Lion’s mane, read from the teeth

A small X cut, and teeth about a centimetre long, tell you whether the air and humidity are right for lion’s mane.

Teeth, not gills

Lion’s mane is Hericium erinaceus. The body that comes out of the bag has no gills and no oyster cap. It is a ball of hanging teeth, and those teeth are the hymenium: the surface on which the fungus prepares its spores. From the cut onward, cultivation is the job of reading those teeth. Their length, the colour of the tip, the tightness of the ball tell you carbon dioxide and humidity better than a notebook does. A wide opening, with a shapeless mass coming out of it, does not give you more mushroom. It takes the signal away, because the block dries and the teeth are born already wrong.

It is a wood decomposer. In the woods it grows on living or dead hardwoods, often from a wound. Indoors it wants sterilised beech, not straw. The straw that forgives an oyster loses here: lion’s mane mycelium is slower and less aggressive, and a substrate that was only pasteurised leaves it the competitors. The path is liquid culture into grain, white grain into beech, the bag shut until the block is even. A syringe straight into a kilo of sawdust is too dilute. It often fails, and when it does not fail it takes so long that a mould arrives first.

Colonisation is comfortable around 20–24 °C. Fruiting prefers a cooler room, about 16–21 °C. In the heat the teeth yellow early and the ball becomes thin. In fridge cold the pins do not advance, and the air in a fridge is also too dry. A shelf without sun, without the blast of a radiator, with indirect light, is enough. Light aims the growth. It does not feed the fungus.

The mycelium that looks like too little

Anyone arriving from oyster looks at the bag and thinks the culture is weak. Hericium mycelium is often thin, almost transparent, in sparse tufts, not the thick ropes and dense cotton of a Pleurotus. If it is white and advancing, even slowly, it is the species. A white that looks poor to the eye can be a healthy block. The judgement is the advance and the smell, not the thickness of the felt.

Grain can take two or three weeks, the wood as many or more. Throwing out on day ten a bag that is still patchy, but clean, is timing this species on the wrong clock. A denser sector and a thinner one, while they stay white, are normal. Amber drops with a mushroom smell are metabolites. You leave them. An acid smell, a slimy film, grains in a puddle: bacteria, and that grain does not go into the beech. Powdery green is Trichoderma. You seal it, bag it, discard it, without opening it in the kitchen. The window is longer than for an oyster, so a doubtful inoculum has more days in which to lose.

When the block is evenly white and firm, you wait a few more days for it to tighten. Then you cut. Not before. A cut into a still-bare zone is a door onto the sawdust, and mould uses it.

The X cut

The gesture is a small X, on the order of a couple of centimetres, or a short crossed slit, not a smile from one edge of the bag to the other and not the top taken off. The X does three things. It concentrates one or two fruits instead of a crust of attempts. It keeps the block’s humidity, because the rest of the plastic stays closed. It leaves a mouth narrow enough that you can read the teeth: they come out at one point, and you see whether they lengthen, whether they yellow, whether they stay a ball.

A wide opening does the opposite. The block loses water from a large wound, the surface crusts, and many sites are born that all abort together. It looks like “a lot of mushroom.” It is a lot of dead surface. In a room under 80% relative humidity, the difference between an X and a window is the difference between a white ball and a yellow, hard block.

One X at a time, or two on opposite faces if you have a tent that stays humid. Not a score of cuts “to fill the bag.” The second mouth opens later, once the block has rested, on a face that is still whole. The edges of the X need to stay open: if the plastic closes again, the fruit deforms and carbon dioxide rises. Open them again with clean fingers. Do not widen them.

Mist the air of the room or the tent, not the ball. The teeth hold drops. Water sitting on them stains them yellow and glues them, and you no longer know whether the yellow is maturity, dryness, or your spray. Hands on the ball do the same: lion’s mane bruises and yellows where you squeeze it. You do not feel it to test it. You look.

Reading the length

The teeth are a measuring instrument.

A dense white ball, with short even teeth, is a young fruit in humid air with enough exchange. It is the point you start from. You do not harvest yet, unless the tips are already changing colour.

Long, thin teeth, hanging like wet hair, and a fruit that opens into branches instead of staying a ball: carbon dioxide is high. The fungus keeps extending the hymenium instead of filling a compact body. Fresh air is missing. Water is not missing, and adding mist in a still pocket makes the stagnation worse. You open the room, you loosen the tent, you avoid shutting the X in a cupboard. The air has to change without becoming a draught aimed at the cut.

Very short teeth, or none, brown or yellow tips, a small hard fruit: dry air, or a blow directly on the mouth. The tip of the tooth is the part that dies first when humidity collapses. You raise the humidity of the air and you remove the draught. You do not wet the ball to compensate.

Both at once, long teeth with the tip already brown, mean a pocket that is stale and dry at the same time: a corner of a tent that does not move and still does not hold water. You change where the bag sits, not only how often you spray.

Yellow or pink over the whole ball, with the teeth already long, is maturity. You have passed the window. It is not a pink mould. It is the fruit ageing, and from there the flesh softens and the smell is less fresh. You harvest what is there, and next time you look sooner.

The centimetre

The practical harvest signal is teeth around a centimetre long, with the body still white. At that point the hymenium is formed and the fruit has not yet spent everything on spores and yellowing. A centimetre is not a law of nature. It is a reading point. If the teeth are still white, dense, and arrive there, that is the moment: you take the whole body with a twist or a clean cut at the base, without leaving a frayed stump in the X. The stump rots and the next mouth is born already dirty.

If the tips brown while the teeth are still half a centimetre, waiting for the centimetre does not improve the fruit. The air is dry. Harvest what is white, fix the humidity, and the next one, from the same X if it is clean or from a new X, will tell you whether you corrected it. If instead, at one centimetre, the teeth are still white and the ball is firm, do not wait for three centimetres “to make it bigger.” The bigger one, in this species, is often the yellower one, and the block has lost the water you needed afterwards.

The spores are white and you see them late, as a film on the shelf. A ball left until that film is past its best. In a closed room that dust is also unpleasant to breathe for a while. You harvest before it. Paper in the fridge, a few days. This is not a mushroom that improves by keeping.

After harvest the block rests for several days. If it is light, a bath of a few hours and a real draining, not a night in the bucket. The next flush often comes from a new X, on another face. The old one, if it stayed clean and humid without being sodden, sometimes starts again. If it is brown and slimy, you do not widen it: you leave it and cut elsewhere. A second flush is common. A third is possible. None of them is a weight that is owed.

Coral and bear’s head

In the same genus there are forms that do not make a single ball. Coral tooth, Hericium coralloides, opens into branches, more open, with teeth more scattered along the branches. Bear’s head, Hericium americanum, tends toward a cluster of balls instead of one. The gesture does not change. Sterilised wood, a small X, a reading of the teeth, a harvest when the teeth are around a centimetre and still pale. The outline changes. Coral will look “too branched” if you compare it with a lion’s mane, even in good air: that is its architecture, not necessarily a carbon dioxide mistake. Bear’s head will look like “lots of small mushrooms.” If, though, the teeth of any of the three become long hair and the form dissolves into a soft tangle, that is still too much carbon dioxide, in all three.

Keeping them side by side, same room, same X cuts, is how you see the difference in outline without changing the method for each name. The comparison of the three Hericium puts lion’s mane, coral and bear’s head in the same fridge. It is for that: three forms, one reading of the teeth. It is not a different harvest for each, and it does not change the beech or the X.

Growing only

This page is about how the fruiting body grows. The cut, the teeth, the humidity, the wood. It is not about anything else. It is not a page about preparations, and it says nothing about effects on the body. If that is why you arrived, this guide will not answer you. The only thing the fruit tells you, here, is whether the air and the water in the room are right.

The lion’s mane liquid culture is the seed. It goes into the grain, a few millilitres in different places. The rest goes back in the fridge, between 2 and 8 °C, never in the freezer.

Coltura Liquida Hericium Erinaceus 10ml Micelio Vivo Lion's Mane€11,00

The lion’s mane plate is the same mycelium in a format you can look at before you commit the beech. With a slow species, a dirty plate costs you a month. An advancing white edge is the permission. A green sector or a wet film is not.

Hericium erinaceus – Piastra Petri Agar Fase Iniziale – Criniera di Leone€12,90

Sterilised beech is the fruiting food. You seed it with grain that is already white, not with the syringe alone, and you use it while the filter has not already let months of air through.

Substrato Funghi Faggio Sterilizzato — 1 kg / 2 kg€12,90

What this guide is not

It is not advice about the body, and it is not a harvest weight. It is the way to bring a ball of teeth out of a small cut, and to tell from their look whether you are the one who has to change the air. If the teeth are hair and the ball is yellow, the lesson is in the room, not in the name of the fungus.