Emerging first flush for the next few days.
Growing room with emerging first flush. Mushrooms are appearing throughout the growing room.
After harvesting, the mushrooms are packed here.
The mycelium is not damaged and broken so it does not need to recover. This represents a time gain. Another advantage of bags is that the com- post is isolated. As the compost is not mixed after spawning, if a problem with infection occurs any competitor moulds, like trichoderma, are locali- sed in the bag. But labour intensity is the main disadvantage of a bag system. With bags, all the work has to be done by manual effort: carrying the bags into the growing rooms, levelling the top before applying the casing soil, applying the casing by hand, etc.
Coir pith casing soil The casing soil is prepared on the farm and mainly consists of coir pith. This is the fibre bet- ween the husk and outer shell of a coconut and is quite similar to young white peat. It absorbs a lot of water very quickly, but it also releases water
34 MUSHROOM BUSINESS
very quickly. Plenty of water is added to the coir pith before it is mixed with clay, gypsum and lime to introduce more structure to the casing. Howe- ver, this casing soil still has a very fine structure in comparison to casing used in Europe. Before the casing is applied, all the bags are levelled and evened out, so they all contain preci- sely the same amount of compost. The casing soil in transported to the farm in large buckets. In the growing room is a container that is exactly the right size to hold enough casing to fit into one bag. This ensures that a uniform amount of casing is placed on top of the compost in each bag. The casing is applied by hand. This system boosts uniformity in the growing room.
Everything by hand After casing, water is applied for six days and the mycelium grows through the casing. On day
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