This is a trial setup for a bigger, commercial mushroom growing house. In this trial growroom we will be doing the same tasks as in the future bigger setup but with less substrate, 40kg of substrate/week.
– The room has a northwest orientation and has a big tree by the window. These and the A/C unit if needed will help keep the room fresh during the summer
– There is plenty of natural light and no direct sunlight so artificial light is not needed
– The Floor has been covered with several layers of thick plastic
– We will put extra shelves (12 in total) to accomodate three blocks of 3 kilograms each
– The two humidifiers maintain a 90-95% humidity. Due to the dry weather in Madrid (30%-40% this days) i have the big one 24/7 and the small one on a timer 15 mins ON / 45 mins OFF.
– Some trays with perlite help to maintain the humidity when the greenhouse is quite empty. We place them on the empty shelves
– We had at home this old Thermo Hygrometer because my grandfather and father used to run a business where they sold them, it has become my favorite gadget. It records humidity and temp. for a week with no shitty batteries. It´s also much more accurate than all the digital hygrometers under 100€
The image above shows the evolution of the humidity. It took me some hours to setup the humidifiers to maintain 90-95% RH.
For FAE (Fresh Air Exchange) we just cut 4 holes on one side. We also live the zips from both sides of the greenhouse´s door wide open.
¿like the planets and the stars on the wall? I think the mushrooms do 🙂
– This is the space for incubation which will be cleared of soon to accomodate all the substrate bags
– We will put something to stop some rays of sunlight that manage to hit the shelves
– Bag of pasteurized substrate (50% horse manure 50% worm casts) spawnned with king oyster (pleurotus eryngii)
– This is a homemade steam pasteurizer. It uses the steam cleaning machine on the left to inject steam inside the pasteurizer and elevate the temperature between 60-70ºC
– The box is made of to plastic containers, one smaller and placed inside the other.
– Between the two a thick layer of insulation (sleeping bags) is placed covering all of the inner container
The inside container has a metal wireframe some centimeters above the bottom. This makes posible that the steam is injected from under the substrate.
We use jars to pasteurize the substrate. We tried bigger containers but the center of the substrate took up to 2 hours to reach 60ºC. With the jars it takes about 45 minutes
A thermometer with a sensor that we place in the middle of the substrate tells us when it reaches the pasteurization temp (60ºC). We maintain a temp between 60ºC-70ºC for 1 hour.
Another Thermometer introduced through a hole in the inner container gives as the ambient temperature inside the pasteurizer. When the temperature drops below 60ºC some more steam has to be injected into the box.
With the insulation we have now we are injecting about 3 minutes of steam at the beginning and 1 minute every 30 mins.
This is the thermometer seen throught a hole in the outer box. We made if because we couldn´t read it because of the vapor.
The missing piece of the growing room is a space for spawning and filling the bags.
This is a sketch of what we wanna make
Would love to hear some feedback
see you soon!
bluegrowers lab 