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.
You can check out the packaging from Ecovative:
https://shop.ecovativedesign.com/collections/packaging
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.
