Mushroom Spawn Bag 1.7kg – Turkey Tail (Trametes versicolor)

Description

🦃 Turkey Tail Mushroom Spawn Guide (Trametes versicolor)

Ready to step up your mushroom growing game? The Turkey Tail (Trametes versicolor) is one of the most eye-catching wood-loving fungi you can grow! True to its name, this stunning polypore produces overlapping, fan-shaped brackets that feature strikingly beautiful, velvety rings of multicoloured bands resembling the tail of a wild turkey.

Just like Reishi, Turkey Tail fruitbodies are incredibly tough, woody, and completely unpalatable to eat directly. However, they are highly prized for creating yummy teas

Please note: Like Reishi, Turkey Tail is a slow-growing and slow-fruiting species that requires patience. They are best grown on sterilized or super-pasteurized supplemented sawdust blocks only!

🌾 Recommended Substrates To build those beautiful, leathery brackets, 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 Turkey Tail thrives 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—Extreme Patience!: Turkey Tail mycelium can be brilliantly white and very aggressive, but the actual process of forming primordia and maturing into fully developed brackets is a very slow, prolonged process. Set it and forget it!

🌤️ Best Fruiting Environment Turkey Tail naturally forms overlapping shelves on the sides of logs. We recommend cutting horizontal slits into the sides of your fully colonized block to allow the brackets to form and fan outwards.

• Temperature: This hardy strain is highly adaptable, but it generally fruits best in a comfortable temperature range of 15-25°C.

• Light: Place your fully white block somewhere with enough natural, indirect light to read a book by. Good lighting is absolutely essential for the Turkey Tail to develop its striking, vibrant bands of color!

• Humidity: Keep it high (80-90%+). If the air is too dry, the growing edges will stunt and turn hard.

• Fresh Air: Turkey Tail requires high levels of fresh air exchange to form its classic, thin, shelf-like brackets (6-8+ room air changes per hour). If the CO2 is too high, it will form strange, puffy white blobs instead of distinct fans.

🍄 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 goes a very long way!

• True Identification: Underneath those beautiful, velvety multicoloured caps, the underside of a true Turkey Tail should be brilliantly white with thousands of microscopic pores (no gills!).

• When to pick: Like Reishi, Turkey Tail grows from the outer rim. The growing edge will be a soft, bright white. The mushroom is ready to harvest when that white growing margin recedes or stops expanding, and the brackets feel leathery and fully formed. Snip them off flush with the block using scissors or pruners. They can then be dried for long-term storage!

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