Mushroom Spawn Bags 1.7kg – Nameko (Pholita microspora) – made to order

Description

🍄 Nameko Mushroom Spawn Guide (Pholiota microspora)

Ready to step up your mushroom growing game? The Nameko mushroom (Pholiota microspora) is an absolute delight and a staple in traditional Japanese cuisine! Famous for being the star ingredient in miso soup, these stunning little amber-to-butterscotch coloured mushrooms pack a wonderful, earthy, and nutty flavor. As they mature, the caps can sometimes develop a beautiful, slightly cracked, “turtle back” type appearance!

When fresh and grown in high humidity, the caps have a naturally gelatinous, slightly slimy coating. Don’t let that deter you! This unique feature acts as a fantastic natural thickener for soups and sauces, giving your dishes an incredibly rich, velvety texture.

Please note: Like its close cousin the Chestnut mushroom, Nameko requires a longer incubation period and very specific cold, high-humidity fruiting conditions. They are 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 Nameko 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!: Nameko requires an incubation period of 5 to 6 weeks before fruiting. The block needs this extra time to fully consolidate, store up energy, and form primordia (baby pins).

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

• Temperature: Nameko is an incredibly hardy cold-weather lover—in the wild, they are even known to grow right through the snow! Once ready to fruit, they require a cold temperature drop to trigger pinning. Aim for a cold fruiting temperature range of 10-15°C.

• Light: Place your fully white block somewhere with enough natural, indirect light to read a book by to help develop those beautiful amber caps.

• Humidity: Keep it extremely high (90%+). That natural gelatinous layer on the caps requires massive amounts of moisture to form properly. If the air is too dry, they will stall out and stop growing!

• 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!

• Endless Flushes: One of the best things about Nameko is its resilience. It will flush many times over its lifespan, provided you keep the fruiting block moist enough between harvests! Don’t let the exposed substrate dry out.

• 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 butterscotch caps start to open up, but before they flatten out completely. 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