Martha/WBS casings getting deep contamination - Need advice - Mushroom Cultivation

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lemonsong
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Registered: 07/09/12
Posts: 6
Last seen: 14 years, 2 months

Martha/WBS casings getting deep contamination - Need advice

#16536611 - 07/15/12 09:59 PM (14 years, 2 months ago)

tl;dr I need advice on my Martha setup and WBS casings

Hi, I've been lurking for 3 years or so now. Experienced with cakes and WBS/peat/verm monotubs. A year ago I graduated from college and moved to a new city, so I gave a friend all my growing equipment and started fresh with your standard Martha setup: shelves in a plastic tent with slits cut all around, cool mist humidifier in the bottom (timer set to approx 5 minutes on, 20 minutes off), shoe-box size plastic tubs for the casings, and lots of 5000K lights on a 12/12 timer.

However, in 4 grow attempts since moving, I've gotten nothing but deep, prolific contamination on ALL my casings, all cobweb and trich. The setup is in a closet that has no vents or other inlets/outlets other than the door.

For casings, I've been using nothing but WBS with a layer of 50/50 peat/verm and Hi-Yield hydrated lime. I do not pasteurize the casing material at all, and when I put together the casings I don't use any sterile technique and I do it out in the open living room. I let it incubate for 3 days or so, put them in the chamber to fruit, and fairly quickly they are overtaken inside-and-out with contaminants. All the way down through the colonized birdseed in some cases, in others just down through the casing material, where it dukes it out with the myc.

In each subsequent attempt, I tried different humidities between 85 and 99, got the casing PH to 8 on the dot, altered casing thickness and density, and I put a fan in the closet (not in the Martha setup but the closet itself) to increase FAE. This last attempt, I put an ultrasonic in the closet, and had the fan gently blow the mist around the casings. I thought tons of humid FAE, a PH of 8, and lower humidity would fix things but nothing changed. I've nuked the closet and Martha with Lysol after every grow. This time I'm going to mist the entire setup with H2O2 and 70% isopropyl.

Right now I've got 12 fully colonized quart jars of WBS and bags of verm/peat/lime. They've actually been 100% colonized for a few weeks now, because I'm hesitant to try fruiting before hashing out some details here.

I owe a lot to magic mushrooms, they tore down the walls I had built around my heart from a childhood full of sadness, made me kinder to those around me, and opened my mind to so many ideas and the pure beauty surrounding us always. Now I grow them to give others the same opportunity. The problem is, I'm a busy young professional, working full-time and putting in 600+ hours of studying a year for credential exams. So if you could keep the following criteria in mind, I would appreciate it a lot: I'd like to only use materials I can preferably find at a Publix, Walmart, Home Depot, etc. I live in a city and specialty materials are hard to find sometimes.

However, my other criteria is that I'd like the most minimalism as possible. The fewer materials I need, the better. I also like to keep the mess to a minimum, as I do have a roommate and want to be considerate.

All that said, if a specialty material or two will make my life all the easier, and you know a way to acquire it in a city, I will do my best to acquire it.

So uh, any ideas on what to do with these quart jars of WBS and my setup? I've been looking around the forums trying to piece together some information, and it seems if I just ordered coir off Amazon, it'd make my life easier? But I'm just not sure how to properly use it, or which type to use, or if it will help with my contamination issues.

Anyways, thank you for reading this! Really I'm just looking for ways to save time and labor here, and get consistent success (i.e. I'll worry about yield and isolating once I've got a fruiting chamber that doesn't kill everything inside). I'm worried that WBS is a bad choice of substrate, that there's something wrong with my Martha setup, or my casing materials need to be nuked, or that the jars are too old, or I'm missing the right materials. I'll spend as much time as I can monitoring this thread.

Extras:

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