Use of water extract of common reed and johnsen grass flowers to increase yield and storage life of oyster mushroom

Abstract

   Experiments were conducted in the mushroom project, dept. of Hort , college of Agric , Univ. of Baghdad from 2/2/2012 to 25/6/2013 . Pure culture of pleurotus ostreatus (Jaq. Fr.) was imported from Jordan , Plastic bags were filled with 1 KG of moist and sterilized wheat straw and 50 g of mushroom spawn was added to each bag, the bags were transferred to the incubation room at 25 +- 2 C for one month , Humidity was raised to 80-90% and light to 400 lux , Water extract of common reed and Johnson grass flowers of the following concentrations : 0.0% or 5% or 10% or 20% of one of the two extracts was added to the plastic bag after the pin heads formation .Fruiting bodies were harvested , dried and used to determine the concentration of the protein and phenolic compounds , the results showed that the fresh and the dry yield and the biological efficiency (BE) increased significantly with the increase of the concentration of the water extract of Johnson grass flowers , while increasing the concentration of the water extract of the common reed flowers to 20% reduced the fresh and the dry yield and the BE significantly compared with 10% and 5% concentrations , the best result was obtained from using10% of common reed flowers extract compared with all other treatments , the highest percentage of dry matter was obtained from using 10% of both kind of extracts , the concentrations of the phenolic compounds and the protein increased with the increase of both kinds of extracts ,the best concentration of the phenolic compounds and the protein was obtained from using 20% of common reed flowers extracts, the concentration of the protein and the phenolic compounds decreased during cold storage