CULTIVATION TIPS ADVISIE Better selection procedure
Insufficiently fermented compost at spawning.
By Con Hermans AdVisie ‘the mushroom growing consultants’, Heythuysen
hermans@mushroomconsulting.nl
Photos: AdVisie
42% of the straw blades in this compost are insufficiently fermented.
Mushrooms double their weight every day. This means an even spread of mushrooms across the beds is essential, especially with mechanical harvesting, otherwise many kg/m2 will be lost. An even spread across the beds is also important with manual picking. To achieve this, every kilo of compost in the beds must be uniform Mixing is one of the most important processes to create homogeneous compost. You could say that making compost is all about mixing, mixing and mixing again. Trailers of horse manure, straw, chicken manure and gypsum arrive at the composting yard. All these individual loads are mixed. Top loaders mix the compost evenly in the bunkers. The compost is mixed a few more times when it moves to a different bunker and is also mixed again when the pasteurisation and phase III tunnels are filled and emptied. Mixing takes place when the phase III compost is loaded onto a trailer. And on many farms, the loads on the various trailers are also mixed together. So you would think that was enough mixing! However, that often proves not to be the case and the resulting compost is not homogeneous. The cause is the raw materials. A homogeneous compost starts with a good selection procedure. If the raw materials are too heterogeneous at the start of the mixing process, good mixing will ensure that every ton of compost appears uniform - at macro level at least. However, if you examine the compost at micro level, which the mushrooms depend on for their supply of nutrients, significant differences in the degree of decomposition between individual blades of straw in the compost will become apparent. Some blades of straw will have already completely disintegrated into fibre while others are still too hard and too dry, so that no mycelium can grow on them at all, let alone extract any nutrients. I always apply the 10% rule which means: 90% of the straw blades must be well decomposed. They supply the mushrooms with nutrients. Between 5-10% of the blades may be less well degraded. They supply little or no nutrients but are vital to add structure to the compost volume. Structure creates enough space for oxygen in the compost in addition to water, which is also necessary for sufficient compost activity. However, 5-10% of hard blades is more than enough. I often see a much higher percentage and this certainty compromises the availability of nutrients and initially results in weaker mushrooms. Spawning is the best moment to assess the degree of fermentation, as fermentation is only fully complete after the conditioning phase.
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