The Master Mix Grow Kit
The Master Mix is super simple recipe to upgrade your grows and flushes.
“Combine 1 part hardwood sawdust with 1 part soy hulls, hydrate to 60%, and sterilize at 15 PSI for 2.5 hours.”
It is simply A 50/50 mix of soy bean hulls and hardwood sawdust hydrated to perfection! (Field Capacity)
To break it down even more, for every 5 lb fruiting block, you need:
1 lb Hardwood Sawdust
1 lb Soybean Hulls
3 lb Boiled Water
Why Soybean Hulls?
So what are soy hulls and why do mushrooms love them?
Soybean hulls are a by-product of Soybean processing and consist of the Soybean seed coat. Soybean hulls make up approximately 8% of the whole seed and contain 86% complex carbohydrates. The insoluble carbohydrate fraction of Soybean hulls consists of approximately 30% pectin, 50% hemicelluloses, and 20% cellulose.
Oyster Mushrooms are known for their aggressive colonization speeds and appetite to eat just about anything: coffee grounds, leaves, grain hulls, certain hydrocarbons, agricultural waste, and may more. What makes Soybean hulls so nutritious to Fungi and Mushrooms is their polysaccharides (complex carbohydrates) these in turn react with water using amylase enzymes as catalyst, which produces constituent sugars. The sugars provide quick source of nutrients for the Fungi to quickly grow while the hemicellulose and cellulose provide long-term energy. The only drawback to utilizing a Master Mix substrate is the number of available flushes and the initial yield. Master Mix Blocks will produce large and dense clusters, with mushrooms just clamoring all over each other to burst out of the bag.
Are there any drawbacks or cons supplementing with Soybean Hulls?
The drawbacks of Master Mix are are the possibility of contamination significantly increases if not prepared properly and mycelium withdraw, as it burns up all the biologically available simple sugars. Typically, growers will only utilize the first flush as you can expect 40 to 60% mass conversion.
You can play around with different mix ratios, but note that a 50-50 mix is ideal, as this ratio balances grow cycle and biological conversion. Any more than 50% Soy Hulls, and your mix will be too nutritionally dense, and you’ll run into higher contamination risk and deformed mushrooms. Using less than 50% will diminish first initial yield due to lower bioavailable sugars; however will the mushroom block will produce more flushes, perfect for the hobbyist grower that can’t eat that many mushrooms at once.
**Each 5lb Grow Block should be inoculated with 1lb of Grain Spawn, a 5:1 ratio.
I recommend utilizing the Master Mix formulation if you need to maximize your initial growth and harvest of Mushrooms, subsequent flushes will be almost non-existent.
We at Shroom Stop utilize a Premium Blend of Hardwood and a secret blend of supplementation to provide optimal growth while maintain number of flushes/duration of our Grow Kits. Many of our customers have reported 4 or more harvests, having multiple harvests allows for the freshest mushrooms possible.