Mushroom Spawn Bags 1.7kg – Maitake EU (Grifola frondosa)

Description

🌿 Maitake (Hen of the Woods) Mushroom Spawn Guide (Grifola frondosa)

Ready to step up your mushroom growing game? The Maitake—often known as “Hen of the Woods” due to its ruffled, feather-like appearance—is a spectacular gourmet and highly revered medicinal mushroom!

In the wild, Grifola frondosa is a perennial fungus that often grows in the exact same place for several years in succession, sprouting from an underground, potato-sized tuber-like structure known as a sclerotium. It produces massive clusters (sometimes reaching up to 100-150 cm across in nature!) consisting of multiple grayish-brown, curled or spoon-shaped caps with beautiful wavy margins. Unlike the other gilled mushrooms on this list, Maitake is a polypore, meaning the undersurface of its caps bears tiny pores rather than gills!

Please note: Maitake requires significantly more patience than standard oysters, needing a very long incubation period. They are also best grown on sterilized or super-pasteurized supplemented sawdust blocks only!

🌾 Recommended Substrates To get those famous, heavy clusters, 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 Maitake 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—Patience!: Maitake is a slow mover. It requires a long incubation period of 6 to 8 weeks. The block may look fully white well before this, but it needs this extended time to consolidate, store energy, and form its primordia (baby mushroom pins) right under the plastic. Don’t rush it!

🌤️ Best Fruiting Environment Maitake are top-fruiters! Once you see dark, brain-like mounds forming on the top of your block, you will need to cut the top of the bag open to allow the clusters to grow straight up.

• Temperature: Once fully consolidated and pinning, they require a cooler temperature drop to fruit properly. Aim for a temperature range of 13-18°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 the beautiful grayish-brown pigmentation in the caps!

• 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.

• Fresh Air: To get beautifully proportioned “fronds” (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!

• Tough Stems: The milky-white stipe (stalk) has a unique branchy structure, but be aware that it becomes tough and woody as the mushroom matures.

• When to pick: Harvest the entire bunch at once! The best time to pick is when the distinct, spoon-shaped caps have formed and flattened out, but before the cluster stops growing and drops spores from its tiny pores. You want to harvest while the caps and upper branches are still tender!

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