How to Cultivate Poria? Detailed Guide to Planting Techniques and Timing

Surely everyone is already quite familiar with poria as a food, often eating poria cakes and other foods in daily life. Poria is actually also a common traditional Chinese medicinal herb that can strengthen the spleen, treat qi deficiency, and also has good effects in nourishing the heart and calming the mind. However, many people are still quite unfamiliar with its cultivation techniques. Let us learn about them together.

Poria Cultivation Techniques

1. Nutrition: In the pure culture process of poria mycelium, potato juice, pine sawdust, and pine wood chips are commonly used as comprehensive nutrient sources, or glucose, sucrose, and rice bran are used as carbon sources, amino acids and peptone as nitrogen sources, and monopotassium phosphate, magnesium sulfate, magnesium nitrate, ammonium nitrate, and calcined gypsum as mineral sources. To ensure the mycelium's need for various mineral elements, natural water is used instead of distilled water when preparing the culture medium.

2. Temperature: The mycelium can grow at 10-35°C, with the optimal temperature being 23-28°C. Above 35°C, the mycelium tends to age; if the duration is long or the temperature is too high, it will cause death. Below 20°C, growth is slow. At low temperatures of 0-4°C, the strain can be preserved.

3. Humidity: The growth and development of mycelium and sclerotium require a soil moisture content of about 20%. The formation of fruiting bodies requires an environment with 70-85% relative air humidity.

4. pH Value: Poria grows in soil with a pH of 3-7. For cultivation, a soil pH of 4-6 is preferable.

How to Cultivate Poria

1. Selecting the cultivation site

Production areas mostly choose hillsides at an altitude of 600-900 m, with shelter from wind and facing the sun, neutral or slightly acidic, well-drained sandy soil plots for cultivation.

2. Preparing materials

This can be done in early winter of the previous year, when pine trees are in the dormant stage, with low moisture content and not easily peeling, which is favorable for the growth and extension of the strain. When felling trees, cut the large ones and keep the small ones, cut the dense ones and keep the sparse ones. After felling, remove the branches and make 3-10 longitudinal cuts in the bark at intervals according to the thickness of the pine wood. The cut surface should be 3 cm wide and go 0.5 cm deep into the xylem, so that the pine wood dries easily and exudes pine resin. The uncut bark is called "jin," which facilitates the spread and growth of the mycelium. When the resin stops flowing from the cut end of the pine wood, saw the logs into lengths of 65-85 cm. Thin wood materials can be longer, but not exceeding 90 cm. After sawing, the log sections are transported to a ventilated and light-transmitting area near the cultivation site and stacked in a "#" shape for later use.

3. Preparing the strain

The strain is also called the starter, and there are three types: mycelium starter, flesh starter, and wood starter. Nowadays, the mycelium starter is mostly used. The mycelium starter is artificially pure-cultured poria mycelium, and the mother culture of the mycelium is obtained by tissue separation method. The flesh starter is a slice of fresh poria. The wood starter refers to wood material inoculated with the flesh starter; those with a yellow-white color, obvious mycelium under the bark, and a poria aroma are considered good.

4. Inoculation with mycelium starter

Choose a sunny day to place the log sections into the pit, 2-3 pieces or more per pit, matching thick and thin, and placing them in layers. During inoculation, insert the cultivation strain upside down at the tip of the thin log section, with the thin log section closely adjacent to the thick log section, so that the mycelium can spread from the thin log to the thick log. After inoculation, cover with soil 3 cm thick in a timely manner. Alternatively, the cultivation strain can be taken out of the bottle and concentratedly inoculated at the saw cut on the upper end of the log section, not placed too scattered. The strain should be closely attached to the log section. To protect the strain, some wood chips and leaves can be added on top, then covered with soil.

Poria Planting Time

Poria inoculation is divided into spring and autumn seasons. Spring planting is carried out from Qingming (Tomb-Sweeping Day) to Lixia (Beginning of Summer). In southern Guangxi, southeastern Guangxi, and western Guangxi, temperatures rise earlier, so inoculation around Qingming is more suitable; in northern Guangxi and northwestern Guangxi, inoculation is better around Lixia. In autumn, temperatures vary little across regions, so poria can be inoculated around Liqiu (Beginning of Autumn).

Poria cultivation uses strain or fresh poria sclerotium as the "seed" for propagation. The strain is made by placing small pine wood chips in bottles (plastic) for sterilization, adding an appropriate amount of culture substrate, inoculating with poria stock culture, and after cultivation, vigorous white mycelium grows in the bottle. For fresh poria propagation, fresh poria with thin skin and tender red-brown color is selected, cut with a bamboo knife into pieces with skin weighing 0.1-0.15 kg as propagation material for inoculation.

How to Harvest and Process Poria

1. Harvesting

10-12 months after inoculation, cracks appear in the soil of the poria cultivation site. The soil can be dug open to observe the color of the sclerotium surface. When the outer skin of the poria appears yellow-brown, it can be harvested. If the outer skin turns black, it is overripe and should be harvested immediately. After digging out, brush off the mud and sand, pile them indoors in layers, adding a layer of straw at the bottom and on the surface to let them sweat. Turn them once every 3 days. When the moisture has dried and the skin wrinkles, the outer skin can be peeled off, which is the poria skin.

2. Processing

Cut the peeled poria into uniformly thick slices. The pink ones are red poria, the white ones are poria slices, and those with a wooden core in the center are fushen (poria spirit). Alternatively, without slicing, after moisture evaporates and then drying in the sun, they become whole poria. Every 100 kg of fresh poria can be processed into 60 kg of whole poria.

Poria has very high medicinal value and is widely used in the pharmaceutical and health care fields. It is a treasured longevity product that people have always highly regarded. Although many people currently cultivate poria, the market has always been in a state of supply falling short of demand, and the market prospects are very broad.