What pitfalls should be guarded against in edible mushroom cultivation in Guizhou?
In the process of cultivating edible mushrooms, after several successes, people often become mentally careless, believing they have mastered edible mushroom cultivation techniques, and may even try to change some practices in edible mushroom growing. What they do not realize is that suddenly changing edible mushroom growing practices may cause failure in spawn cultivation, and may even cause serious economic losses. The following summarizes a few mistakes that may occur during edible mushroom growing, which should be avoided as much as possible in actual cultivation.
1. Making edible mushroom spawn at home: Because purchased spawn is generally quite expensive, and hoping to increase the returns from edible mushroom cultivation, a few growers try to make spawn themselves after growing mushrooms for a period of time, not realizing that this very easily causes artificial yield reduction and may even cause cultivation failure. When cultivating spawn, one should establish the awareness of gradual domestication generation by generation, and choose high-yield spawn for cultivation to better increase returns; at the same time, if during growing one simply follows the inoculation procedure for cultivation bags and directly cultivates mother spawn, the degree of aseptic conditions will be reduced and contamination by foreign microbes will occur; if one also cannot identify contamination by foreign microbes and does not promptly remove contaminated spawn, then after the spawn is planted, large-scale contamination will occur in the later stage of edible mushroom growth, causing edible mushroom cultivation failure and economic losses.
2. Blindly increasing the nutrient materials in the culture medium for edible mushroom cultivation: Sometimes some growers simply believe that increasing the nutrients in the culture material can achieve high edible mushroom yields, and greatly increase the content of substrates such as corn flour in the culture material. They do not realize that doing so causes excessive vegetative growth of the mycelium, so the edible mushrooms only grow mycelium and find it hard to form mushroom buds, which instead causes a decline in yield.
3. Not paying attention to mixing the ingredients, resulting in uneven fertilizer distribution: When preparing fertilizer for edible mushroom cultivation, for convenience, some people simply scatter the fertilizer into the ingredients handful by handful and leave it at that. They do not realize that because the fertilizer is granular, it often fails to dissolve immediately and thus becomes unevenly distributed, affecting spawn growth.
4. Not paying attention to aseptic conditions during inoculation: When preparing edible mushroom nutrient material, some people use the form of making mature material and believe that the nutrient material has already been thoroughly sterilized, so they relax the aseptic requirements during inoculation. They do not realize that in places with many foreign microbes, the two ends of the spawn bags or damaged areas are very easily infected by external foreign microbes, reducing the finished-product rate of edible mushroom spawn bags and further reducing yield.
5. Neglecting management after inoculation: Some mushroom farmers believe that after completing edible mushroom inoculation, the task is essentially done, and the mycelium can grow on its own without much management, not realizing that this idea is completely wrong. In the early stage after inoculation, the indoor temperature is relatively low; if management is neglected, it is not only easy for foreign microbes to breed but can also cause acidification. In addition, if the temperature in the spawn room is too high or the bags are not turned in time, it may even cause spawn burning, and then the edible mushroom cultivation will come to nothing.
6. Blindly borrowing "high-yield" techniques regardless of whether they suit local conditions: For example, in autumn and winter, the Guanzhong area of Shaanxi mostly uses wall-style cultivation techniques to grow edible mushrooms. After mushroom farmers elsewhere learn of this, they believe that using wall-style soil-covering techniques will certainly increase yield, not realizing that if this method is used in spring and summer, it is very likely to cause spawn burning or the breeding of actinomycetes that prefer high temperatures, leading to reduced yield of the cultivated edible mushrooms.
Guizhou Chunhui Modern Agriculture official website: www.gzchny.com
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