Lion's mane
Hericium erinaceus · HE-1 · v2.0.0
The highest price per kilogram on this list and the smallest market for it. Wants the highest humidity of the six and the lowest light. Fruits as a single dense head; the spines should hang, and short spines mean the CO2 was too high.
Spawn run
Advances after 16 days, or when you say so| Signal | Target | Band | Switches on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Air temperature | 22.0 °C | 21.3 °C – 22.8 °C | heater, cooler |
| Relative humidity | 88.0 % | 86.0 % – 90.0 % | humidifier |
| Carbon dioxide | 6,000 ppm | 4,750 ppm – 7,250 ppm | exhaust, intake |
| Light | dark | — | lights |
| Fresh air, minimum | 0.3 changes/hour | — | exhaust, intake |
Hardwood sawdust with bran. Colonises evenly and looks like nothing much until it pins.
Vapour pressure deficit at these targets: 0.32 kPa. That is what 88% humidity means at 22.0 °C — the figure the crop responds to, and the one a hygrometer cannot show you.
Primordia initiation
Advances when you mark "pins observed", or after 5 days| Signal | Target | Band | Switches on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Air temperature | 19.0 °C | 18.4 °C – 19.6 °C | heater, cooler |
| Relative humidity | 93.0 % | 91.8 % – 94.3 % | humidifier |
| Carbon dioxide | 700 ppm | 575 ppm – 825 ppm | exhaust, intake |
| Vapour pressure deficit | 0.15 kPa | 0.12 kPa – 0.18 kPa | humidifier, in advanced mode |
| Light | 8 h at 200 lux | — | lights |
| Fresh air, minimum | 4.0 changes/hour | — | exhaust, intake |
Very low light. Two hundred lux is enough and more does no good.
Vapour pressure deficit at these targets: 0.15 kPa. That is what 93% humidity means at 19.0 °C — the figure the crop responds to, and the one a hygrometer cannot show you.
Fruiting
Advances after 6 days, or when you say so| Signal | Target | Band | Switches on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Air temperature | 20.0 °C | 19.3 °C – 20.8 °C | heater, cooler |
| Relative humidity | 92.0 % | 90.8 % – 93.3 % | humidifier |
| Carbon dioxide | 700 ppm | 575 ppm – 825 ppm | exhaust, intake |
| Vapour pressure deficit | 0.19 kPa | 0.16 kPa – 0.23 kPa | humidifier, in advanced mode |
| Light | 8 h at 200 lux | — | lights |
| Fresh air, minimum | 5.0 changes/hour | — | exhaust, intake |
The tightest humidity band of the six, and the one most likely to expose an undersized fogger. Run the simulator on your own room numbers before committing a crop to it.
Vapour pressure deficit at these targets: 0.19 kPa. That is what 92% humidity means at 20.0 °C — the figure the crop responds to, and the one a hygrometer cannot show you.
Harvest
Advances when you mark "harvested", or after 2 days| Signal | Target | Band | Switches on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Air temperature | 20.0 °C | 19.3 °C – 20.8 °C | heater, cooler |
| Relative humidity | 88.0 % | 86.5 % – 89.5 % | humidifier |
| Carbon dioxide | 900 ppm | 750 ppm – 1,050 ppm | exhaust, intake |
| Light | 8 h at 200 lux | — | lights |
| Fresh air, minimum | 4.0 changes/hour | — | exhaust, intake |
Harvest while the spines are white. Yellowing means it is past, and a yellow head sells for nothing.
Vapour pressure deficit at these targets: 0.28 kPa. That is what 88% humidity means at 20.0 °C — the figure the crop responds to, and the one a hygrometer cannot show you.
Alarms
These do not switch anything. They sit outside the control loop deliberately, so that a bug in the control logic cannot also silence the thing that wakes you.
- Air above 28 °C
- Air below 10 °C
- Humidity below 80%
- CO2 above 3,000 ppm
Have Claude read this for you
Optional, off by default, and it uses your own Anthropic API key rather than ours. It is shown the findings this page already computed and is told it may not invent a number — no setpoint, no threshold, no duty cycle. It ranks what matters and says it in two sentences. It is never in the control loop: nothing on your board waits on it, and if it is switched off everything here works exactly the same.
A room review sends about 2,000 tokens and gets back about 600 — roughly US$0.03, or under three rupees.
Get an API key Read the API docs
Paste the key under Settings → Mushroom in the dashboard. It is stored on this site and sent only to api.anthropic.com, only when you press the button.
These targets are derived from published literature, not measured on your substrate, your strain or your room. Treat any recipe you have not validated on your own farm as a hypothesis. The yield log exists so that your second run can correct your first. Literature-derived. Not yet validated on a farm.