Principles of mushroom growing for beginners - Mushroom Cultivation

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Pastywhyte
Say hello to my little friend

Registered: 09/15/12
Posts: 37,843
Loc: Canada

Principles of mushroom growing for beginners

52
#24084128 - 02/12/17 09:27 AM (7 years, 2 months ago)

Mushroom cultivation is a hobby that is varied and has a wide range of facets. There are numerous species, some are edible, some medicinal, some are ornamental and some are psychedelic. But they are all fungi and the all share the same basic needs. When we embark on our cultivation journey it's hard to keep the bigger picture in mind when we are bombarded with teks and species details.

In this writeup the teks and methods I will be discussing are going to be focused on the cultivation of Psilocybe cubensis. While many of the principles are the same for many species, there may be small differences especially regarding fruiting conditions. With that being said many of these methods will work with other species without any alterations, others may require small adjustments.

Basic life cycle

The first thing we all should be aware of is the basic life cycle of the organism.

The above diagram illustrates how the mushroom spores spread, germinate into monokarotic hyphae, mate, colonize media and then form a mushroom which is the reproductive phase. The monokarotic stage is something we know happens but has little effect on us or the grow. A monokaryon cannot fruit on its own. It needs to mate and mating happens long before we can even see it has occurred. To get only a single spore to germinate is a rare thing in fact people often try to just germinate one with great difficulty sometimes.

The dykarotic stage is where the spores have mated and have formed dykarotic strains. A strain in mycology is a pairing of genetically compatible hyphae (a strain is not B+ or Golden teacher at best those are varieties or lineages). These strains are capable of forming a fruit and will work together with other strains (multiple genetics fruiting in concert is often called a multispore grow) if they are present or can often fruit on their own as an isolate. These strains will form a colony and look to consume all available food to gain the energy and resources needed to reproduce.

In nature mushrooms occupy a niche environment which gives them an opportunity to grow and get ahead of competition. The abundance of fresh air and lack of suitable competition in that particular environment means that they will have no problem expanding and growing in the presence of competition. But indoors is another story. Contamination has the edge indoors and we need to set the stage for success ourselves.

When cultivating indoors I look at the whole thing as a series of steps. Spore germination > expansion > fruiting.

Spore germination

Before you can colonize anything we need to germinate spores. This is simple enough. Spores need to be introduced to a food source (media) and have water present. If the spores are viable they will germinate, mate and grow into a colony.

When we germinate spores we need to have a plan for how we want this to end up. A simple grow like PF tek or cake grows requires minimal expansion and is going to be forgiving of some small amounts of contamination with less risk of losing an extraordinary amount of material. Bulk grows will be less forgiving and as the colony gets expanded any contamination will also expand. This will lead to excessive loss if it is not caught. A bulk grow is one where we take a high nutrient media usually grain, and expand that colony to a lower nutrient media that is high in water. Because of this spores are not ideal for inoculating grain and if you plan to use spores to start and expand grain, it's best to use as little as possible. You might be asking why someone would do the extra work involved in a bulk grow. The reason is that you can expand the colony much faster and utilize a larger substrate with a larger water supply which results in larger yields. But the simplest and fastest way from spores to fruit is with brf cakes.

The best way to germinate spores and create a colony to be expanded later is agar. The 2D surface allows us to verify clean growth and transfer away from anything nasty. Everything you need to know about agar.

Expanding the colony

In order to produce mushrooms and reproduce, once the spores germinate and the monokaryons mate into dykarotic mycelium, the new colony needs to expand. Through expansion it gathers water, nutrient resources, and builds up more hyphae which ultimately become the mushrooms themselves. This is called expansion.

Expanding the colony is one of the most important aspects of cultivation. If done cleanly and in a timely fashion the culture is vigorous and will fruit to the best of is potential. If it is not clean or loses vigor from sitting around or being stressed from high temperatures it will often fruit poorly or even contaminate.

There are many ways to expand a colony. The 2 most notable differences are in what media you are expanding to. A cake grow on Brown rice flour and verm in half pint jars is minimal expansion. Just enough to see a crop. However when we colonize grain we usually want to then expand it to more grain to then spawn to a low or medium nutrient bulk media. This helps achieve a larger yield compared to pf tek as the scale is greatly increased. The bulk provides the colony with a water source and some nutrition. Since most of the nutrition is coming from the grain the water retention aspect is most important. Expanding grain or to grain is critical to produce enough spawn for larger grows. It's also a lot less forgiving and must be done with perfect sterile methods. We use either a still air box (SAB) or a laminar flow hood to create a workspace that allows us to perform sterile work. Open air work or other ill conceived ideas like oven inoculation are almost guaranteed to contam. People who claim otherwise are lying or got lucky once. They never seem to have any pics of their success.

Ways to expand to grain:

Agar wedge. An agar wedge is a perfect way to inoculate any media. Because you can see if th wedge is clean, you can then rule out the inoculate source as the vector for any contamination. Agar wedges can typically only inoculate a single vessel per wedge so are usually used to start individual grain jars called masters. These masters will then be used to inoculate more grain. To inoculate a master with agar you need to introduce a colonized wedge into a jar of sterilized grain. You can use multiple wedges or a bigger sized wedge to inoculate a single jar to increase the inoculation power speeding colonization.

One of my favorite methods of agar inoculation

https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/22601023

Grain 2 Grain. A grain to grain expansion is where you take a single grain jar (master) and pour it into several jars of grain. Many people expand like this by a factor of ten. 1 quart is expanded to 10 quarts. This can result in a big expansion very quickly. Done 3 times you can turn a single grain jar into 1000 in a few weeks. That will be a lot more than anyone will need at the hobby level. If you want to stretch the grain further you can but it will take longer to colonize the recipient jars and it's more difficult to do in limited work space like an SAB. A solution for the small space of a SAB is to use smaller grain masters. A pint master will inoculate 5 quarts in the same speed a quart will expand to 10 quarts. But it's easier to deal with fewer jars in the SAB so starting with pints is a lot easier for most people.

Pint masters & receiving jars

Liquid culture or LC. This one is either your best friend or your biggest nightmare. Liquid culture packs a huge amount of potential expansion into a tiny space. A quart of liquid culture is enough to do 100's of spawn jars. But if there is any contamination in the liquid culture it will destroy 100's of spawn jars instead. Because of this it's critical to use only a clean agar wedge to start a liquid culture. All liquid cultures should be tested with a drop or two on an agar plate to ensure its clean. Using spores to start a LC is a very risky game. Here is the method I like to do LC.

https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/23740857

LI or liquid inoculate. Very similar to liquid culture, LI is where you take colonized media and introduce water. The media is often agitated or broken up to strip the mycelium and suspend it in the water. LI has the advantage of not needing time to colonize but it is still prone to similar vectors as LC and care needs to be used when working with it. A good link for making LI;

https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/22833314

In order to colonize grain you need to choose a grain to work with. Most grains are fairly close in performance but some have more inoculation points others have easier prep. Most people work with what is cheap and still easy enough to work with. Many grains used are:

Wild Bird Seed (WBS)

Rye often called rye berries

Wheat (is almost identical prep to rye)

Oats

Millet (prep is like WBS)

You may hear people champion popcorn. It can be used but understand that it's considered the worst spawn by most accomplished cultivators for good reason. It has the largest grain size which gives it less inoculation power during your spawn run and it has less nutrition for your mushrooms. It is also very prone to bacteria and often needs longer sterilization cycles to keep bacteria at bay. It also has the highest price. Buy your grain as cheaply as you can so you won't be tempted to salvage projects that fail.

Spawn run

Expanding colonized grain to bulk media is called a spawn run and is more forgiving. The grain media by this point should be 100% colonized and offer no way for environmental contams to get ahead. Bulk media are often poor food sources for contams as they are mostly a water source in the grow. Some types of bulk media have more available nutrition for contamination to set in and need to be pasteurized. Pasteurization will leave some beneficial bacteria to protect the substrate and keep mold spores from germinating while the mushrooms colonize it.

Examples of bulk media that must be properly pasteurized;

Any kind of manure (cow, horse, sheep, etc)
Straw
Coffee (coffee is risky, mold loves it)
Worm castings
Chicken manure

The last 3 I mentioned are used as nitrogen boosters. Do not exceed 10% of substrate volume with nitrogen rich media, it will make the substrate hot. Many manures will be muddy and should be mixed with materials that can hold water but fluff up the sub like straw or vermiculite. A good method of pasteurization is This one here. Despite the fact he is pasteurizing coir in his writeup, it's principles apply to all pasteurization in our hobby. In fact coir and verm don't even need proper pasteurization as they are contamination resistant and lack significant bacteria populations to begin with.

Because coco coir and vermiculite do not need to be properly pasteurized we can prep them with very easy and forgiving methods. The coir simply needs to be cooked, there is no worry about what temps you hit, hell the hotter the better. They are nearly impossible to mess up and are by far the best way for a newcomer to start bulk. A pretty popular method to treat coir that is fast and easy is Bucket tek.

Some people will suggest coir doesn't have enough nutrition to grow well. But since most of the nutrition comes from the grain and most of the water comes from the bulk, we really don't need a lot of nutrition. We need water. Coir holds lots of water.

Coir verm and 5 quarts spawn

Fruiting

In my opinion fruiting is the easiest part of the whole process. Once we have expanded our colony to the size we intended it becomes time to fruit. Fruiting is where we introduce fresh air and ensure the surface microclimate is maintained. There are a few conditions that need to be met or tropic responses initiated to elicit pinning that are fundamental to fruting. They are;

Full colonization
Fresh Air
Evaporation

Some people say light is a secondary one. I'm not even sure it's that much. I won't say it plays no role but I'm not going to discuss it much here. It helps with fruit development no question, but it's good enough to just have a 6500K bulb on a 12/12 cycle. Be sure it's not in such proximity as to dry out the chamber and call it a day.

Full colonization seems to be the most important for cubensis. I have seen cubes pin with all other triggers absent save full colonization. I however find the term "full colonization" to be a bit problematic for some people to understand. It should be "sufficient consolidation". I feel this for a few reasons. First is that people often see pins before full colonization. This is usually due to the substrate being contaminated too wet or otherwise difficult to colonize. In that scenario the colonized portions will still pin, especially in response to contamination or initiation of other triggers. Ideally however a substrate should colonize fairly evenly and full colonization in that sense is the primary pinning trigger. I have seen 1000's of pins in agar plates and those have nearly 0 FAE (Fresh Air Exchange) or evaporation happening.

Second in my opinion is fresh air. I'm not super convinced that just the introduction of fresh air that switches the state (because of people fruiting at spawning which seems to speed up pin times), I feel more these days that it's just more inclined to pin better if there is O2 in abundance. But either way fresh air becomes super important at this stage if you want to have a good grow.

Evaporation is another reason fresh air is super important. Evaporation of moisture off the surface of th substrate is critical. Since its difficult to have good evaporation without air being exchanged, fresh air is kind of a precursor to evaporation in the first place. While evaporation is important we must keep in mind that if the substrate surface dries out the mycelium dies. It will not pin and you will have a shitty yield. Misting and dialing in the sub will help you maintain the surface conditions.

Keeping conditions dialed in while fruiting is critical. There are loads of ways to achieve this but they are not all appropriate for everyone and their life situation. Some people have loads of time to babysit and check in, others need to leave things for days at a time. The type of substrate also determines appropriate methods for fruiting as well.

Some people have a climate and time to literally fruit their stuff in open air. But for the rest of us the easiest option is to construct a fruiting chamber. Some chambers are better at certain types of substrates others are more maintenance free. The best 3 in my opinion are;

Shotgun fruiting Chamber (SGFC)
Monotub
Greenhouse

Shotgun fruiting chamber

The SGFC is the gold standard for beginners looking to fruit cakes. It's low cost, easy to put together and very simple to operate. It has great fresh air exchange and because of that is superior to things like fishtanks or poor man's pods. A few tips on running a sgfc:

Never mist unless the water from the previous mist is gone.

Don't fan unless you just misted first. Fanning is not to provide FAE, it's too promote evaporation. If you fan without misting first you will dry everything out.

Don't run it in a closet or against walls.

A good link on SGFC use;

https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/20195542

Monotubs

Mini monotub

66 quart monotub

The monotub is easily the most popular way to fruit bulk. It's easy to make, easier to run, requires nearly zero maintenance, can be stacked, the list goes on. To run a mono properly requires enough substrate inside it to cycle the air. This means it is less suitable for cakes unless you fill it right up with them.

Monotubs can be made in a lot of different sizes and shapes. You will probably want to use a clear tote for them for ease of lighting them. While less suitable for species that need lots of FAE, for cubes and some edible species like enoki or ganoderma, monotubs are a great solution for the home hobbiest.

A good link on standard monotubs.

A link on mini monotubs

How I dial in monotubs

These are my Ez dialed in monotubs

The principle is simple. We have a tub with (or without) holes for fresh air to be exchanged. Too much air exchange can dry out the tub leading to poor yields and pinsets. Too little ends up harming the fruit development. We dial in tubs by adjusting the conditions to achieve this balance. There are a few ways to do this.

Put material in or over the holes to create resistance. Adjust material to allow for more or less exchange as needed. People do this with polyfil or other materials. I like micropore tape.

Mist the surface. If you see the tub drying out, a quick mist will help dial that surface and keep the microclimate nice and moist. You ideally want tiny beads to be present at all times.

Casing layers. A casing layer is a layer of non or low nutrition media that we place over the sub. Ideally you want it to bexpand minimally colonized so the mediacan hold the water and provide a microclimate. Casing layers also create a nice surface to encourage pinning. Peat based casing layers are probably the best but need to be pasteurized. I prefer to use lime to pH buffer. Gypsum is also good to stabilize the pH preventing swings as it colonizes. Here is a good writeup on peat.

A tray cased in peat and mini monotub also cased with peat

I like coir casing myself. Just some leftover coir verm from the bucket is great. Lay it on thicker and initiate fruiting when you apply.

Pinning tub with coir casing layer

Greenhouse

For species with high FAE needs a greenhouse is hard to beat. A lot of new people like the idea of a greenhouse because they think automation is less work. But the truth is a greenhouse is a lot of work. It needs to be dialed in, reservoirs filled, timers set, many variables. I would never recommend a greenhouse for cakes or most cube grows to be honest. Before the monotub they were the gold standard to fruiting a lot of bulk. But today they are better used to fruit exotics or gourmet species. Monotubs tend to use the space better as well.

I don't run a greenhouse myself but here is a good link on them.

https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/18322939#18322939

Lighting

This barely even needs discussion. Light is good. It is beneficial to the fungi. They want it. Ideally they want 6500K (but anywhere from 5000-7000 will work). 12/12 cycle seems good. Well lit grows often are nicely developed. No light usually results in weak caps and stringy fruits. Many people may notice faster fruit development in the dark cycle. But they can't have a dark cycle without a light cycle. So just make sure they hace some, no need to go overboard.

Contamination

When we grow mushrooms inside the conditions are now different. There is no special niche for them to get ahead or hold the upper hand against competition. This is where things get difficult for many people.

People often seem to think contamination is a direct battle between the target mushroom and the invading organism. They worry about "contamination resistance." They think of ways to help the mycelium "get ahead". The fact is that this type of thinking is reactionary and incorrect. The mycelium is already pretty contam resistant. As resistant as it can be given its species and position in the food chain. Remember it grows outside amongst loads of contams.

What we need to remember is that contams do not usually attack the mushrooms directly. With the exception of a few species, most contamination is trying to get started on uncolonized material. If the all the available food sources are already held by the mushroom mycelium, fungal spores will have nothing to germinate on. If the spores can't germinate they are harmless.

Once mold mycelium or other contams get a foothold in the uncolonized media they are nearly impossible to to stop at that point. Cutting out molds is very risky because it spread mold mycelium fragments which in some cases can attack the mushroom mycelium directly. The most vulnerable media is the high nutrition grains that we use as spawn.

There are many species of contams and many vectors that they can use to take hold. More than I can talk about here. A good link to learn more about them can be found here.

https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/23130868

Really at the end of the day focus on clean culture work and expansion, proper spawn prep and sterilization, and you will have few contams.

Links and teks

A collection of links and teks on the shroomery that will help in research. These are things I think are useful to know. I will update these periodically.

https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/23651622

https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/21032261#21032261

https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/21922023

Closing thoughts

I have tried to make this as comprehensive as possible but, because the hobby is in motion I will try to add to this as I can. I learn things and change my mind all the time. This is nothing definitive, just my thoughts about some of the basic principles of the hobby. My goal is to update this regularly. It should always be a work in progress.

Extras:

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