Description
20 Kg White French Millet for Mushroom Grain Spawn, bird seed
Our millet is sourced from reputable Australian suppliers. Australian grown.
Why Choose Millets?
- Nutritional Benefits Size: Millets are renowned for their nutritional benefits and are perfectly sized for cultivation. They are considerably smaller than other grains such as Wheat, Rye, Oats, or Corn. This size advantage ensures that they blend more uniformly with the substrate and provide a higher number of inoculation points, leading to a reduced contamination rate from faster, more even colonization.
- Easy Cleaning Popularity: Cleaning millets is a breeze. They’re also gaining traction in the mycology community, with more resources available about their utilization.
- Purity: Millets stand out because they are clean with no pesticides added for preservation. Unlike Rye and Wheat, they don’t have dust.
You can also buy pre-sterilized millet in 500 g, 1 Kg, and 2 Kg variants.
Preparation of Millet Grains for Mushroom Cultivation:
- Soaking: Directly soak the grains without washing them in a bucket for 12 – 24 hours, ensuring they are completely submerged. This step is crucial for mycelium growth.
- Draining: Drain the water with a fine mesh or similar straining tool. Ensure that the mesh’s pores are small enough to retain the millets. Now wash the grains with plenty of fresh water using a hose or under a running tap.
- Additives: Incorporate gypsum and calcium carbonate. Gypsum ensures the grains remain separate, while calcium carbonate adjusts the grain’s pH, potentially enhancing yields. We suggest adding 5% of the total weight after soaking. Thoroughly mix after addition.
- Sterilization: Transfer the millets into mason jars equipped with an air filter and injection port. Then, place them in a sterilizer. Mushroom bags are also suitable. A sterilization duration of 2 hours and 30 minutes is optimal. Ensure the containers are filled to no more than 60% capacity to facilitate proper gas exchange during subsequent mycelium colonization.
- Inoculation: Once sterilization is complete and the containers have cooled, introduce your selected culture. Proper adherence to procedures is essential to minimize contamination risks. Use any inoculation media such as liquid culture, grain spawn, or agar plates.
- Labeling: Post-inoculation, clearly label each bag with the inoculation date and the specific culture used.
Understanding Ratios:
Following the procedure above, the water retention rate for our millet is approximately 40%. Thus, the millet’s final weight after preparation will be 40% more than its dry weight. To compute the wet weight, multiply the dry weight by 1.4.
For clarity: Soaking and cooking 5kg of Millet results in about 7kgs. To derive any other desired final weight, use this formula:
Illustrative Example: If you aim for 10 bags of 1 kg millet each:
Calculate:
10/1.4 = 7.15 kg.
This means you need to soak 7.15 kg of dry millet for 12-24 hours to yield 10 kg of wet millet, suitable for producing 10 bags of 1 kg each.