Hey mox!
Yeah it's weird how some of these hobbies can just go away and pick up again... but for me plenty of interests see some rich days due to me not having major problems anymore and still time to spare (though I help out at two very cool places now)..
I assume you are talking about Cubensis, they do have a consolidation period prescribed which is not all that long. But actually if you look at gourmet mushrooms there are bunches that have ripening periods of often a month long or sometimes even several, so yeah that is after the colonization. Hard to say really why you had such a poor grow, I'd need quite some descriptions of what's going on at different points during the process.
At this rate I am getting more experienced with gourmet species perhaps, also because it kind of feels like most are a step up from Cubensis... so I am not an authority on Cubes anyway.
If by incubation you mean consolidation then sure a few days up to a week should be good, typically I'd say incubation means letting a culture run on agar or just letting spawn or bulk substrate colonize which is not really optional. Getting enough batches going making no difference, do you mean if you do a lot of tries at the same time there should be some successes among them? Well while redundancy is used to keep things under control, I don't think it is a way to offset bad grows where you are not really sure what the problem is - you'd better find out what the problem is instead so that you don't waste a lot of time and resources.
I don't remember much about having to trigger pinning on Cubensis esp in difficult ways, but I am finding out more and more about the intricacies with gourmet mushrooms and how they do require it, usually by cooling.
Yield is not related to colonization rate afaik except maybe there is a correlation between the two when it is due to general vigor... but say with gourmet mushrooms on wood you can get quicker fruits pumped out when using fine sawdust whereas the bigger coarser wood chips you use the longer it will keep growing and fruiting and the potential yield may go up but it can take a lot of time and seems pretty inefficient to try and capitalize on that - the best seems to be a moderate mix with most of it still being on the finer side.
The mycoponics just involve using humid CO2 rich air exhausted from growing mushrooms to grow plants, for me especially plants which love unusually humid climates. Though still the air probably needs to be dehumidified / only partially let in etc because otherwise it would be too humid for plants (like Novo's and kratom). It is not an original idea apparently but that doesn't matter. For me at home it would be awesome and where I work it can still serve as a pretty sweet installation although for a demo I have a much different design in mind, more integrated.
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I'd be totally down for some more discussion, on what we'd have to narrow that down? Here is the shroom cultivation thread: http://www.bluelight.org/vb/showthread.php?t=378996 but of course it is not meant for gourmet growing talk, there are subthreads like for magic truffles which I am also working on, but apparently not yet for woodlovers which is a bigger challenge and bigger focus for me. Anyway if you post there I'll join you. People who wanna IM about growing mushrooms can PM me.
Cool that you are getting into it too Xorkoth! I am growing shiitake right now for first time I think, among various other species, actually got a nice fruit now but the others are waiting possibly because I didn't induce pinning right.
Interesting that chicken of the woods is so good to you! I was doing research earlier this week and found out it causes brown rot rather than white rot which refers to a different set of enzymes and a different preference for the 3 major components of wood (cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin). To me this is interesting because this way by selecting the right species you can more selectively break down one or two of those components. Great if you are trying to grow on waste materials which are made of mostly one of those materials... which is what I am working on.
The life cycle of most of these sorts of fungi is similar for the biggest part but there can be differences in how spores are released which is sort of a detail though it helps to identify mushrooms. Very simply put you need at least two spores to germinate and form a network of strands called a mycelium (by feeding on substrate or medium), when these meet they can mate, a bit like a sperm and egg but more equal (gender equality ftw). The resulting mycelium is genetically 'unified' then and is now able to reproduce sexually itself. Resources are gathered in knots which then turn into pins (primordiae) which are "pre-mushrooms". These are then mostly inflated with water and the development is finished so that they can release spores. So the mycelium is the body of the fungus usually invisible in the ground and mushrooms are merely the sex organs spreading progeny.
Propagation of fungi can happen in different ways, two major ones being:
- you can put a big amount of spores on a medium (meaning agar petri dish here), or substrate. With agar you can clean this up, by transfering small pieces of mycelium a few times you can isolate a winning set of genetics out of the ones that germinated from the spores... they can combine if they are compatible in a process called anastomosis... so they have a big brawl and the winning cultures can be picked. If you clean this up you create a monoculture - one set of genetics means more reliable grows, however it is impossible to predict what you are really getting at this stage so you'll have to test.
- you can take a mushroom and under sterile conditions take out a piece of it from the inside where nothing could have infected it, then if you put this on agar it will grow into a mycelium and you will have cloned it. This is a common way to work with wild mushrooms but you can also make a spore print and use the spores as described.
So if you trade or buy, cultures are just pieces of mycelium. Liquid culture is mycelium drifting in a liquid.
Not sure if you can buy chicken of the woods spawn, if so you don't need to know the life cycle and you don't need to propagate, just grow.
Propagating yourself involves the agar etc. Spawn plugs in logs is pretty easy. But there are also intermediate levels like using spawn to colonize more spawn you sterilized or pasteurized yourself in a pressure cooker.I think I have that John Lilly book lol
Hopefully it's just the flu.