Our Process

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Substrate & Spawn

 

Substrate

Firstly, what is substrate? Put simply, it is the food for your mushrooms to grow on and can be thought of similarly to soil in farming any other crop. A wide range of different materials are available for use as mushroom substrate, yet all of our species require plant-based materials to grow on.

 

Fortunately for us, many of these options are low-value or waste products which we can upcycle into delicious and healthy mushrooms! In several cases, this can help us reduce the amount of waste being sent to landfill but in most cases mushroom cultivation simply offers a more efficient method of upcycling the nutrients trapped in these materials. Furthermore, mushroom cultivation can actually increase the availability of nutrients in our spent substrate - improving the efficiency of other methods (composting, animal feed, etc.).

 

As sustainability is so important to Myco Curators, we use locally-sourced agricultural byproducts as our substrate; specifically, locally sourced wheat straw.

 

 

Spawn

Spawn, in our case, grain spawn, is in essesnce a 'mushroom seed' - grain which, instead of producing wheat or sorghum, produces our wonderful mushrooms. As such, grain spawn is very much the first building block in our production process.