Putting your focus on growing the most perfect mushrooms is going to create a system with problems very quickly. You’re going to baby those mushrooms, you’re going to tweak your system for every efficiency, and you’re going to quickly become overwhelmed with just how much work is involved in growing large quantities of perfection. A true Sisyphean task if there ever were one!
All this said, I want a purple mushroom. It haunts my dreams not because it is a vision of what could be, but because it is a memory of the most terrible sales tragedy I have ever seen. A vision of what was, and was lost.
Buying extremely cheap strains may seem like a smart move upfront, but you’ll be paying for that decision for a long time to come with poorly performing mushrooms. We’ve gotten several of our customers just by giving them a sample of what we offer. The clusters of healthy, strong mushrooms that have a fair amount of heft to them are all it takes to get them to call back for more.
Before we developed our system of getting rid of our spent fruiting blocks, we got a gigantic pile built up. All the empty spaces that developed, the grain, the substrate, and the plastic shelters worked together to create a fantastic rat habitat.
We’ve already established that the process of creating your own fruiting blocks is essential to growing your mushroom business. Sure, gaining profit is possible when buying blocks, but true growth requires active participation in the full process from start to finish. Part of which involves inoculating fruiting blocks.
In plenty of ways, our expanse was at the worst possible time. We did accomplish our goal of staying out of debt while expanding, but that meant using our savings to pay two months of rent on the new space. With an abundance of work to be done to get the space ready, a large shipment of building supplies had just been ordered, also. We were left with no cash flow and employees we had no way to pay. Things looked incredibly grim.