is it ok to use aluminum foils as my casing? you know those type to bake cake with? those disposable ones, not the sheets. I am thinking about buying wild bird seed as my substrate. some company sell it in a grow bag, but once I see colonization, I can dump the thing in a casing for more fruits to yield. I want economical casing so if those foil I talked about would work let me know, or would those tupperware or rubbermaid products you could buy at The Container Store a good option as well?
growing bags vs. substrate jars to grow shrooms?
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why doesn't shrooms grow in the substrate jars, but possible with bags? I'm also wondering how many days it takes for the shrooms to fruit after the "cakes" has been placed on a case? I'm sure it varies but which type of strain is quickest and which is longest to fruit?
Solipsis
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In your case, with a strain that can produce sclerotia they would probably start producing those. So to be clear: that's truffles like "philosopher's stones". They should be in the dark for that though. Your hydroshroom fruiting chamber apparently has light but as I understand it you let them colonize in the dark which is good.
If you let them colonize for too long the more light there is present the worse it is, because it will take any such bit of light as a signal to start fruiting. Again, if you have a sclerotia producing species apparently the tendency to fruit is lower so less of an issue. You don't want that for a couple of reasons: the fruits cannot really grow in the jars because there is no real refreshed air and no space so most if not all will become 'aborts'. Which are mini shrooms that have stopped growing. You need to be alert for those because they can start rotting after that and ruin the rest. Having aborts on the side and bottom of your colonized substrate is a common problem for this same reason, even with birthed cakes or layed trays.
When you see 'pinning' meaning very tiny mushrooms that start to form like match heads only smaller... thats the sign for you to birth the cake. With bird seed I would instead just make sure that every kernel is white colonized and add 3 extra days for consolidation, then open it up.
You can opt for dunking and rolling with cakes, dunking is putting a colonized cake in a pan or container of water and submerging it - then setting it in the fridge for a day for it to soak up water. After that the rolling means literally rolling your cakes in vermiculite to make it stick to the wet sides. Then that serves as a layer (like a casing layer) as well, to protect from contamination and regulate water. You can mist the vermiculite with a water spray, but should not apply water to the mycelium directly or else it can rot. Even if not, an excess of water will make the mycelium stop growing locally and even retreat away from the patches of water.
So: 95-100% air humidity YES, but liquid water directly touching the fungus NO. With air humidity the water is dissolved in the air, makes all the difference.
By the way here is a picture of aborts or advanced stage pinning inside the jar:
Aluminum foil is not casing. Casing means a top layer of a soil material mix that has very little nutrients but can contain and give off lots of water. As a water reservoir the mushrooms can draw from that and become bigger. Another function of the casing is to keep contaminants from falling directly onto the mycelium and attacking it for food. With casing, they fall on that and since there are not many nutrients they cannot really grow there. Your mycelium will form a very loose fuzzy blanket through the casing, looking a bit like clouds. I guess this is a hyphae system that only serves as something like plumbing for the water absorption.
So the aluminum foil is not like casing at all, aluminum foil would only be a cover. I used aluminum covers in the time when I had just crumbled my cakes into trays and put a casing layer on it of like half an inch to three quarters. I punched little air holes in the aluminum, and periodically checked to see if the fuzz would cover the casing and start looking ready to pin, then apply a light signal.
What you can do is let bird seed colonize, preferably shaking them loose from each other periodically but not too often because every time you do it the mycelium needs time to reconsolidate. Then when all is colonized and relatively loose and still granular, you can use (again sterilized!!) trays for example those cheap aluminum low barbecue/oven trays. Pay attention not to fill them up, leave 1 1/2 inches above the rim or something.
Then cover the colonized birdseed with casing. A good casing material is something like a mix of coco coir + vermiculite or sphagnum moss + vermiculite, either of which is sterilized and made wet with sterile water by using something like a sterilized plant sprayer. That way you can make it wet without reaching a point where its soaking. Soaking is not good! THAT is what casing is, a layer of fuzzy stuff. Google those things like coco coir, vermiculite and sphagnum moss if you don't know it. And check the Shroomery for gods sake there are thousands of descriptions of it and pictures. I have told you so many times before to put in some own energy and do research there.
Because usually substrate jars are filled too far up so there is very little room for mushrooms to grow. I have seen people growing mushrooms inside the jars themselves but mostly for novelty. Other than that it's just not a very ideal way of working. Bags are not supposed to be filled that heavily, unless your plan with it is to do what is called "spawn to bulk", or lay in trays. You need bags with a filter patch by the way, a special piece in it that allows air exchange. The same goes for jars, you can make that yourself with holes cut in the lids and a piece of tyvek... but I never did that. I just bought filter boxes which are plastic instead of glass jars, and the lids of those boxes have great pre-made filter patches for air exchange.
Pinning can take like a week or two after you have placed it in the tray or put the cake in the fruiting chamber.
B+ is a strain of pretty good growers, and advised for starters and all-round enthousiast. Maybe not extremely special like Penis Envy or Albino strains but they get the job done. I also liked Cambodians as well.
But you shouldn't focus on the variation between growing properties of different Cubensis substrains. Look up lists and descriptions of lots of commonly found substrains and from the ones listed as "easy" to grow, pick one that sounds nice to you.
Something you should realize most of all is that there is not really one superstrain that colonizes fast and agressively and is strong against contamination and pins quickly and grows fast and in abundant numbers and into large sized fruits. You can't have it all. Strains are typically specialized in some of these characteristics but not others. The main difference I would focus on is if you want lots of small mushrooms or only 3 or 4 very large ones, or something in between. And well okay, being known for rapid and strong colonization like lots of substrains from South-America such as the Amazonian / PES amazonian... that's also worth considering.
Other than that, the differences are just really not that big and what result you get from a single specific substrain can vary a lot by the way you grow them. Many differences as portrayed by distributors are for a significant part marketing ploys. Not entirely, but sometimes it can appear as if all these Cubensis substrains are all completely special and different, as different as different species. Well they're not, they are all types of Cubensis. Errr well except for a number of mutants that have been propagated of course.
Please next time you come back with questions show that you have tried searching for answers instead of just immediately asking.
On the bright side, if we continue like this - it's almost like cultivation FAQ or something hehe.
thanks for the pic, my jars with the tampanensis in it is starting to look like it, but I might be mistaking it as contaminated. Half is milky white the other half seem like it's dark red (or blood) in color, could be brown too. Looks like raw chicken blood in the jars. The pic you posted has "growth" in the jar. I thought "growth" in the jar means contamination? Now I know tampanesis is the hardest to work with, but I'll wait to see if what I have going on is contamination or not before I dispose of it. I did follow procedures. I might have taken too long to place it in a casing. I left it hanging in the substrate jars for an addition week, instead of following procedure of just 2 weeks. Oh well...
In your case, with a strain that can produce sclerotia they would probably start producing those. So to be clear: that's truffles like "philosopher's stones". They should be in the dark for that though. Your hydroshroom fruiting chamber apparently has light but as I understand it you let them colonize in the dark which is good.
If you let them colonize for too long the more light there is present the worse it is, because it will take any such bit of light as a signal to start fruiting. Again, if you have a sclerotia producing species apparently the tendency to fruit is lower so less of an issue. You don't want that for a couple of reasons: the fruits cannot really grow in the jars because there is no real refreshed air and no space so most if not all will become 'aborts'. Which are mini shrooms that have stopped growing. You need to be alert for those because they can start rotting after that and ruin the rest. Having aborts on the side and bottom of your colonized substrate is a common problem for this same reason, even with birthed cakes or layed trays.
When you see 'pinning' meaning very tiny mushrooms that start to form like match heads only smaller... thats the sign for you to birth the cake. With bird seed I would instead just make sure that every kernel is white colonized and add 3 extra days for consolidation, then open it up.
You can opt for dunking and rolling with cakes, dunking is putting a colonized cake in a pan or container of water and submerging it - then setting it in the fridge for a day for it to soak up water. After that the rolling means literally rolling your cakes in vermiculite to make it stick to the wet sides. Then that serves as a layer (like a casing layer) as well, to protect from contamination and regulate water. You can mist the vermiculite with a water spray, but should not apply water to the mycelium directly or else it can rot. Even if not, an excess of water will make the mycelium stop growing locally and even retreat away from the patches of water.
So: 95-100% air humidity YES, but liquid water directly touching the fungus NO. With air humidity the water is dissolved in the air, makes all the difference.
By the way here is a picture of aborts or advanced stage pinning inside the jar:
Aluminum foil is not casing. Casing means a top layer of a soil material mix that has very little nutrients but can contain and give off lots of water. As a water reservoir the mushrooms can draw from that and become bigger. Another function of the casing is to keep contaminants from falling directly onto the mycelium and attacking it for food. With casing, they fall on that and since there are not many nutrients they cannot really grow there. Your mycelium will form a very loose fuzzy blanket through the casing, looking a bit like clouds. I guess this is a hyphae system that only serves as something like plumbing for the water absorption.
So the aluminum foil is not like casing at all, aluminum foil would only be a cover. I used aluminum covers in the time when I had just crumbled my cakes into trays and put a casing layer on it of like half an inch to three quarters. I punched little air holes in the aluminum, and periodically checked to see if the fuzz would cover the casing and start looking ready to pin, then apply a light signal.
What you can do is let bird seed colonize, preferably shaking them loose from each other periodically but not too often because every time you do it the mycelium needs time to reconsolidate. Then when all is colonized and relatively loose and still granular, you can use (again sterilized!!) trays for example those cheap aluminum low barbecue/oven trays. Pay attention not to fill them up, leave 1 1/2 inches above the rim or something.
Then cover the colonized birdseed with casing. A good casing material is something like a mix of coco coir + vermiculite or sphagnum moss + vermiculite, either of which is sterilized and made wet with sterile water by using something like a sterilized plant sprayer. That way you can make it wet without reaching a point where its soaking. Soaking is not good! THAT is what casing is, a layer of fuzzy stuff. Google those things like coco coir, vermiculite and sphagnum moss if you don't know it. And check the Shroomery for gods sake there are thousands of descriptions of it and pictures. I have told you so many times before to put in some own energy and do research there.
Because usually substrate jars are filled too far up so there is very little room for mushrooms to grow. I have seen people growing mushrooms inside the jars themselves but mostly for novelty. Other than that it's just not a very ideal way of working. Bags are not supposed to be filled that heavily, unless your plan with it is to do what is called "spawn to bulk", or lay in trays. You need bags with a filter patch by the way, a special piece in it that allows air exchange. The same goes for jars, you can make that yourself with holes cut in the lids and a piece of tyvek... but I never did that. I just bought filter boxes which are plastic instead of glass jars, and the lids of those boxes have great pre-made filter patches for air exchange.
Pinning can take like a week or two after you have placed it in the tray or put the cake in the fruiting chamber.
B+ is a strain of pretty good growers, and advised for starters and all-round enthousiast. Maybe not extremely special like Penis Envy or Albino strains but they get the job done. I also liked Cambodians as well.
But you shouldn't focus on the variation between growing properties of different Cubensis substrains. Look up lists and descriptions of lots of commonly found substrains and from the ones listed as "easy" to grow, pick one that sounds nice to you.
Something you should realize most of all is that there is not really one superstrain that colonizes fast and agressively and is strong against contamination and pins quickly and grows fast and in abundant numbers and into large sized fruits. You can't have it all. Strains are typically specialized in some of these characteristics but not others. The main difference I would focus on is if you want lots of small mushrooms or only 3 or 4 very large ones, or something in between. And well okay, being known for rapid and strong colonization like lots of substrains from South-America such as the Amazonian / PES amazonian... that's also worth considering.
Other than that, the differences are just really not that big and what result you get from a single specific substrain can vary a lot by the way you grow them. Many differences as portrayed by distributors are for a significant part marketing ploys. Not entirely, but sometimes it can appear as if all these Cubensis substrains are all completely special and different, as different as different species. Well they're not, they are all types of Cubensis. Errr well except for a number of mutants that have been propagated of course.
Please next time you come back with questions show that you have tried searching for answers instead of just immediately asking.
On the bright side, if we continue like this - it's almost like cultivation FAQ or something hehe.
If my attempt to cultivate tampanensis fails, I'll try again. I'm still interested in it. I read that it is a good sclerotia, but hard to fruit. Does type of substrate used matter? Does casing matter? The substrate jars I used was similar to the jar pics Solipsis posted (vermiculate-based?). For tampanensis, will zoo manure be a better choice or wild bird seed could work as well as substrate?
I'm getting ready to inject my grow bags with a spore syringe. From what I've read, I need to wash my hands first with antibacterial soap, wear gloves, wipe spore needle with alcohol pads (or cotton ball with alcohol), then as I inject the spore into the grow bags, I need to use a lighter to heat up the needle as I'm injecting the spore. Is this part necessary? The spore I bought from a vendor should be sterile. About the using a lighter to heat the needle as I inject the spore; wouldn't this heat up the spore, and wouldn't this be a bad procedure? Can't heat kill spore? Should I just wash my hands with antibacterial soap and just inject the spore? Is this enough?
Keep me posted. My attempt in growing Tamps almost worked I thought. I used a substrate jar that came with my HydroShroom growing kit (I think it was a PF Tek? Probably vermiculate-based?). I heard rye berry works well with Tamps. I will re-attempt to grow Tamps with it soon. My jars were turning white, half of it, but the rest turned discolored so I threw it all out. How I prepared the spore print might have something to do with the failed attempt. I wish someone sold Tamps on syringes. Do you know of any vendors? I'm interested in growing these, not the mycology part of it yet. It was my first attempt.
Solipsis
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In vitro refers to a different distinction namely an experiment that is not in vivo, in vivo being inside an organism. Unless you were thinking about growing mushrooms inside another organism ( I would admire the ambition), it's just "indoor growing" as in inside-the-house. Just to be informative.
And yes there would be a number of mushrooms that would seem hard to grow in a bag like woodlovers and other more advanced types. They pretty much require to be spawned to wood chips, lowered temperatures, and either cased and/or better yet just put in a patch in the ground outside. Indoor is hard, let alone using a Grow Bag. Depends a little on what you mean by "WON'T", using elaborate techniques advanced growers have pulled off very interesting types of grows to the point of becoming artsy but for mere mortals to just try to put in a bag and wait? No it's just not realistic I'm afraid.
Fantasizing is good, but when they say mushrooms are not that hard to grow they mean when you just stick to standard conditions. Otherwise it becomes quite hard indeed. And if I remember how you handle some procedures I'd mostly say: perfect a way to just get any sort of regular Cubensis using fairly regular methods.
But again: if it's just hypothetical then that is very different from what is realistic for you and me.
what temperature should I set my apartment to for growing shrooms in an apartment setting? It's getting cold out. I read that 70-72 degrees is suitable.
I injected my grow bags with spore syringe already. I stored it next to under my kitchen sink cabinet (it's dark). My apartment's heat is set at 72 degrees. Should I store these grow bags inside my HydroShroom for incubation instead and set its temperature (at what degree?). The HydroShroom came with a thermometer so I can set it's temperature accordingly. Was my procedure of storing it under my kitchen sink cabinet good enough (it simulates darkness and the apartment heat is already set at 72 degrees)?
I'm not even sure if I still have a need for this HydroShroom since I can grow in a bag instead.
I injected my grow bags with spore syringe already. I stored it next to under my kitchen sink cabinet (it's dark). My apartment's heat is set at 72 degrees. Should I store these grow bags inside my HydroShroom for incubation instead and set its temperature (at what degree?). The HydroShroom came with a thermometer so I can set it's temperature accordingly. Was my procedure of storing it under my kitchen sink cabinet good enough (it simulates darkness and the apartment heat is already set at 72 degrees)?
I'm not even sure if I still have a need for this HydroShroom since I can grow in a bag instead.
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Solipsis
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Why? I'd just keep it in the dark for another 3 days or something like that, after you have reached full colonization to help consolidate the mycelium. Perhaps for the last smart bit you could take it into the light to help induce pinning but only if you birth it and keep it that way. Otherwise if you want to crumble to tray and case it I probably wouldn't even wait the 3 days.
Solipsis
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Yes well during the colonization process the fungus is still relatively weak and needs a 'boost' to latch onto a more easily digestible substrate than wood. Fine wood chips, virtually hydrated to pulp that can work... I suppose in nature part of the humus layer is similarly light-digestible but when growing yourself the rule is always to create conditions that are as ideal as you can make them. In this case that means grains or even lighter substrates based on some kind of flour mixture. Then when the mycelium is strong enough to handle actual wood and make another grow spurt you can spawn to such substrate.
I guess you could compare it to a baby. Left on it's own it might find sustenance to grow up but it might become retarded in some ways or it might very well not make it at all. Baby food made in the factory nowadays is easy digestible ideal food, it provides an artificial way that helps it grow up in the best way biologically possible (as far as we can see with out current biological/gastronomic understanding) until it is ready to eat as an adult. And flourish. :D
I guess you could compare it to a baby. Left on it's own it might find sustenance to grow up but it might become retarded in some ways or it might very well not make it at all. Baby food made in the factory nowadays is easy digestible ideal food, it provides an artificial way that helps it grow up in the best way biologically possible (as far as we can see with out current biological/gastronomic understanding) until it is ready to eat as an adult. And flourish. :D
regarding grow chambers, can any medium work (tub, plastic ware, tupperware, a pan, a tray, a carton box? etc.). Must they be sterile or "clean" is good enough? I do have the HydroShroom grow chamber. I need 5 more "grow chambers" since I have 6 different types of psilocybin spores that I'm trying to grow. I've seen pictures of people that fruit their shrooms out of tubs, trays or plastic medium. The HydroShroom is about the size of a shoebox. What have you used and what not to use?
I guess I can fruit in the bag as well so I won't have to spend more money on trays or pans?
Seem like a different growing procedure is written up here: http://www.out-grow.com/index.php?main_page=page&id=5
I guess I can fruit in the bag as well so I won't have to spend more money on trays or pans?
Seem like a different growing procedure is written up here: http://www.out-grow.com/index.php?main_page=page&id=5
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is this substrate mix just perfect for wood lovers?
http://everythingmushrooms.com/grow...ocket-mushroom-grow-bag-w-injection-site-3lb/
I have some hardwood substrate by itself without the grain, so now I need to buy some grains or either the product above seem like the product I was looking for. What do you guys think of it?
http://everythingmushrooms.com/grow...ocket-mushroom-grow-bag-w-injection-site-3lb/
I have some hardwood substrate by itself without the grain, so now I need to buy some grains or either the product above seem like the product I was looking for. What do you guys think of it?