How to log a mushroom grow batch
A step-by-step walkthrough of creating your first batch in Mushroom.casa Grow Log, from species and substrate through to the first flush.
How do you log a mushroom grow batch?
Log a grow batch by recording five things at inoculation: the species, the substrate recipe, the spawn type, the inoculation date, and how many containers you started. From there you move the batch through each stage as it happens, which turns a scattered set of notes into a timeline you can compare between grows.
Steps
Create the batch record
Open Batches and choose New batch. Give it a name you will recognise later, for example "Oyster tub 3 — Feb".
Record species and spawn type
Pick a species from the list or type your own. Note whether you used grain, sawdust, liquid culture or an agar wedge.
Attach a substrate recipe
Select a saved recipe, or enter the substrate weight so biological efficiency can be calculated automatically later.
Set the inoculation date
Use the actual date you introduced spawn. Every elapsed-day count and stage suggestion is measured from this date.
Move the batch through stages
Drag the card between columns as the batch progresses: spawn prepared, inoculated, colonizing, pinning, fruiting, harvested, archived.
Log each harvest
When you pick a flush, record fresh weight and a quality rating. The app computes biological efficiency from the substrate weight.
Why the inoculation date matters most
Every timing signal in a grow log is measured from the inoculation date. Elapsed days drive the colonisation estimate, the pinning window and the expected first flush. If the date is wrong by a week, every suggestion that follows is wrong by a week.
If you are back-filling history, enter the real dates rather than today. A short, accurate log is far more useful than a long, approximate one, because yield comparisons only hold up when the timelines are real.
What to record at inoculation
Species, substrate recipe, spawn type, inoculation date and container count are the five fields that make later analysis possible. Everything else — notes, photos, ambient conditions — adds colour, but those five drive the numbers.
Container count is worth being precise about. Biological efficiency and contamination rate are both far more meaningful per container than per batch, because a single contaminated shoebox tub out of twelve is a different event from one out of two.
Keeping the log useful over a season
The habit that separates a useful log from a forgotten one is logging at the moment of the action. Adding a stage change when you actually move the tub takes seconds. Reconstructing three weeks of notes from memory does not work.
Photographs are the cheapest memory aid available. A photo at each stage change lets you compare visual colonisation speed between batches that used different recipes, which is often the first sign that a recipe change helped.
Terms used in this guide
- Spawn
- Spawn is mushroom mycelium growing on a carrier material, most often sterilised grain, used to inoculate a larger substrate.
- Substrate
- Substrate is the material mushroom mycelium digests and grows through, such as straw, coco coir, hardwood sawdust or supplemented pellets.
- Flush
- A flush is one distinct wave of mushroom fruiting from a single batch, harvested together before the substrate rests and produces the next wave.
- Biological efficiency (BE%)
- Biological efficiency is the fresh weight of harvested mushrooms divided by the dry weight of the substrate, expressed as a percentage.
- Contamination
- Contamination is the presence of an unwanted organism competing with or damaging the cultivated mycelium, such as trichoderma, bacteria, cobweb or yeast.
Put this into practice
Mushroom.casa Grow Log records stage timings, flush weights and contamination events as you go, and calculates biological efficiency from the numbers you enter. Free for three active batches.