The targets for a mushroom farm are amongst others:
• Meet market requirements
• Good quality at the lowest possible harvesting costs
To meet the market requirements the farm needs about the same amount of mushrooms every day, seven days per week. Maybe a bit more on one day than the other depending on sales. This means generally picking seven days per week.
Imagine the third picking day of a first flush. In the morning the pickers are picking a beautiful mushroom.
Around noon the mushrooms are starting to lose colour and 3 hours later they start growing like mad. Stems are stretching and caps are getting soft.
Longer pre-wetting of straw to preserve structure during mushroom composting
In my 'Pre-wet' blog, I already wrote about the importance of pre-wetting for good mushroom substrate. In this blog, I would like to discuss the structure of straw. I often hear customers say: "We are shortening the pre-wetting time because the structure of the compost is too short." But I disagree with this statement. Why? Read all about it in this blog.
What is the absolute moisture content of the air? Or the enthalpy of the air? More and more growers have a handy app that reads out these values. I always ask: “What do you do with this data?” I don’t always get an answer. Because it’s not about the numbers. The best way to understand this is to use a sponge as an example. It’s much clear and you can combine it with the Mollier diagram. Use this link to download the coloured Mollier diagram (pdf).
Picking mushrooms is more than just removing them from the beds. The handling and picking the right mushrooms is vital. Creating space to allow them to grow bigger is not only for yield. A mushroom with enough space has better evaporation and will hold the quality better, longer and will have a better shelf life as well. Handling of mushrooms can affect quality and shelf life.
My previous blog described what the pH should do during the composting process. This blog examines the role of the raw materials, such as ammonium sulphate, gypsum and water.
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