Mushroom Spawn Bags 1.7kg – Wood Ear (Auricularia auricula) Medium DIFFICULTY – no shipping to WA

Description

🪵 Wood Ear Mushroom Spawn Guide (Auricularia auricula)

Ready to build your own mushroom blocks from scratch? The Wood Ear (Auricularia auricula) is a truly unique and highly prized mushroom, especially popular in traditional Asian cuisine! While it has a mild, non-distinctive taste on its own, it is famous and loved for its incredible gelatinous-rubbery texture. It acts like a sponge, soaking up the rich flavors of your soups, broths, and stir-fries while providing a satisfying, crunchy bite.

True to its name, this fascinating mushroom produces wavy, irregular fruitbodies that often look like delicate little ears, fans, or cups!

🌾 Recommended Substrates To get those famous, abundant clusters, this 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 the Wood Ear thrives on highly nutritious supplemented substrates, standard hot-water pasteurization is not enough to keep competing green molds away. 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 Goal: Leave the bags to incubate until the substrate is fully colonized. Note: Wood Ear mycelium can sometimes look a bit thinner or stringier than aggressive oyster mycelium—this is normal!

🌤️ Best Fruiting Environment Wood ears are generally side-fruiters. Cut small slits or “X” shapes into the sides of your colonized bag to allow the “ears” to pop through!

• Temperature: Wood Ears enjoy a mild-to-warm climate! Once fully colonized and ready to fruit, they thrive in a temperature range of 16-26°C.

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

• Humidity: Keep it incredibly high (80-90%+). Because they are naturally gelatinous and thin, they will dry out, turn hard, and stop growing if the air isn’t moist enough! Mist the plastic flaps over your cuts frequently.

• Fresh Air: Ensure you have excellent fresh air exchange. Aim for 6-8+ room air changes per hour in your fruiting space.

🍄 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!

• What to look for: The upper fertile surface will be brown to reddish-brown and bald (sometimes wrinkled). When young and fresh, the lower sterile surface is finely hairy, creating a beautiful whitish bloom over the brown/reddish-brown color.

• When to pick: Harvest when the “ears” are about 2-5 cm across and still feel wonderfully plump, thin, and gelatinous-rubbery.

• Preserving: If your entire fruiting body dries out and becomes hard and black, don’t panic! Wood Ears dry beautifully for long-term storage and will quickly rehydrate and regain their rubbery texture when soaked in water or tossed into hot soup.

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