Hello all.
Questions at end of long ass description, hopefully you'll find it entertaining.
No pictures, sorry, my FOAF can't provide.
Goal: Fastest turnaround for enough for personal use. And never do it again. Possibly move on to other species for restaurant / boutique sale once enough experience is gained.
And when reading this, please keep in mind my FOAF is VERY happy with his progress, he just would like to tweak it a bit.
My FOAF is trying his second grow. A couple of years ago he mail ordered a bag with spores, and got a bit, but quickly failed due to overgrowth and he gave up.
This time around he STUDIED. He read Stamet's, and Roger Rabbit's compilations, as well as a bunch of really cool academic papers. He oggled pin porn, and payed attention to FAE and went off the DEEP end on the cleanliness side.
He is in month 2 of the project. He's got a walkin closet, 6 feet wide and 12 feet deep. He covered the walls, ceiling, and floor with tarps and 6 mil plastic. He split it into 3 sections, with plastic walls (translucent, not see through), and cut zippered triangular doors into them.
He learned what kind of duct tape is scrubbable and what peels when you spray it.
1st section is dedicated to prep/cleanup before entering 2nd section. Essentially it is an airlock.
The middle section of the closet is split between a clear glove wall (sections of lucite for best visibility) and tubs filled with grain jars (he sits on them while facing the gloves). The space behind the glove wall has a 2 level table big enough unload 2 pressure cookers and to handle about 10 quarts jars of grain to grain transfers.
According to one visitor (a nurse), she said it looks like an ICU premie baby unit.
He allocated the back for plastic covered shelves. They are filled with a variety of perlite filled shotgun tubs, with a bunch 6500 degree 9 watt CFL bulbs. He pumps HEPA filtered air from the air conditioned adjoining room. He has a bunch of vaporizers at his disposal, but doesn't need them, the perlite (and misting sprays) keeps the humidity around 90-95%, and almost everyone seems happy with that.
He doesn't pretend the fruiting area is sterile, and used pasteurized substrate and casing, not sterilized.
The tubs in the tubs where initially from multi-spore needles.
He nocced up about 80 BRF jars (4 and 8 oz) (on the dry side, using a bunch of different lid types, real filter disks as well as simple tyvek and home created port/breather lids, it was an adventure) jars with 15 (or so) different strains from 2 vendors using different needle types.
He bought a LOT of jars. 4/8 oz for germinate, then pint and quart for rye spawn. The pints are for fridge storage (or an occasional jar grow), the quarts get layed out in the next stage. The 4 ozs jar colonize fastest, which allows for quicker next stage grain prep. And he's got a real tupperware collection going. His wife says it seems to be a problem, every time he comes home he has another bag of tubs to try.
He's really bad at labeling. He found out that almost nothing writes on glass (or stays), even when it is the industrial/lab marker. So he's got a lot of mystery strains. He got pretty good at identifying mycelium characteristics.
He HATES trying to deal with tape while wearing gloves.
He learned a lot about needle control. Initially 10ML knocced up 3 jars before it ran out. He can do 10 jars now with it, 4 shots per jar, running down the glass at an angle.
He did this over the course of a month to make sure his pressure cookers were working, as well as the rest of his procedure.
He lost 5 out of 20 jars in the 2nd noc run, using a glove box. The glove box did not allow for flaming (poor design, he learned). Other than that, he lost 3 more (seemed to be a single needle issue) of the next batch. He finished the glove wall. And then lost no more.
Oh, he learned that Oust is far better than Lysol for the general air environment, but Lysol is better for surface. Combine that with hospital wipes, bleach spray, alternating h2o2 and vineger, and 90 percent alcohol spray, he doubts much survives. He goes through gloves and masks like crazy.
He even wore a moon suit (industrial protective, not tyvek, or at least no air flow tyvek). He sweated LOT. Mistake. He learned.
He tracked down rye grain from the health food store. They looked at him funny when he bought it all.
He wandered garden centers, got his gypsum and lime and perlite and vermiculite and peat moss. He got lots. As well as bricks of coir from the hydro store, and bags of it from the pet store.
Oh, lots of wood. Birch dowels, aspen shavings, a variety of BBQ smoking woods, etc. He knows that Pan side of the world wants wood.
Lots of labware too. He was wandering, and stumbled into a labware manufacturing facility. The guys blowing the glass were happy to package of a bunch of jars, beakers, boxes of small tubes, and connectors, for about 1/3 the price he'd ever seen before.
The agar prep was a large order of stuff online. He got both already prepared and sterilized, plus all the pieces to make a bunch of different agars himself. He figured he'd see what the pros did, and if his mix grew as well.
He hasn't done any of the agar work yet, but it is almost time. He'll clone some of the choice fruits.
He focuses on fast agressive colonizers, heavy rhizo, early pinners. He created at least 3 BRF jars from each strain, and many more when he got better. When at least 3 of a strain colonized, he'd wait a week, and then store 1 in the fridge, birth/dunk/roll one, and for the better growers, he'd create 2-10 pint/quart jars of grain.
Of all the different species, about 50% were worthless, ie: while most grew, they didn't grow fast enough or didn't want to fruit. If he had more time, they may all be wonderful, but for him, the most important lesson learned is try as many species as possible, and focus on the best performers. If he had only tried a few of the slower ones, he would have given up for good.
Of course, he followed Roger Rabbit's rye grain recipe.
When choosing the mycelium for the grain, he'd try to isolate a single section of an early pin. He's able to create 3 grain jars from a very small pin. After creating enough grain jars (he'd run out of jars before running out of mycelium), he'd dump the source jar into the grain for a very fast growing noc up.
In the earlier cakes, he'd smush it down and do a 60/40 verm/coir+gypsum substrate, and then case with 50/50/5/1 verm/peat/gypsum/lime, with occasional coffee added.
When the jars were done (10 days is all most need, 2 shakes at 20 and 40 percent), he'd lay them out with the 60/40 mix, then case with 50/50 when colonized. In most cases it only took a couple of days for each step.
He kept the casing at a minimum. He did NOT light block on side and bottom. He likes to see the pins forming, and does not mind pulling them out occasionally from the side or bottom. He really likes flipping a substrate when the bottom is 100% pinned and nothing had shown on the top.
He found they grew SO fast (as compared to the shmushed cakes) that there was no reason to keep the cakes. The grain outgrew it and fruited before the cakes, with much better pinsets and ultimate sizes.
Different mycelium has different growth characterstics. Most partially colonised the casing layer and pinned, but a couple of them ate through it and totally consumed it. And now are sitting there, totalled overgrown, laughing at him, refusing to pin.
He's out of room and wants to know what to do with it. Ignore it? Give it away? Bury it in the woods?
Throw some other semi or non nutritious layer on? He doesn't mind just tossing it, there are so many fruiting containers that there is not a lot of point in wasting time on it, but if there is any recommendation, he's all ears.
Phew. That's enough typing for now.
So anyway, thanks for reading this far, and please let me know what to pass along.
|