Most farms operate on a familiar narrative: plant a seed, give it water and sunshine and nutrients, harvest a crop. As I recently learned, mushroom farming is a little more complicated. It has its own language—mycelium and hypha and primordia being key players. Once you speak it, it's not too tricky, but I had to haul out a dictionary at the beginning.
The farm I visited was Nantucket Mushrooms in Chatham, a state of the art modern fungi farm recently relocated from the island. Wesley Price, the business manager and a passionate mycologist, and Troy Janusz, the farm manager, showed me around. The pictures you see up there are of one of the two 30 by 100 foot greenhouses and a big, beautiful king oyster mushroom.
Basically, the mushroom reproduction process works like this: you produce mycelium in a sterile lab. You can do this either using spores or tissue culture, and the difference between the two processes is essentially comparable to the difference between making a baby and making a clone. What you decide to do depends on what you're going for.
Once you have mycelium—the vegetative part of a fungus made up of hyphae—you have to innoculate it into a growing medium. For two species—white and brown oyster mushrooms—the farm uses pasteurized straw—but for the majority it uses blocks made out of wood chips. The blocks are wrapped in plastic and kept in the greenhouse, where a fog machine adds plenty of humidity. Depending on the variety of mushrooms growing, the top of the bags are opened to encourage growth upward, or slits are cut in the sides of the bags to allow mushrooms to grow out horizontally. Each block can be fruited between three and five times depending on the species of mushroom growing, and then the process starts over.
It's a pretty fascinating and technical process.
The exciting news for eaters is that the farm grows twenty-two species of edible and medicinal mushrooms, and as farmers' markets open up in the next few months the mushrooms will be available at many different markets all over the Cape. Next week's Local Food Report will focus on all the different varieties they're growing...so stay tuned!
5 comments :
Awesome! I liked your article about mushroom farming.
Thanks
Happy Birthday Gifts
Packers and Movers in Bangalore
Packers and Movers in Delhi
Packers and Movers Near Me
Packers and Movers in Pune
Packers and Movers in Mumbai
Packers and Movers in Hyderabad
Packers and Movers in Gurgaon
Packers and Movers in India
Thanks for sharing this knowledgeable blog with us, truly a great informative site. It is very helpful for us. Visit website Here:
English to Finnish Translation in Dubai
English to Vietnamese Translation in Dubai
English to Hindi Translation in Dubai
English to Tagalog Translation in Dubai
Insurance Documents Translation Dubai
English to Flemish Translation in Dubai
The article is very helpful and informative, so thank you so much for sharing this article and I hope that you will share more information about it. Btw also visit my website.
English To Korean Translation
English To Malaysian Translation
English To Nynorsk Translation
English To Romanian Translation
English To Slovak Translation
English To Telugu Translation
English to Yiddish Translation
Abu Dhabi, The Executive Regulations for Space Cooling Activities No. (-) Issued On 2 - 9 - 2019
Abu Dhabi, Head of Culture and Tourism Department Resolution No. (25) of 2019
Abu Dhabi, Chairman of the Department of Culture and Tourism Resolution No. (53) of 2019
Post a Comment