Twelve blocks to mix. How many pounds of pellets?
Master's Mix at equal dry weights, hydrated to your target, costed per block — and carried through your biological efficiency to the number that matters at the chef's door: cost per pound. Everything stays in your browser.
The mix
Your costs
The standing order
The numbers here are yours to check. This page does arithmetic on what you type — it cannot see your recipe, your equipment or your batch.
For anything you will eat or sell as food, double-check it against your own process and your local rules. This page does maths, not food safety.
Want it to remember?
In MadeKeeper pellets, hulls and bags are inventory: each mix day consumes its real pounds at real cost, and the clamshell at market knows what the block behind it cost. See for growers & farmstands or poke around the live demo. $19/mo for the whole back office, kept for as long as you stay. The shop stays free for cost a piece and one fair — no product cap. The tax packet, Etsy and Square, and more fairs are the $19.
Saturday's mix, weighed before the kettle goes on
Substrate day is arithmetic before it is agriculture: pounds of pellets, pounds of hulls, pounds of water, and what the block costs. The math below is the same math the calculator runs.
What is Master's Mix?
Equal DRY weights of hardwood fuel pellets and soy hulls, hydrated to about 60% — a forum ritual that became the standard because it fruits oysters and lion's mane reliably without supplement math. The 'equal' is by dry weight, not volume, which is the mistake the calculator exists to prevent: pellets and hulls pack completely differently in a bucket.
How much water does the mix take?
The hydration target times the wet block weight: a 5 lb block at 60% is 3 lb of water and 2 lb of dry mix. Pellets absorb and expand as they break down, which is why the argument runs 55-65% — drier mixes colonize slower but resist contamination, wetter run the opposite trade. The default is the common middle and the setting is yours; your bags tell you within two batches.
What is biological efficiency, honestly?
Fresh mushroom weight over DRY substrate weight, as a percentage — so 100% BE means 2 lb of fresh oysters from a block holding 2 lb of dry mix. Published oyster figures genuinely reach 100% and beyond across flushes; lion's mane runs far lower. The default here is the published oyster seed, and it is the least trustworthy number on this page until your own flush records replace it — which is exactly how it should be.
What does a pound of mushrooms cost me to grow?
Cost per block divided by yield per block. At the seeded numbers — roughly a dollar-twenty of pellets, hulls and bag making a block that fruits 2 lb — you are growing for well under a dollar a pound, which is the margin that makes the chef's-door price work. Spawn, electricity and your Saturdays are real costs too; add them when you price, not when you mix.