Mushroom Spawn Bag 1.7kg -American Bowsers “Chestnuts” – (Pholiota adiposa) – Made to order – NO shipping to WA

Description

🌰 Chestnut Mushroom Spawn Guide (Pholiota adiposa)

Ready to step up your mushroom growing game? The Chestnut Mushroom (Pholiota adiposa) is a spectacular choice edible that produces absolutely breathtaking, dense clusters of mushrooms! Found naturally in North America, Europe, and Asia (most often growing on beech trees), this variety is famous for its stunning orange to yellow-brown fruitbodies covered in distinctive scaly white and dark brown spots.

When fresh and grown in high humidity, the caps have a naturally viscid (slightly slimy) texture, which translates to a fantastic, rich mouthfeel and an incredible nutty crunch when cooked. Highly prized for both its culinary value and medicinal compounds, this is a phenomenal species to add to your grow room!

Please note: Chestnut mushrooms require significantly more patience than standard oysters, needing a much longer incubation period. They are also best grown on sterilized or super-pasteurized supplemented sawdust blocks only!

🌾 Recommended Substrates To get those famous, heavy bunches, this wood-loving strain requires a high-nutrient diet! We highly recommend:

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

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

🛠️ How to Prepare Your Substrate & Inoculate Because Chestnuts thrive on highly nutritious supplemented substrates, standard hot-water pasteurization is not enough. You will need to treat this like an advanced grow!

• 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 you are mixing your spawn into fully sterilized material, you must be extremely clean! 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 Golden Rule—Patience!: Chestnuts are slow to consolidate. They require an incubation period of 4 to 6 weeks before fruiting. Even after the block looks fully white, it needs this extra time to store energy and prepare for a massive flush. Don’t rush it!

🌤️ Best Fruiting Environment Chestnuts are excellent top-fruiters! Once fully consolidated, you will need to cut the top of the bag open to allow the clusters to grow straight up.

• Temperature: Once ready to fruit, they require a cooler temperature drop to trigger pinning. Aim for a medium fruiting temperature range of 15-18°C.

• Light: Place your fully white block somewhere with enough natural, indirect light to read a book by. Good lighting helps trigger pinning and develops those beautiful, vibrant orange colors and distinctive scales!

• Humidity: Keep it incredibly high (80-90%+). Because they fruit from the exposed top of the block, they need consistent environmental moisture to form healthy clusters without drying out.

• Fresh Air: To get beautifully proportioned stems and caps, aim for high fresh air exchange (6-8+ room air changes per hour).

🍄 Tips & Harvesting

• Inoculation Rate: Because you are mixing your spawn into fully sterilized material in a highly clean environment, you only need an inoculation rate of 3% to 5% by weight. Your 1.7kg spawn bag will go a very long way!

• Nutty & Crunchy: Don’t discard the stems! Chestnut stems retain their fantastic crunch even after a long simmer in soups or a hot sear in a pan, giving dishes an incredible texture.

• When to pick: Harvest the entire bunch at once! The best time to pick is just as the veils under the caps begin to break and the caps start to open up, but before they flatten out completely and drop their spores. Gently twist and pull the entire cluster away from the block.

Please note this culture is sold with our Mushroom Spawn and Cultures sale agreement. By purchasing you agree to this agreement