Behind the Scenes Pt.1 - JCM
Behind the Scenes at Jurassic Coast Mushrooms:
Pt.1 - JCM intro
If you’ve ever wondered what life is like at Duck Farm Workshops, behind the lab curtain and beyond the incubation room at Jurassic Coast Mushrooms HQ, then this little blog will keep you nicely updated :)
It’s been 6 months since we opened the doors at JCM, it was steady at first but a little quiet. We needed to gain growers trust in both us and our product. Cultures were selling through social media and on EBay but not in great numbers. The autoclave was running once a week and a few local restaurants were starting to show an interest in this new local mushroom farm in Dorset.
It’s now mid November, and business is going great. We supply direct to customer and to a select number of local high end restaurants, we never intended to cultivate masses of mushrooms but we do get a lot of joy from growing them and it’s also important for us to continuously grow out and inspect our genetic range. It’s also nice to collect data on fruiting preferences during the seasons, to enable us to feed this back to customers.
The engine room of the business is bedding in nicely, we now run the autoclave 3 times a week and manufacture around 230kgs of mushroom grain spawn each week. We regularly supply several small to medium sized mushroom cultivators. Our 5 bag bulk discount is popular, 5 x 3kg of mushroom grain spawn for £100.00 + shipping. The website is now live and we’re starting to get to grips with it..we’re selling more liquid cultures and we’re pleased to see there’s far more interest in native strains. We’ve run 6 cultivation workshops from our unit as well as several offsite. We have a range of ready to fruit mushroom growing kits which are really popular and we’ve got some Christmas Markets lined up, and a grow workshop on December 21st to finish up the year nicely!
Monday: Harvest Days and 1st autoclave run
Mondays at Jurassic Coast Mushrooms begin with a cuppa followed by a post weekend harvest, ready for our deliveries to The Kings Arms in Dorchester and other local customers :)
The rest of the morning is spent between checking on the previous week’s mushroom grain spawn and preparing a run of grain bags to load up the autoclave. This 200Ltr autoclave allows us to process around 90kg of spawn a day.
Midweek: Hot Shake and Inoculate.
By Wednesday, we’ve given the grain a hot shake and it’s now cool enough to inoculate. The autoclave has been reloaded to run over Wednesday night. By this point the grow room is bursting with activity. Native Oysters and Coral Tooth fungus all across the shelves, and Pioppino standing like proud little sculptures.
A little session in the Lab
It was time to pour some agar, a job that requires focus, patience, and a little bit of ritual. The freshly prepared media sits in-front of the hoods over night so they cool in perfect formation.
Sam likes pouring the agar it’s the fungal equivalent of sharpening tools before an important job, you’re setting the stage for the next wave of growth.
Friday: Final Harvest and Smash out All the Jobs!
By Friday we’ve delivered to both Yalbury and Thirteen Restaurant, the autoclave has run a third time and we’ve got cultures to monitor (lots of them!).
The grain spawn gets a quick break and shake, this weeks fruiting blocks get moved from incubation to the grow room, which has had a quick tidy and the lab has been set for the following week’s transfers.
Highlights
We’ve recently received some great samples to clone and hopefully add to our native culture library. Both a Hericium coralloides and erinaceus. Two Ganoderma species too, likely resinaceum and applanatum and one other which we’re unsure of, perhaps G.carnosum.
We’ve also just secured a shipping container to enable us to expand the mushroom grain spawn operation, more on that in another blog..that’s a whole ‘other story.
Finally, we’re trialing a new recipe of fruiting substrate too, if results are good it will allow us to bring the cost of our mushroom growing kits down a nice smidge. We’re also in the process of building a custom walk in chiller, giving us a huge refrigeration capacity for holding more stock of mushroom grain spawn, mushroom growing kits and fresh liquid cultures. :)
Happy Growing!
Andy & Sam xx