that back one thing that you're looking for when you bring them into the grow room is literally overnight within 12 hours those fingers will start getting dark and there's a noticeable difference hopefully you saw in the video but there's a darker margin around the tops of the mushrooms that's always a good sign sorry i don't have my selfie stick so we went through the progression went through the temperature how i inoculate them what i'm using 35 soybean holes 65 sawdust so when to cut them open we're letting them grow in the bag first we're seeing all white block then it starts getting dark then we start seeing spider eyes and we start seeing these knobs grow up and then when we see those fingers start going out then we're going to cut the bag so i started by cutting the bag all the way off and that works fine but you don't get the best yield they don't like lots of airflow so when you block that airflow with the bag up around the top you can see that we're cutting the bag up high and then we cut a slit here that when they start to frond out they can push the bag on their own and that saves them from getting hit with the air and keeps the moisture on black so let's pull up a good looking my attack so when they go in the grow room it's gonna happen lightning fast lightning fast this block has been in the grow room for a week one week so we went from fingers to that or to any of these in a week and i left this rack in here i should have picked a lot of these yesterday and here i'm trying some other stuff down here look at this one that is just oh yeah beautiful little hen beautiful so i have a rotation that they're in the grow room for a week and the next round comes in that allows me to clean this room immaculately i do not grow any other mushrooms that don't like to grow with other mushrooms do i know why no but i do know that they don't like to grow with other mushrooms so you saw my humidifier i try to keep the humidity in the 90s but not getting water to be on the mushrooms themselves um but i try to keep it high low airflow co2 below a thousand so i have a fan right behind me that's pulling off a preconditioning room so i've set my whole grow up up for these now um as opposed to my previous videos i just try to keep the co2 below a thousand my humidity in the 90s i want to keep it as high as possible but not get lots of water on the mushrooms themselves and temp believe it or not a lot of people think that they like really cool temperatures they do not like cool temperatures and this is one of the few mushrooms that i know of that you can get it warmer like up to 70 and it's they're still good to go um right now it's about 64 degrees so in the 60s is where i'm trying to hang out and even towards the upper end of the 60s so again what we've gone over and what i know and i only know one strain i don't know multiple strains i know this strain i've stuck to this strain so i kind of figure stuff out 98 27 or m4 those things are interchangeable um but it's ready to fruit in about six weeks but might be different for you guys just look for those fingers i cut the whole top off the bag and cut slices down the sides but the key is the when it's ready you're bringing it in when it tells you to bring it in and there's one other thing and this camera won't do these justice these are flood lights these are blinding the camera doesn't do them justice but it will looking towards you guys it's almost blinding to me there's a light response uh i don't know fully how much light they need but i do know that they need light way more light than the other species so about six weeks but we're looking for the fingers so it could be six weeks seven weeks or eight weeks they're always enough it's like popcorn it starts with a few then most of it than a few stragglers that's exactly like my top lights humidity give it as high as you can without getting lots of water on the mushrooms co2 below a thousand temperature mid 60s even to the upper 60s and about a week in the grow room uh i don't recommend growing other mushrooms mayataki they have some sort of sixth sense um this room is cleaner than any other grow room that i've ever had i am anal retentive about keeping this thing clean um i think i covered everything what i'm using how i'm colonizing how i'm fruiting when i'm bringing them over and this is what you get so hopefully i helped you guys understand maitake better than you did before keep on growing mushrooms stay motivated sell those mushrooms and we'll talk to you later