Growing Black Pearl Oyster Mushrooms: Spawn Incubation and Fruiting | Pheno Flicks 4

0:11 welcome to the fenal FL welcome to the next edition of of our pheno flicks today we're going to be going over black pearl mushrooms or as we like to call them poos a little bit about this strain in particular black pearls are a little funky they were actually a breeding project from a company called hiyoko Toco I didn't look it up before by a company hyoko NOCO by a company hoko OKO and they were a Japanese company htoo hokto Koko Koko I wrote it I wrote it down HTO H HTO hokto Koko okay I'll just mouth it out okay so this strain was developed as a breeding project by the company and they decided to cross a European and an Asian species of plotus orus and develop the Black Pearl mushroom but some people think or have suspicions that maybe it was a plotus arangi or a king oyster mushroom that they breeded with the plotus orus just because the morphologies of the mushroom starred a little King oyy and then eventually evolve into the nice Pearl shape that we all know and love when we are starting with this strain again we're going to have our cryo set up that's where everything here starts so we've gone over before but anyways we'll just do a quick recap boom inoculate an agar dish pour some grain around it let the mycelium take over the dish as normal when it gets to that grain make sure it fully colonizes the Grain and starts to move on a little bit and then from here we know that the melium has most likely fully taken over that grain and its insides because inside of the grain uh ryberry which is what we use the structure it cell structure inside actually provides cryoprotectant properties as as well as just being a good carrier for the melium so boom let that grain get fully taken over wait for the my to move on a little bit and now we can deem that grain ready to cry preserve we don't want to let it sit for too long at that stage because mushrooms will just keep eating so it'll eventually turn that into mush and get rid of that cell structur that's providing some of the protection boom and then we have that fully colonized grain next we're going to have our cryo vial it's just a little plastic vial about 5 mlit is as much as it holds and inside of there we're going to put about 3 Ms of our cryo protectant solution which is just a 10% gristle glycerol Solution by volume so 3 Ms of solution in total3 Ms of glycerol inside of each of these vials and that is just a standard cryoprotectant Solution that's used across the entire mushroom indust industry and biologics just to help preserve the cell structure the way glycerol works it just the water molecules come around the glycerol instead of letting the water molecules connect to themselves so when freezing they're all around that instead of making these big large structures of ice because that's mainly what damages our cells so we have a fully colonized grain we have our cry vial you get that grain sterilize your tool and simply toss it into our vial we want to make sure that the grain is fully submerged inside of our solution this just makes sure that the mycelium is taking up and having that glycerol solution inside of all of its cells so we boom toss in you know 10 grains or 5 to 10 grains shake it up a little bit just to make sure that they're all nice and covered and boom into the 80° cryo freezer next when we are ready to expand onto our agar plate

5:12 we simply grab our cry that's desired we grab our Petri plate that's desired and in this case for our oyster our black pearl mushroom it will be a pdy solution or a potato Dex roast yeast agar and this is just a standard agar that's used across the mushroom industry um thank you tip of the cap that is who we are currently using congratulations congratulation on your child so yes PD is the type of plate we use just a potato dextrous plate and so we get our grain you sterilize your tool grab your grain out of that vial place it just nice and in the center of our plate just to allow for an even radial growth right if we stuck it over here this side of my salum is just going to hit the wall and then stop and maybe just try to survive while the rest of my celum is just focused on taking over the plate we just want the whole thing worried about Str uh worried about spreading and then also this provides the most outer range that we're going to be cutting from so you have your grin you put it on there and we like to keep it inside of the flo hood for about 3 to 5 days over the weekend or a week and this just helps the myum that's in that grain kind of go oh okay I'm in a new environment I need switch up my enzymes my food sources different they make that switch they spread off the grain establish on the plate and then once that's happened then we are ready to move the plate seal it up and let it sit in our incubation so that first 3 to 5 days while it's establishing that's going to be at about 80 to 85° on average or just a standard incubation temperature in those 3 to 5 days we won't see too much growth but oysters do move quickly on a plate as well so it wouldn't be odd to maybe get a good couple inches of my Cal growth that have appeared on that plate after those first 3 to 5 days then we're going to seal it up move it over into our incubation space where it will be stored at about 65 to 70° and in here it's just going to keep taking over that plate and like with other oyster mushrooms the Black Pearl will have a very nice easy to easy to identify thread that is coming out or mycelium that's coming off of our grain it'll be thick it'll be white it'll be easy to see and it'll grow nice and clearly out and it'll just keep growing like that all the way until it hits the outer edge it won't really start densing up or fluffing down it'll still be kind of connected to the plate and just crawling over taking it across and it should be a very nice and even growth going across that entire plate so if we were going to if we're rotating our agar quickly we would like to catch the melium about a centimeter away before it hits our Outer Edge or our wall as I like to call it because once it hits the wall it's no longer thinking about cell division and spreading it's just going to fluffen up and make its mat denser and denser and with black oyster mushrooms this plates on the older side so there is no negative space in between the lid and the agar itself usually with most strains you'll see a you know a little space of air but since this Plate's a little old it's run up the walls and it's fluffed all the way up to kind of fill in any empty space it can get uh even if we're at this stage it's still good to spawn with if we kept it going a little longer there's a little evidence of it starting to happen on this plate but you'll start seeing some yellowing happening around the plate and maybe even some little yellow metabolites that are coming off the plate at that point we wouldn't recommend using it but our kind of standard rule is after after 3 months we don't use the agar anyways it's small it's easy to refresh it's you know we have enough of an inventory and it's just not worth it down the line because right this is going to make our 6 to 12 G1 Masters and those will go down to make the 12 spawn bags to the 20 this so if we mess it up here or we have a bad plate here we've possibly just ruined an upwards of 240 bags when we are going to cut it is just like all of our other species we are just following that Outer Edge all the way around as that Outer Edge is where the most cell division is occurring we want to put it into a spawn bags where it will just keep cell dividing and eventually take over that bag so we just fall around that Outer Edge about 1 cm squares all the way around and if we're doing two cuting it'll just be two of those squares in a 4pb grain bag so just a little small smaller than this guy one on the front one on the back and ideally having the agar Cube on the face of the bags that it's easy to identify that growth right if the agar Cube was just in the center we wouldn't actually know how it's doing

10:12 or if it's even taking off and so from this plate we will get if we're trying to max out we'll get 12 4 pound grade Masters and that way we're not stressing about cutting any short on any distances of our cuttings on the plates and they're all a nice unit uniform size and then if we're trying to Speed it along and do four cuttings we'll only get about six 4B Masters out of that plate we just use our standard mix for this grain which is three parts Rye with one part sorghum and that's standard pretty much across all our species except Lion's M we've recently been having some success with oats so in the grain stage for the Masters it's just a 4lb master bag and it's going to start just growing nice and rily outside of of our initial agar cutting and this is going to look wispy at first but it it will start to it won't be wispy where you can't see it it'll be like on our plate earlier where it grows these nice white threads that you can see you see them traversing along the bag and All Along The Grain they're not hiding from you and we let it sit there and grow that Ry until about a week a week and a half and with oyster mus muss in this initial waiting to shake we're you can have a pretty good amount of Lancy and even if we left it it would eventually take over the bag but as you'll maybe notice if you keep it for about 2 weeks and haven't shaken it it's going to be taking up that whole face the bag and it will start to mat up in the center of where that cutting originated and at this point we're thinking okay well it's moving along a little too quickly we want it just to take over the whole bag and then start to thicken up because if we have these spots of thickness too early and there're still uncolonized parts of the bag it'll just lead to very uneven spawning or just not a nice consistent bag to work with so after about that week week and a half depending on your preference we shake up the bag and we let it sit even longer in the incubation again this incubation room is at about 65 to 70° and after that point the oyster the Black Pearl Master bag will just start to densen up it'll be all these individual pieces that are nice and myceliated and it's just going to take over the bag with those Wiss and then just really start to densen up so all those original grains before the shaking you'll start seeing those turning a deeper white and almost like a Pure White and the parts that are still getting taken over will appear still a little more whispy you'll still see the grains underneath but it will take over the whole bag and you'll start getting a really nice firmness onto our bags pretty early on as well so about a week week and a half say we shook it after just that week come the end of that next week we would have a fully myceliated white bag and it's doubling up everywhere there shouldn't be really much wispiness and so luckily oysters are very generous to us and so we can keep it at that stage without Refrigeration for about another week or two before we really have to move it along and get it refrigerated or spawned with it and we have our nice fully myceliated white bag before Refrigeration some things to look out for with black pearls is that they will like to form stroma if they get a little too hot or they're just stressed out so it's important to make sure that we have nice even spacing between our 4 pound grain bags and just to monitor each of the bags before you spawn with them that there's none of these very hard discolored spots that are occurring in the bag because once it's shifted that way that stroma spot is going to stay as stroma it's not going to going to reiterate back into wanting to spread or into my celium it's just trying to survive so make sure that the once the black oysters have fully taken over the bag we don't let them sit for that big long two we period after because you most likely will get some stroma and another thing of note with other oysters they'll maybe make like a like a skin of oyster material around the bag the black pearls they'll kind of start to but it will all easily break up whereas if with an oyster bag if we let it sit for too long you'll just have these big kind of fleshy chunks inside of our grain bag our bag's fully myceliated it's feeling firm at this point it's ready to spawn when we go to spawn with these bags right we can spawn once it's initially fully myceliated and taken over the bag but most of the time just due to inventory we shove them in the cold storage and they can stay there for about a month but you're going to have maybe more pressure prevalence of stroma and other instances of hardness or overlay so you just want to double check those bags during that time period but anyways you have about a whole month with which you could spawn with these bags before it's kind of a guaranteed

15:13 no-go so with our 4lb Master bag we lay out our 12 six lb grain bags and then we just break it up and we try to evenly distribute that grain across all 12 six lb bags as mentioned before we don't like to do less than six bags as then we're just adding in a little too much and we might get some weird growth or old growth in some parts of the bag and we also don't like to extend it past 24 as that way we're just stressing the mycelium out to spread too far or it might just take too long so again we'll have an old part that's been in the bag for two weeks and maybe over here there's still no mation occurring so boom inoculate those 12 bags seal them all up off to the incubation at 65 70° again since these are a little more prone to the Heat and stroma we want to just make sure our bags are nice and evenly spaced across and this is going to look very similar very similar timelines to our grain Master it's just a slightly bigger bag these are just going to sit on the shelf and at first we'll see our initial grains that were from the master bag and they're going to start spreading out taking over the bag at the end of that first week um this bag right here is only 7 days old and there's already firmness there's already squishiness it's not cracking under my pressure so you know maybe that first four days you'll just have a white wisp and then immediately it'll start to densen up and start forming that brick so end of week one we've got a pretty much a spawnable brick it's nice and firm it would be ready to be shipped off we usually if we're using them for our circumstances we'll maybe keep them another week and then toss them into cold storage and again like mentioned earlier with the 4B Master bag they give us a lot of lency so even though it's good to go at this stage you know if we're short we'll still ship this out to customers it'll work perfectly but a lot of the time we can keep it for longer and so we can build up kind of a nice buffer zone to have and again it won't form that skin like a blue oyster does so that's also what's providing us with some of that lency and then um some differences with compared to other oyster strains is that we'll start to get maybe splotches that are progressing a little farther along or seem a little harder a lot of these aren't stroma that we're actually worried about it black oysters will start to create kind of dense pillowy formations like on our agar plate and so it's always easy enough to check by coming up and just giving a quick little poke if it's not super hard or just right when you poke it it just turns all yellow then you're still good to go the biggest thing mainly is just watching out for stroma with these bags and it's very obvious you'll see it in the denser zones you won't get it in kind of a new myceliated Zone and also with our grain bags we don't really experience a lot of autof Fring with black oysters it is mainly they'll go to stroma first before ever producing an auto fruit and that's a little different cuz our other oyster strains if we keep them in this gr bag too long they'll start trying to make little autof fruits on the top or even on the bottom of the bag they're just trying to find a way to escape and they really like to move on but this species will as mentioned kind of stay in that buffer zone for a good month or so inside of our cold storage or not and again anything leaving it in cold storage for a long time you just have to be a little more thorough with checking it make sure it's not damaged or anything we haven't had any differences in whether it stays in a light or a dark Zone um with a speed species like a lion's man they fruit a lot more when there's light appearing on them the black oysters don't really seem to mind any of that too much we've had them in cold spaces and light spaces and they both have acted the exact same and so once we have our fully myceliated firm bag and it's ready to spawn with we are going to lay out our 20 10 lb substrate bags break this one up and distribute evenly thank you Gregor Jones for all that wonderful information on the Black Pearl the black oyster the shimo furry the cosmic Queen I'd like like to take over now in this infomercial and discuss the inoculation the incubation the management the visual characteristics of black oyster uh the Fring of black

20:15 oyster and some little nuances there in um so okay uh and I'll interchangeably use Black Pearl black oyster sorry Alex not GNA use Cosmic Queen um other people call it black king we can cut this mic this stupid um it has way too many names um let me just start over this I mean if you would like to but I'm gonna find a way to use all that okay all right the Black Pearl um again we're boring here at CPP and stem because we are just Titans of industry and so we have standard standardization across the board we knock things at the same rate all the time it's boring um but you know truth be told there is you know empirical um data you know there's there's actually informed recommendations as it pertains to inoculation rates in general as far as my understanding of the topic it's based off of uh you know the total percentage of the mass of the Fring substrate taken up by your inocular to some extent this has to do with the nutritional content of the spawn or carrier that you're providing so you know Ry or Millet or whatever is is quite potent on its own but I really think it primarily has to do with um by providing lots of inoculation points from the same organism it is able to expend less energy in its exploration process of the fuing substrate and Reserve more of its energy towards metabolizing its fruiting substrate to thus yield more fruits faster bigger better faster stronger um with that in mind there's a general recommendation don't quote me m wizards but I want to say that it was about uh 2 to 5% in that uh in that range um so we typically do 20 blocks 10 pound blocks for every six pound G2 bag you're going to hear that a lot on these pheno flicks um uh we speak with Farms who have good results doing more aggressive inoculation rates for various reasons you know down to eight bags or so um and all the way up to you know 30 I tend not to recommend too much Beyond 30 for 10 PB blocks um you know the uh the Vigor of the Fring substrate starts to decline after a certain point um and the incubation timeline gets extended Beyond a point that you might find viable um basically if you want hot fast uh you know colonization then you'll do an aggressive spawning rate if you like it slow and low like a beautiful beef brisket um you know you do something like 30 blocks black oyster Black Pearl shimo furry Cosmic Queen black king the super awesome hybrid oyster mushroom um is one that is uh in my anecdotal experience a little bit more prone to adverse mutations depending on how you manage it and that can extend to substrate incubation uh you can see all kinds of adverse phenomena develop um if your incubation is Loosey Goosey managing properly um with that in mind a key variable is to ensure that um ambient temperature is monitored carefully and it doesn't get too hot this is a variety that will demonstrate all kinds of problems um if the ambient temperature exceeds um you know if you're on a 10 pound block the rule of thumb we're always giving is around 66 degrees Fahrenheit once you start to creep up from that the internal heat when this substrate block is at its highest metabolic rate is far beyond what is healthy and all kinds of bad things happen stroma bacterial problems um slower time to pinset once you do cut it to fruit um but provided that you have good temperature regulation you can expect a fully myceliated block that is at a point of being justifiable for fruiting in around 10 days um black oysters in our experience are one that have a significantly longer grace period um after it's fully mated the Fring substrate before it actually starts forming pins so um you can kind of extend the time as needed based off of your schedule with your fruiting and all the other variables you have a bit of breathing room so somewhere in the like 10 to 10 days to three weeks or so the Block's going to be in a pretty stable condition in your fruit room eventually it will

25:15 get to a point where it will form pins in vitro so don't extend that too long um also the longer that you let it sit the more likely it's going to do what's colloquially called consolidation with oysters where it'll form a really thick mat or milin sheath um and just basically be slow and reluctant to FR that's how you know you let it sa for too long but all things being equal our typical plan when we inoculate black oyster is about 12 13 days until we box it up and send it to a farm as far as the you know the look morphology um different traits exhibited of black oyster melium it's pretty consistent with other plotus otus strains it'll first form a relatively light white melium stretched across the growing medium and then it will fluffy and become dense and like a brick um uh this is a good example this is a block I picked up off the floor because it's been sitting for too long it has some pins in there um this is not a strain that like some more Classic Blue oysters for example will form a really really aggressive rubbery sheath it will still form it particularly at the top um but as you can see just a dense but not exceedingly dense white melium um black pearl is a strain that is known for a higher prance of stroma in incubation um you will be able to spot that uh via you know dense often discolored often kind of Amber or orangish colored very dense white mycelial you know off circles um that is going to lead to poor performance in fruiting lackluster yield sometimes really funky ass looking fruits um that'd be one thing to bear in mind um other than that it's it's a pretty gentle oyster melium if you're in a position where you are trying to refri refrigerate your black pearl blocks before uh you fruit them for whatever reason they are one that um are fairly stable in general and fairly stable um before autof Fring so I'm not sure on the exact timeline that you could maintain but at 34 fahit um you could reliably store these for several weeks before they'd be in a condition where they're really best not fruited one other note on Cold Storage um this is a cold loving strain of oyster So eventually it will indeed autof fruit there are some strains that simply won't form fruit bodies in refrigeration just due to their temperament uh whereas cold loving strains like the Black Pearl will in due time form a pinset even in 34° uh people go about Fring Black Pearl in quite a lot of different ways those who are uh very dialed in on trying to mimic the morphology of King oysters without all the attendant problems that King oysters present um we'll often top fruit these uh but truth be told this mushroom does like to form a cluster so that's usually not in our experience the recommended way to go I recommend Fring these much as you would most other oysters uh do a cross cut or a slit across the long surface of the block not too deep quarter of an inch or so with a clean blade and that will encourage a dense pinet that forms a very large Bountiful proper looking black pearl cluster as far as their performance once you do bring them into fruiting and cut the blocks this is a strain that's a little bit slower to form a pin set and it has a very unique um you know process it under goes as it starts to fruit it'll first form that classic aerial melium um that starts to pillow out almost like cobweb mold outside um spilling out from that cut Point into the block eventually what you'll see in about depending on your conditions five or seven days on average um you'll start to see some amber colored metabolites form as little droplets on the outside of that aerial mycelium um that is soon going to give way to little tiny pins little tiny primordia recognizable as baby black pearl mushrooms that process overall takes longer in terms of a time to pinset than most other oysters however Black Pearl once it's gotten through that stage of initiation is more or less on par with most other cold weather oyster strains in terms of how fast the fruit bodies go

30:17 some are in the range of 10 14 days and you have mushrooms that are ready to harvest black pearl is a temperamental little baby in your fooding room people have all kinds of problems with it it's one of those species that we speak with Farms with very often um uh for reasons associated with it not performing the way it used to in your Fring environment um as mentioned is a cold loving species once you start to exceed give or take the mid-60s range Its Behavior in morphology and the Fring environment starts to rapidly change it's uh eagerness to form a pinset starts to drop precipitously the warmer it gets so as a little uh hack um if you are in an environment where you just can't do anything about how hot it is in the summer in your Fring environment I'd recommend initiating these to form a pin set in the coolest environment you have available even if that's not your Fring room people often have a pinning room for that purpose um once it starts to get warmer as well the morphology of the fruit bodies themselves starts to change drastically from what you might expect whereas in cold temperatures you'll get a morphology that's much more akin to King oysters just simply as a cluster rather than as individual Cap N Stem mushrooms um once you start to get into warmer conditions the fruits look quite a bit more like a typical blue oyster you can still differentiate them don't get me wrong they still have fatter stems to them and a cap that isn't quite the same shape but if you were looking at it from afar it's going to look a lot more like a typical plotus otus as far as recommended Fring conditions this is a strain that's best cultivated cold now if you're going to cultivate it co cold that brings with it its own set of considerations about how you manage your environmental uh parameters so I'd recommend fruiting this somewhere on the low end of 50 degrees if you really like a dense slow growing but high quality fruit um and not exceeding the low 60s ideally um one thing I should have mentioned earlier as you get into those warmer conditions the prevalence of bacterial blotch and other icky Fring room problems starts to shoot up to the Moon in those warmer conditions um but again yeah about 50 Fahrenheit give or take 65 is the recommended range probably the ideal is somewhere in that 55 to 60 fahrenheit range um in those those colder conditions that colder air can hold on to far less humidity so for that reason if you don't make any adjustments to your humidification schema you'll often see condensation start forming in those colder conditions on the black oyster fruits that's going to lead to all kinds of problems uh on the more benign end you're going to often see uh my celium start to form out into open space from the Caps themselves that's just fruit body melium colonizing over you know often organic matter saturated uh humidity that settled as condensation on your fruits the bigger end of the problem is with lots of condensation uh that'll beget bacteria sometimes it'll even beg get Rose comb on black pearl is best avoid it so for that reason in colder conditions it's always a good idea to try to do what you can to have a higher atomization um to your humidification so as we talk about constantly using something like like a heart nozzle um aromis system something that's a little finer as opposed to really big particle sizes for your your humidification as far as fresh air exchange It's relatively run-of-the-mill um the standard recommendation of having your CO2 e fan kick on somewhere in the 800s is probably best to not have excessive stem elongation um and just you know it's pretty run-of-the-mill and terms of standard fruit room parameters as far as fresh air exchanges per hour are concerned standard all Spectrum Lighting is fine I think there's a lot of evidence to support the idea of using uh blue spectrum LED lighting um for oysters it is pretty thoroughly known that that's really good for King oysters um so logic would have it that you'd probably have good results if possible with blue Spectrum Lighting with black pearl as well but you know it's really not that critical you're going to get nice looking fruits with nice color nice shape to them with your standard all Spectrum Lighting regime uh after harvest Black Pearl has a a fairly decent shelf life if harvested before um those caps are Overexposed and starting to elongate and flatten out um not quite

35:19 as beautiful and impressive as something like a king oyster but still pretty decent um so they're a good quality mushroom for wholesale ing so inmation black pearl black king Cosmic Queen shimo furry um the patented very illegal Black Market jail broke strain that we've been talking about here is a fantastic mushroom and I recommend that you make it a part of your standard regimen in your Fring operation um most strains only go to 10 but this strain goes to 11 with that I bid you would do until next time thanks for tuning in to M Wizards he's a nice guy I like this guy yeah get to know the truck drivers you know seem likeing no he's uh he's been shut down I believe he's alive um but yeah he just uh we got like a very sad call from the dispatch lady we talk to all the time from that company like H we had to uh you know Dennis like caused or almost caused way too many like accidents and stuff you know he was great yeah you ever see him fall like just that classic image he would actually do reliably of falling asleep with a cigarette like in his mouth his head like dangling like you've been half decapitated you know at the window he was always like tossed into prison and for the night you know just like he's he's like the local guy you know they're like oh it's Dennis again we'll get him in his wife will get him in the morning or you know yeah he was great there's some good and some bad there's a racist guy um there's a guy who kicked Wade I wasn't here but yeah yeah no kidding all right um we'll have to cut it again I think in a second but uh all right where were we inoculation rates um all right um um see what else uh are we supposed to be talking about uh yields is that on there I don't think that's probably best avoided um it's always yeah um you're going to yield a record amount of fresh mushrooms every time you work with Cap N Stem um all right