Growing Lion's Mane Commercially: Spawn Incubation and Fruiting | Pheno Flicks

0:11 welcome to the fenal f welcome to the next episode of phenol flicks today we're going to go over Lion's man or hersum arcius but J so just getting started this specific strain of lion's M as we like to call H CNS it was developed by Leighton Banks who is a mysterious Mushroom Man from the Appalachians Eric is good at finding these mysterious mushroom people they became friends and he said that he had this strain of lions man that he cloned from the wild and it works really well so you know eventually he left the mushroom industry but he was nice enough to gift us his knowledge and his strains and today we are now cultivating H CNS and it's one of the two biggest cultivated Lions B strains in the states the other one I believe is HP that's a little bit about where this strain came from just from the mountains of Maine or the hills as some like to call them first off we're just going to start talking about how we set up our cryo vies and this is just our long-term storage in order to prevent strain degradation so with our current Cryo Storage protocol we can store our strains for up to about 2 to 3 years comfortably and then after that they start getting a little iffy and our current strain preservation protocol includes getting just an agar dish and instead of leaving it bare and allowing the mycelium to grow and take over the plate we're going to pour Ry berries is what we're using currently all along that plate just kind of in a nice little circle then we're just going to let the plate incubate grow take over these Ry berries and you want to make sure that the Ry berries are fully colonized before we look to preserve them and so what that means is just the mycelium will fully cover the ryberry and then even start to move on a little bit and at this point you can deem that okay it's moving on from the ryberry that means it's probably infected the inside of it I don't want to keep it too long or it'll just turn the ryberry into mush and we're going to lose use our cryoprotectant properties that the berry provides for us so just as soon as it starts leaving that Berry we're going to come back and now we want to take these Ry berries and toss them into our cryoprotectant solution so we have cryo vials just plastic vials anywhere you look that's pretty sure what they're called and we fill those up with about 3 MLS of water and glycerol at 10% we're just going by volume on that so you know you have 3 MLL total solution then you're going to have3 milliliters of that glycerol inside of your solution and this is 10% which based off of research papers has shown to be the most effective amount of glycerol to provide proper cryoprotect so we have our gray Berry we have our vial filled with our glycerol solution all you do is simply sterilize whatever tool you're using grab that ryberry or grain tossed into the vial and you just want to make sure that the grains aren't floating but that there is full submersion going on with that grain you know you can give them a little shake some of them float but most of them will just go nicely down to the bottom after it's in there you just seal it up toss it in your cryo freezer at 80° C and it's waiting to be used for another day when we are ready to actually start growing our strain we will simply grab our desired vial out of the cryo freezer and we will let it thaw inside of a warm water bath just at 30° C nothing crazy just nice kind of room temperature and this just speeds up the thawing process to allow ice crystals to not exist in a state of forming and reforming for too long but just push past and go straight all back into a liquid solution from here we will get our bare Petri plate and the Petri plate that we'll be using or agar that we are going to be using is a malt yeast AAR AR with with charcoal inside of that plate um the charcoal we're going to get back to that later there is a reason that we like to do it for Lion's M but anyway it's mainly a malt yeast agar that we

5:12 are using so we have our fresh Petri plate and we have our C with our myceliated grains you're just going to sterilize your tool grab that grain and toss it right on the middle of the plate and now we are ready to start our agar incubation stage that grain is going to be sitting nice in the middle of our plate and it's Lion's man grows a very wispy kind of clear melium it doesn't grow this nice white fluffiness like the penos and like oyster mushrooms out there they almost grow a mat or have thicker threads that you can actually see taking over the plate Lion's man is a lot more wispy it's very clear so that's why I mentioned that we like to use the charcoal plates because without the charcoal plate it's going to be very hard to see your Leading Edge of your mycelium and and just allowing that black and white contrast we can almost start to see these invisible threads that are crawling across the plate and that's just going to continue and persist persist for about a week and a half to two weeks until it hits the edge of that plate you might get initial we're going from grain to agar so you might have an inial an initial little bit of lag time and this is just where the melium is now in a new environment New Media to eat so it just has to develop change up its enzyme s so yes it grows continuously nice and fluffy for about 1 and 1 half to 2 weeks and in that initial time period there's a little bit of lag time for the melium to actually go onto the plate and outside of the Grain and during that time period we like to keep it inside of our Flo Hood because the flo Hood stays at about 80 to 85° ambient temperature so there's a dog um wait and so as it's getting onto the plate we like to keep it into the flo Hood because our Flo hood is about 80 to 85° this just is more of an incubation temp temperature and helps that piece of grain and mycelium establish itself onto the plate and once it's done that we're welcome to move it around and whatnot so it'll usually stay in the flo hood for over the weekend or you know if you did it at the beginning of the week we'll just bag it up and get it all sealed and into incubation come the end of that week so you know there are 3 to 5 days in our Flo Hood incubating not that much growth just some little whisk coming out toss in the incubation all sealed up and incubation is at about 65 to 70° and inside of here it's just going to keep taking over that plate and we just like to monitor it and catch it about a centimeter away from the edge of the plate being as we've mentioned before if it hits that edge of the plate it's no longer in Rapid cell diffusion stage and it's more looking just to absorb nutrients and get a maybe a little denser and happier inside of that Petri plate once it hits that Outer Edge um it won't really start to fluffen up and densen up all around the plate instead you'll start maybe getting some type of primordia formations just dense fluff clusters are kind of all around the plate and as you can see on this one our plate right here is a little on the older side so it's got that fluff going all around and in the middle it's even started to form a fruiting body granted it's going to be a very tiny fruiting body at that but Lion's man is so reactive that it will try to fruit on your plate we've still use plates like this just as long as you grab from the outer edge and not a section that's you know got a big primordia on it or an actual fruiting body so when we have our Leading Edge and we're ready to cut and make one of our grain bags first we make a 4pb grain master and in order to make those 4B grain Masters we will get this PL and on that Leading Edge we will take cuting going all around the Leading Edge and these cuting are just squares that are about a cmet by a centimeter and we just do that falling all around the outside if we're looking just to make a bunch of 4 lb G1 Masters we'll just do two cuting per 4lb Master bag one on the front one on the back of the bag and if we're you know maybe a little more rushed for an order and we need to get it out there quicker then we'll do four cutting so four cubes front back and the sides of that 4B grain Master once inside of that grain master we're still just going to get a little bit of lag time to start with you'll just maybe see your agar Cube sitting there and some little white threads and Wiss will start coming out and so for about the first week we're just going to get this almost invisible spread of my celium that's going across that bag so it's going to grow nice nice and rily we'll still get our good circle and a half circle if we were to see the inside of the bag and it's going to be very hard to see even if you came up to it and started giving it a little squish it's not really going to be connected at all and at this point we like to wait

10:14 until that invisible Circle you can very briefly see it gets about this big or it on our 4 lbs it starts to take up about half of the face on one of the bags from there we shake the bag and then we just let it sit and this is where it's just going to start to fully take over the bag after the shaking stage you'll start noticing these white threads taking over the whole bag and about a week after shaking we're going to have a fully myceliated bag but it may not appear that way cuz it's still very wispy it's still very thready but if you come up to these bags and give them a little squish there will be some firmness inside of there so it won't just be like a loose bag of grain with some little bits it'll actually start to be this nice like oh okay I understand why a brick is forming or how a brick is forming and what we've noticed recently is that oats are doing a really good job in for growing Lion's man on we originally were using Ry berries but the oats are able to hold a little more moisture content upper in about the 56% range and the Lion's man just absolutely love this and they'll take over the bag and then unlike with Ry berries or some other mixtures they'll actually start to densen up and make like a really white almost matte type of deal um we broke one up the other day and I had to double check if it was a lion's man because it was almost looking like an oyster mushroom bag and so yeah other only other really thing to note in that stage or to watch out for is if they start autof Fring and obviously they're a little more susceptible to mold early on just cuz they're not this nice thick mat there's this kind of wispy my iium throughout the bag but once fully established and it's going the main thing you have to watch out for is that it just autof fruits too much we're okay with a little bit of autof Fring to spawn with that because most hersum species if there's a little fruiting body it'll just kind of melt back into mycelium but we like to catch things before they've started Fring or right before you know if we have some of that firmness we can deem it good to go so about a week to get that nice Circle and it's established in the grain bag and then we shake it and then about another week until it's fully taken over that bag and maybe we're looking to refrigerate it so it doesn't autof fruit or we're looking to spawn with it so from one of these dishes doing our cuting if we're just doing two cuttings all around the dish we like to max out at about 12 Master bags this just makes sure that we don't really skimp on any room and we still get the right size cuting each time and so if we're doing four cuttings per the bag it makes about 6 4 lb Masters and so another thing to note on that moisture content is that the lies main it'll kind of let you know if your moisture contents real low kind of in those lower 40 Realms what we've seen in the past with when we've been growing it on other grains or experimenting is that if we don't have enough moisture and it is in that low 40 percentile range the growth will be a lot slower it'll be a lot more unhappy and with that right we're increasing our chance of infection that's possible and also it'll just be so much slower and it won't actually try to densen up like we've noticed with the oats it won't make that kind of nice thick white strands it'll always exist in this wispy stage and also with that since Lion's man is very reactive and doesn't like to be unhappy you get a lot more chance for autof fruiting to happen so we have that a lot more in our cases with lower moisture bags was that the bag wouldn't even be fully myceliated yet and you're already starting to see auto fruits in the little sections that have been myceliated so we have our 4B grade master and from that one 4B grade Master we are going to make 12 six lb grain spawn bags and we call them you know we call agar G1 and G2 because the you know Generation 1 generation 2 or we also call our G1 Master bags so that one 4lb master makes our 12 6 lb grain bags and with this we don't like to go below six bags knocked per grain bag just cuz then we're kind of adding a little bit too much and we might start getting weird growth inside of the bag like this part's super old while over here just got colonized and then we also don't like to go above 24 bags knocked per 4 lb grain Master as this we're just skimping it a little bit and now we're starting to to stress the mycelium to reach out and grab all corners of that bag so boom knock your 12 bags seal them all up send them off to incubation where

15:14 they'll sit at about 65 to 70° for a week and a half two weeks these are very fast strain they are almost on the same par with oysters in terms of their time frame and inside of those grain bags uh this bag is 7 days old and it's got a little bit of firmness in there it doesn't feel like quite a brick you know if I squeeze this it would just all explode into a bunch of individual grain but throughout the bag we can see it's not just wispy there's some wispiness that's covered the whole thing but there are strands that are solid white and are starting to appear inside of the bag whereas when when we first knock it that first week it's just going to be kind of a loose bag of grain and you'll maybe see some wispiness but it's going to exist in that kind of invisible wispy state for that entire first week you can go up to the bag and you know if you go to move it around it'll all just kind of jiggle in your hands instead of try to stay as a brick and connected and then come that second week that's when you'll start seeing the wispiness maybe well you'll just see the wispiness be a little more present it won't necessarily be invisible we'll actually start seeing some threads they'll look a little thicker and our bag will actually have some structure to it come the end of that 2 weeks is usually when we'll like to look to ship or move our bags over to cold storage and inside of that cold storage we usually um Lion's man will still try to fruit inside of a cold storage room so we like to put them in there but not keep them in there for no longer than 2 weeks obviously this goes off of you you know whatever temperature you keep your cold room at and with constant monitoring just making sure that they don't autof fruit but again like with the 4B Master our main concern usually is too many autof fruits in the bag cuz if the whole bag is covered in fruits and we go to spawn with it it's not going to want to spread and take over the bag as easily it'll have to switch all its genetics from Fring bodies back to mycelium and spreading and you'll just run into a lot of problems that way from that we are ready to spawn with this and make our substrate blocks Hello mological friends I'd like to thank my co-host Gregor for his very aute saged and succinct summary of all things Lions man leading up to I'll talk about which is substrate blocks their incubation management characteristics all that and Fring them Fring practices uh for the lon Bank strain of liin man which we have co-opted we have a whole madeup story about how we uh clone this from The Wild Woods of Garder and dubbed it the Cap N Stem strain but don't listen to our lies the L and Bank strain as far as inoculations of Fring substrate if we're talking about sort of the standard if you will of using Master's mix a 10 lb block and in our case using a six lb bag of G2 grain spawn um our standard is 20 10 lb blocks from every 6 lb G2 that amounts to about a third of a pound of grain in the bag of self now um there is a range that makes sense depending on your circumstances with with uh the lat and strain I would uh say that you wouldn't want to go too far below about 12 per um 12 blocks per six lb bag so as not to just basically overload what is already a very rich growing medium with grain which is a powerful supplement in its own right and I also wouldn't recommend going above about 30 blocks um at that point the risks of mold um creeping in going to creep up Lion's man's a Fickle strain and it's easily tampered with early

20:14 on the lat and strain like most Lions um is very faint the untrained eye you might not see much biological activity whatsoever however it still runs quite fast um and the overall timeline for it to reach full incubation it's on par with most uh of the faster strains like oysters um at first you can hardly see a thing it's a very wispy mycelium you just sort of see a slight opaque discoloration of the growing medium developing as a sidebar that can make it tricky at times to differentiate between healthy hericium melium and something that is not that that's inside your block we've had times where there's been for example traderma that's still in its asexual phase wreaking havoc on a portion of the substrate um and it's ever so slightly has a different growth pattern a little bit more of a dense matting growth and ever so slightly a different shade of off-white but very hard to differentiate from healthy hericium melium because the traderma has yet to reproduce and shoot out spores at which point is pretty damn obvious to see it's green as hericium matures it becomes a little bit more obvious as exhibited on this mature block that's ready to be fruited and it is indeed solid and dense once hericium blocks have reached maturity they don't take long to start to prepare to fruit mushrooms what they first will do is start to shoot up a mat of aerial mycelium you'll often see this on the top surface of the block um if you have ambient Lighting in your incubation room that's where it's going to pop up if you had a bag that's super slanted um if your bag wasn't you know tight to the substrate uh uh you might see primordia uh beginning to form in some of those nooks and crannies but for the most part you're going to see a slowly developing aerial pillow of marshmallowy melium start to coat the top surface that will indeed mature to full-fledged Lion's M fruits that will get denser and denser and look more recognizable as baby mushrooms the longer it sits but basically as soon as you start to see that pillow of aerial melium coat the top surface of your block that's a good shorthand reference to know that it is ready to be brought into the fruit room the Laten Bank strain is pretty rapid as mentioned despite its wispy nature um we typically plan in our incubation scheduling for uh 12 days for it to be completely ready to be boxed up and shipped to a farm for Fring you have a little bit more of a grace period a substrate in general but with Lion's man um depending on the particulars respawning rate ambient temp recipe genetics you can expect something between 10 days if you're a speed demon um and it's relatively stable and fine uh to fruit with basically the same outcomes well beyond that point of 12 Days something like 16 17 18 days and it's still going to be at a point where that primordial mat at the top hasn't developed so far that it makes your fruiting complicated once you are ready to fruit this very vigorous Lon Banks Lion's main block you have a few different options they generally all involve cutting the bag as long as what you're going after is a typical recognizable Lion's main fruit sidebar if all you cared about was just Mass cuz you were processing it for uh tinctures or something like that you could just let it fruit in vitro set it and forget it Allah growing raii antlers without care for it looking like a big pillowy mass of marshmallows but assuming you're trying to fruit these to form healthy looking liines man fruits um you're going to be making a cut in all intents and purposes most Folks at least see the Merit in working with the natural tendency of lion's man to start to fruit in the plenum of the bag and for that reason the ideal often times is to intercept this bag from its incubation right when it's formed that pillowy mass but before they've kind of matured to recognizable fruits U cut the bag and then cut a slit across the top surface of the block not too deep um just a nice long slit sometimes with a cross is fine as well at the same time plenty of folks will cut on the long side of the bags the fat side of the bags Etc um but basically you're just going after your standard slit cut or X

25:14 cut like a lot of other varieties such as blue oyster Lion's man has a relatively wide um tolerance for uh different Fring temperatures one thing that most folks will see and have probably had some experience with is her isums in general tend not to do so well if it gets too hot for their liking and that extends to Fring um in really hot environments they're a little bit more prone to having uh bacterial infections and it's a little bit trickier to manage other environmental variables that interact with temperature like relative humidity and fresh air exchange um uh but generally speaking uh somewhere in the 55 to 6 5 F range is kind of the ideal uh for the latent Bank strain it is indeed a strain compared to other Lion's Mains such as pow that does prefer it ever so slightly on the cooler side might not perform as well as it gets warmer um somewhere in around 60° seems to be the sweet spot in my personal experience Lions main definitely don't do well if one of the environmental variables in your Fring room is off or inconsistent that's where you'll often see um sort of a popcorn cauliflower like formation on them as far as relative humidity is concerned uh like it a little bit more moderate often times folks will say slightly lower than what they're maintaining for oysters uh what you'll see with exceedingly High relative humidity if basically there's very little chance for moisture to Wick off the developing fruits that's where you'll often get uneven spine development and overall a fruit that looks like it has different chunks at different stages of development and big nasty ass spines drooping down on one side and a dense ball without any expression to it on the other half of the fruit um people tend to operate a little bit lower with relative humidity we've often seen somewhere in the uh upper 80s to very low 90s as a recommendation we've often heard to um people emphasizing a relative humidity swing for line main as being really beneficial for even uh fruit body development and getting basically a smooth surface to the block where there aren't those crenulations like the greaters of the moon and the spines develop at a relatively consistent rate as far as air exchanges are concerned Lion's man and the late and Bank strain is definitely one that won't do so well if there's insufficient fresh air exchange and or um excessive CO2 excessive CO2 whether that's because the room's hot and the blocks are respiring at a faster rate or if it's just densely packed you're just loading in blocks they're pressed up right against each other point being if these are having a hard time getting a constant constantly replenished supply of fresh air with high oxygen um you'll often see a lot of those same problems with unhealthy looking fruit body development our general recommendation does tend to apply having your CO2 Evac fan um you know program to start flushing out once you exceed about 800 or so parts per million of CO2 um until you get back down to Baseline atmospheric uh CO2 levels in the 450 range as far as lighting regimes in the fruit room are concerned Lion's man is most certainly fairly heavily light triggered species uh I'm not aware of folks who do a super precise lighting regime it's not as light dependent as other varieties such as myi but it definitely um is encouraged for a more robust pin set and and fruiting overall with solid ambient you know all Spectrum Lighting Lion Man is certainly a slower growing Variety in the fruit room compared to some others not absurdly long but in your typical low 60s uh fruiting environment with this particular strain uh the primordia are relatively slow to develop they take a long time to swell up in size to their Max potential uh Mass um after which you should ideally see even spine development as those spines elongate giving you that cue that they are getting ready to harvest the latent strain is known for very dense fruits overall they just have a shitload of Mass to them very dense and their uh spines tend not to uh swell up to quite the same size as many other strains and particularly compared to Wild Lion Man and furthermore they tend not to form that classic drooping down effect that you'll see with a lot of her isums they tend to just have very small spines uh

30:16 which is a nice quality for a lot of folks because it makes them kind of easier to handle and hold up after harvesting overall um I would say that on average you're looking at 14 to 20 days or so um until Harvest for Lion's man be careful when you're harvesting them too cuz they're very prone to bruising they have very soft tissue they can hold quite a bit of water in them and you can easily kind of tarnish the quality of your fruits by poor handling practices yeah thanks for checking out this pheno flick filmed on a beautiful day here in Gardener Maine in late summer um stay tuned for the next bit of content from MCO Wizards oh yeah this way yeah okay