Mushroom Spawn Bag 1.7kg – Black Pearl Oyster (Pleurotus ostreatus) – Made to order

Description

🖤 Black Pearl Oyster Mushroom Spawn Guide (Pleurotus ostreatus hybrid)

Ready to step up your mushroom growing game? The Black Pearl Oyster is an absolute masterpiece! A true hybrid cross between a King Oyster and a Blue Oyster, it is also known by its original Japanese name Shimofuri or Shimofuri hiratake (which translates to “marbled” due to the beautiful speckled, starlit pattern on its cap).

This incredible hybrid gives you the best of both worlds: it colonizes and grows rapidly like a standard Blue Oyster but produces massive, meaty, swollen stems similar to a King Oyster. Highly prized as a choice edible and for its medicinal compounds, it features medium-sized light brownish convex caps with beautifully inrolled margins and decurrent light-coloured gills.

Please note: While Black Pearls can be grown on simple “low-tek” substrates, they truly thrive and produce their legendary massive yields on supplemented, nutrient-rich blocks that require a higher level of sterile practice!

🌾 Recommended Substrates To get those famous, thick, meaty stems, this strain prefers high-nutrient diets! We highly recommend:

• Master’s Mix (a 50/50 blend of hardwood sawdust and soy hull pellets)

• Hardwood sawdust supplemented with nutrients (like oat bran, wheat bran, or soybean meal) at a rate of 10% to 30%.

• Wheat straw or cottonseed hulls

🛠️ How to Prepare Your Substrate & Inoculate Because the Black Pearl thrives on highly nutritious supplemented substrates, simple pasteurization usually isn’t enough to keep competing green molds away.

• Hydration: Before processing, ensure your bulk substrate mixture is thoroughly wetted to a 60% moisture level.

• Sterilization is Key: Your supplemented substrate blocks should be fully sterilized in a pressure cooker at 15 PSI for 2.5 hours, or “super pasteurized” by steaming them at atmospheric pressure for 10 to 12 hours.

• Clean Inoculation: Because of the rich nutrients in the block, you must be extremely clean when mixing this spawn! Always inoculate your cooled blocks in front of a laminar flow hood or inside a Still Air Box (SAB) wiped down with 70% isopropyl alcohol.

🧫 Incubation (Colonizing Your Block) Once you have cleanly mixed your spawn into your prepared, sterile substrate and sealed your bags, it is time to let the mycelium take over!

• Temperature: Store your inoculated bags in a clean, dark space with stable temperatures between 16-20°C.

• Fresh Air: The growing mycelium needs to breathe! Ensure your incubation room has good ventilation, aiming for ideally one room air change per hour.

• The Goal: Leave the bags to incubate until the substrate turns completely white with strong mycelium. Once fully colonized, it is ready to fruit!

🌤️ Best Fruiting Environment

• Temperature: The Black Pearl is a cool-weather loving strain! Once fully colonized and ready to fruit, it requires a low temperature range of 10-18°C to trigger pinning.

• Light: Place your fully white block somewhere with enough natural, indirect light to read a book by.

• Humidity: Black Pearls need it wetter! They require higher than usual humidity (80-90%). When you cut your fruiting holes, ensure you maintain this high moisture level by misting the area around the cuts frequently.

• Fresh Air: Mushrooms “exhale” CO2 as they grow! To ensure you get beautiful caps, you need excellent fresh air exchange. Aim for 6-8+ room air changes per hour in your fruiting space.

🍄 Tips & Harvesting

• Inoculation Rate: We generally recommend mixing your spawn into your sterile bulk substrate at a rate of 10% to 20% by weight.

• Eat the Stems!: Unlike standard oysters where the stems can sometimes be tough and woody at the base, the thick, swollen whitish stems of the Black Pearl are tender, sweet, and highly sought after by chefs. Treat them just like King Oyster stems!

• When to pick: Harvest the entire cluster at once while the margins (edges) of the brownish caps are still slightly rolled inwards. If the caps flatten out completely or start turning upward, they are past their prime and about to drop spores.