ingredients:
- 30 Cups Shredded Horse Manure
- 16 Cups Vermiculite
- 14 Cups Coco Coir
- 12 Cups Wild Bird Seed
- 4 Cups Organic Worm Castings
- 4 Cups Garden Gypsum
- 2 Cups Spent Coffee Grinds
- 3 Tablespoons Kelp Meal
- 4 Tablespoons Vegetable Oil
- Used to use hydrated lime, but changed mind
- Water, add a gallon at first and then squeeze test. Add more in small increments as needed.
Makes 4 spawn bags (82 cups dry)
Take a sample, hydrate and then test pH after a few hours if you want to know what it's at. You can bring it it down with more coffee or up by adding some hydrated lime. 5.5-6.5 is fine. I wouldn't worry if it is a little over 6.5 though. If you follow the directions you shouldn't have to worry about ph. I t is a hassle to test, then wait hours for it to readjust, etc.
Since there is so much stuff in this recipe, and some of it in very small quantities, it is important to mix everything very well. I suggest mixing every time after you add a new ingredient and then mixing the crap out of it (actually, leave that in, it's important) after everything is in there. I think that it is important to keep the batch this size or smaller, because if you quadrupled the recipe and mixed it all up, you probably wouldn't have an even distribution of ingredients.
Water content is critical, so keep adding a little at a time until it gets so that a light squeeze causes a few drops and a hard squeeze causes a small stream. If you add too much water, add some more vermiculite and horse poo to soak it up.
This is to be loaded into spawn bags and sterilized in a PC. See related article for instructions on that. It could be pasteurized too if you wanna do it that way (leave the birdseed out if you want to spawn grain to it), but I suggest sterilizing and inoculating with LC because there will be much smaller chance of contamination and pasteurization can be tricky to get right. 3.5 hours at 15psi (or just under to keep the rocker weight from letting all your steam out and drying out he PC) is a good sterilization time.
I suggest inoculating with 40-240cc's of LC per bag. If you feel your bags are too wet or dry you might wanna use less or more LC respectively to adjust water content. Using more will grow faster, but using less will still work and it will be less effort and stretch your LC batch further. Faster colonization of bags may be linked to initial yield size and pinsets. Experimenting with isolate LC's applied in varying mls per bag would be the way to find out. Have a good sample size though.
Potency will be very high with this formula.
Yields vary but are generally large. Dunk and fruit till it's producing miniscule amounts or contams.
****Note: The intended method is for mushrooms to be grown inside the bags. That means you don't have to mess with humidity or grow chambers, just lop off the tops of the bags when it's time to harvest. You can still crumble them and put in a tub and case and grow in a fruiting chamber if you really want to, but if you wanna save a lot of hassle don't bother. I can't say that any minor benefits are worth the extra effort to do that.
After each flush put them back in bags and just roll the top over a couple times and use some tapes to keep them like that. Gotta keep humidity up. Fanning out and then humidifying with a pump mister periodically after the first flush is a step that may improve further flush sizes. Experiment to see what works for you.
Another idea is to birth to a FC like cakes or bulk tubs/trays. Could potentially get larger flushes than a monotub if stuffing a monotub of same size full of these. Their shape would give a greater surface area inside and more landscape for mushroom growth. Haven't tried it myself.
-MasFina
