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Nanoid said:
Casing is just a way to combine whatever colonized cakes/grains you have into one grow.  It doesn't add much, if any, nutrition/food.  it just gives something for the mycelium to grab onto so you can fruit it as one instead of multiple cakes.

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0therean said:

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Nanoid said:
Casing is just a way to combine whatever colonized cakes/grains you have into one grow.  It doesn't add much, if any, nutrition/food.  it just gives something for the mycelium to grab onto so you can fruit it as one instead of multiple cakes.

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Casing is not a term describing mixing your cakes together without adding anymore substrate and adding a casing layer. Casing just means you added a casing layer. You can case a bulk grow too.

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iFung said:
I recommend this:
http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/12759690

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iFung said:
I dunno man... In all my cakes I've never gotten a flush that good.  I have seen a few pictures of really good cakes which I still don't think quite match up.  Perhaps it is possible to get flushes that good with cakes but IMO it seems much easier and more reliable to do with my tek.  After all, I went from getting ~40g wet on cakes to 70g - 100g wet in a bowl without doing anything crazy or hard or time consuming.

Have you tried it?  Your cakes come out pretty good, perhaps you could do even better in a bowl?

In any event, why knock it?  Different strokes for different folks.  I have found the Cake2Bowl tek to work well for me.  Perhaps it will for others as well.  Just trying to help here...

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You should try a mini-bulk with your bowels.  Instead of using mostly non-nutritious verm, try using nutritious coir + verm.

Using Damion's Elementary coir tek + my mini-coir measurements, you can get whatever desired amount of subb you need.  And undoubtedly it will out-perform just using verm since it gives the myc some more food and nutrients to help give bigger yields.  Plus it's not very hard to do at all.  Basically just add boiling water, wait a few hours, mix in spawn and you are good to go.


In case you want to try it, here is the measurements I came up with using Damion's Elem coir tek. The measurement below will make exactly 1 pint of coir-verm substrate.

20g dry coir
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup verm


I recently started a grow doing this, I spawned four 1/4 pints to 2 pints of coir + verm in a nice small container that gave me about 2.5in of substrate.  After 1.5 days it has already grown a lot.  I am going to check it again tomorrow to see how much further along it is.

This is the growth after one and a half days.


If it is successful, I will have effectively tripled the amount of colonized nutritious substrate to fruit off of.  And no doubt it should provide a heck of a lot better yield than four 1/4 pints could have done (I hope).

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Another myth is that vermiculite is non-nutritious for fungi.  I even bought into that one until a year or two ago, when it became obvious that it's a nice food source for fungi in addition to fluffing up a substrate and holding lots of moisture.

You'll find old posts of mine where I say it has 'no nutes' and other stuff like that.  I now disavow that earlier information and stand corrected.
RR

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efarley said:
Naniod I am doing something very similar but with the addition of Coffee grounds. I would also add Gypsum and crushed oyster shells if I was able to locate ether of them anywhere.

Shea25: 13+ grams dry from 1 cake would be fantastic but from my experience I have gotten about 1/2 that from my cakes. although admittedly I don't have a ton of experience with them but I have found around a 6 gram dry yield to be average and from reading on here that is right in the ball park that most people report from BRF cakes dunked and rolled. So while for you adding the cake to a bulk like coir to get 13+ grams might be a waste of time but for me it would be doubling my yields for an extra half hour investment. Besides I would image if you tried the same you could substantially increase your 13 grams

Personally I wouldn't spawn to pure verm as I want to give my myc. as much nutrition as possible and help it use that energy as efficiently as possible, and spending time colonizing dry verm while not receiving any new nutrients in return for the energy used in the colonization is counter productive especially when compared to a nutritious sub such as Coir that not only adds to the amount of myc but should create healthier better feed myc, and I think everyone can agree that means larger yields of bigger shrooms with more potency.

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efarley said:
Naniod I am doing something very similar but with the addition of Coffee grounds. I would also add Gypsum and crushed oyster shells if I was able to locate ether of them anywhere.

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efarley said:
Yeah I refuse to pay the prices of shipping for anything mushroom related. $10 shipping for a $4 purchase is insane. I can't image a teaspoon of gypsum makes that big of a difference anyways. I'm sure it's worth the $4 investment but at $15 I could be buying a whole world of more useful things including a new strain.

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efarley said:
It's great to know that drywall is gypsum. Now I can acquire some! Thanks!

Have any of you tried any of the calcium supplements with vitamin D? They say they are 100% calcium carbonate so I figure the vitamin D shouldn't hurt anything. Any opinions?

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