in december 2018 i set out on a journey to grow mushrooms in my two-car garage
at my house. I stuck with it, I persevered, I learned all i could. I pushed through the night,
through the heat, through the cold, through equipment failure, through failed crops,
through just about every problem a grower can face,
until it came down to this... Oak and Spore is expanding! yes! Look at that. Just look at that!
Seriously look at that facility. I haven't seen anything this attractive since like pre-2020.
You know 2020 when everything just got a bit ugly and people still call it good looking, but it's
not really, it's actually quite ugly. Yeah this ain't that, this is good looking! Look at that,
just look at it! You see behind me is our new facility we are going to be growing our
mushrooms in. It's a 200 square meter concrete floored workshop. There's five bays, there's an
insulated workshop here. One of those bays that's open is on the insulated side, and down the end
there there's 150 square meter pole barn we call it in New Zealand. So we're going to be using
that for our substrate preparation. That gives me about 350 square meters to grow tasty mushrooms.
So let me take you guys for a walk around this new facility we are going to be building. Here's the
entrance door just on the left here and that goes into my office. right it's a bit dark
there. and if we walk down the edge of this building here um you can see one door here,
so that goes into the insulated area, we'll come in here and have a good look around shortly. and
then we've got two doors, three doors, four doors, five doors. and out the back here,
let's take you for a wee walk, this is where our substrate preparation area is going to be.
so we come at the back here you can see i'm already doing a bit of work here, doing some
grinding out of the foundation for drains and just boxing up. we're going to put concrete pads
in here, boxing up. the good part about out here is I've actually got a big three-phase
conduit coming out on the wall here. so that there is a big three-phase line that is coming
into here three-phase power so we're going to be running all our mixing equipment here,
just on a concrete floor. we'll prepare all our bags out here, and after our bags have
been prepared out here they'll get sterilized out here, and then they'll get taken through
into where all the magic happens, which is in this building right here.
So we are in the area that we're going to be used as a fruiting room right now. well the
fruity rooms are going to be in here. Just open these doors.. Let's jsut do a wee spin around.
So there's a lot of stuff in here right now where um nothing's really organized yet because
it's all got to come out because we're going to re-epoxy the floors. When building mushroom farm
start with the floor you grow a top make sure that's good and correct first i made a mistake
of not doing it last time. So this time i'm just doing it a bit properly you can see this mark here
on the ground here that's where the fruity rooms are going to come out to and they're going to go
right back to that wall back there and it gives me about 40 square meters of fruiting room you
can see there's um channeled cut right there and that's where our drain's going to go um so yeah
having a drain this time that is perfect. But the fretting rooms aren't going to go back to the wall
or to the edge you can actually see there's a mark there, I don't know if you can just see it.
so down there that little mark there that's where they're going to come out to so you're going to
be able to walk all around the perimeter of the fruiting room and that is so you can get round the
edge. There's going to be some reasonably complex HVAC ventilation, not really HVAC but smaller,
coming in and going out of these fruiting chambers. It's going to go to a pre-conditioning
room which we're going to put right behind that wall back there. If we come down here but
you can see, you can see the quality of the wiring this place we'll show you a bit more of that
later. More power coming in here, three phase, um it's got an alarm, there's an electric fence
on the wal,l it's all electrified, and we've come through to this area here. So We're insulated part
of it, i'll just do you we spin around here, all these walls have some pretty heavy duty insulation
in it and just look at this cable management up here right it's just absolutely extraordinary.
We've got power points everywhere we've got a heat pump already in here, we've got a heat
pump markings on the floor here, these markings on the floor, I don't know if you can see that,
yeah this marking here is going to be incubation. heat pump already, three phases over there,
we don't really need three phase in incubation, but why not! three-phase hair dryer, go in there
dry my hair really quickly in the morning, and here's going to be my lab, right in the middle.
yeah just a lab! so we're going to have the office which i'll kind of have set up here,
again all of this has to be taken out when we re-epoxy the floor which is happening in
probably about a week or so. we're also getting the panels made up, all of the walling in here is
going to be his purpose built and that's getting manufactured right now. it's all insulated panel,
it's like foam insulated between stainless, no, color steel they call it. so that's going to have
all of that's getting proper made. some doors in here. if we go over here you can look at
the power. we have alarms, i mean again look at this cable management it's just absolutely
extraordinary. the guy who did all this was a engineer on the British admiralty, and we do know
the Brits have quite a history of building some pretty high quality ships.
so yeah he really did a lot of work here, again three phase of 32 amps, three phase
is probably on a bit of the light side. some of these other three phase sockets are uh 20 amp,
which is a bit unfortunate, would have liked a little bit more but can't complain. the roof
has got a lot of insulation in it so it's really warm. we've got an alarm, my alarm's already gone
up a few times during the night when um, yeah i don't know, something happens. oh here's my wife
and let's just go chat to my wife, hey sweetheart, come here! come here! don't cover your face
here's my wifey, she's happy i've got my own mushroom farm as well,
oh look at this, look at this, look at this pretty little thing! this pretty little number!
little number! okay oh and what else we've got, we've got, let me show you, so we've got some
really cool stuff going on there. we've got extraordinary cable management, we've
got insulation, we've got heat pumps, um you know double glazing the house doesn't even have double
glazing but the workshop's got double glazing, so that's a positive. let me show you our pump shed,
why is that so dark how do i operate these cameras.. we're going to go in here this is the
pump shed. i'm going to spin this camera around. so this is our pump shed in here. you can see
we've got power coming in here because if we need more power, got data, what this big thing in here,
all of that there controls all of these on the floor here and they're big filters. so
that's our bore. that's a 54 meter bore we call it, (A well), it comes up here, servos dump the
first bit of water, it's dirty, runs through the filters out to the 30 000 litre tank.
back in here through this big pump here, irrigate. that's irrigation for the property. this one goes
to the house through this um pressure vessel here. pumps the water down to the house. um
so it's really really quite high tech. not high tech, but for a new zealand board so that's quite
techy. he's really, he's really done a lot of work in here on making sure that irrigation runs
correctly. this all just just controls the irrigation, which is pumped by this giant um pump
here. so we're pretty happy about this. so you've seen the pump shed that's where we're going to get
all our water from the farm from. mushroom farming doesn't need a heck of a lot of water which is
pretty good, so it's not going to be a heck of a lot of waste. this is one of our paddocks.
so that's our land out there, and there's another one out here which goes behind the house,
for a total of about four hectares. and it goes round and you can see in the background up there
those giant eucalyptus trees, those giant blue gums, they are on the corner of our property.
so these paddocks are going to be planted out with mycorrhizal fungus species. we're looking at some
saffron milk caps some truffles and then maybe some something along the lines of some boletes,
if we can find the cultures for them. not sure if we can we can, get truffle easy enough. so
we're going to plant these paddocks out as well to give you that really authentic mushroom farm
experience. we've got a lot of work to do here especially over the next few months.
we basically have to turn, you know, this empty workshop here, into a functioning mushroom
farm. so if you're interested in following and seeing what i do just to do that, we're going to
try and get a lot of videos out, a lot of videos specifically about what i'm doing to turn this
into a farm. so make sure you guys subscribe, hit that bell button, like my videos, comment,
i do try to answer most comments. sometimes not immediately, but maybe once in a while i'll go
through and i'll really try to answer um almost every comment that's made, so please leave a
comment. ask a question if you'd like. yeah and let's just see.. oh and my goal is to get 250
kgs a week out of this, so the species we grow here aren't big yielders species unfortunately.
our biosecurity laws prevent a lot of species being imported, so we don't have these big you
know 100 biological efficiency yielders that you guys do in america have. our species tend, you
know our oyster species just don't quite grow that well. they grow well, but they just don't yield a
lot. my main pulmonarius species is biological efficiency is like 50% right, so, you know, if
we had other species we could probably do 500 kilo a week but we don't, so aim for 250 kilos a week,
and we'll go from there. we'll sell some mushrooms. hopefully people want to eat them.