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It seems there is alot of confusion out there as to what overlay actually is.
Overlay is caused by a few things: #1 Initiating pinning too late. #2 Improper watering. #3 Humidity is too low. #4 Too much evaporation. #5 CO2 levels remaining too high. #6 Stroma type substrain.
All of these are in our control except for #6
#1 Can be influenced by strain as to when. Also coir users need to initiate sooner.
#2 Is something that only comes from practice and by practice I mean practicing to get it right! Near saturation but not over!!! Also never mist a casing directly! Now what I mean by this is to mist upwards from a distance and let the finest mist fall onto your cakes/casings.
#3 For the majority Perlite and misting will do the trick for the others full-auto kicks ass!!!!!
#4 Means your fanning without misting lightly afterwards. Also improper FAE's either too long in duration (fannings only need be 15-20 seconds in duration at most) or coolmists are not setup properly.
#5 Give adequate FAE's
Summary
There are two basic types of overlay none of which are "dead" as many think. The first type is caused by a stroma type substrain which will continue to veg even under fruiting conditions, nothing can be done except for isolating a different sector from the parent (original) plate.
The second and preventable type of overlay is caused by "us" As stated above all are preventable. Water delivery is as important to mushroom cultivation as are spores. Directly misting myc will mat it down and repeated will lead to a thick mat impervious to water. Coir users need to initiate soon as well as use blends higher in verm and lower in coir.
The first two are #6 overlay, notice how much the first one resembles your standard coir casing layer colonization (last pic), not exactly the same by the way but the circular patterns are similar. Last pic is a coir based casing layer with lots of pins.
I hope this helps those who are misinformed or simply do not know.
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