Hi everyone, i just got into mushroom cultivation, and i wanted some advice about a strange orange substance that has appeared in the mycelium that I'm trying to grow. Although the pics might give an immediate clue to solve this supposed issue i reckon i should share the whole story as well.
So 5 weeks ago i bought a grow kit (innervisions' easy grow kit if that matters) and i inoculated the mushbag with psylocibe cubensis var. thai/koh samui's spores, i stored it inside a drawer to avoid any excessive temperature variations. The weather in the last month or so here has been relatively stable and the inside of the drawer was stable at around 20°C for the most part which is colder than the suggested temperature of 28 but since i read it's still acceptable i just thought "wth it'll just take longer" and i have time (maybe too much now that i'm stuck in quarantine). Anyway the growth was pretty slow compared to what my little grow kit manual said, so i started using a heater outside the cabinet for some hours a day which kept the temperature at around 28°C when it was on and at minumum of 24°C even 12h after i turned it off. In this process i noticed the grains were drying out and the rate of growth seemed to have slowed quite a bit, so i decided, being aware of the risks, to inject the bag with some water, i used distilled water and a sterile syringe to which i sterilized the needle with a lighter just like i did for inoculation (the bag has a rubber "injection port" akin to the ones used in medical grade saline solution glass bottles which is further sealed with a sticker on top) this happened maybe 3-4 weeks ago, and the growth continued as usual, but i started using less and less the heater because its a 1000w heater and the power consumption worried me and the mycelium continued to grow just fine. One time i accidentally turned on both of the coils in the heater and the inside of the drawer got to 34.6°C, this was about 2 weeks ago. Since then i used vary sparely the heater, and the temperature oscillated between 20°C and 25°C.
During all this time i checked on the bag multiple times a day, maybe because of impatience, maybe because of curiosity, maybe because it's a project i share with friends that wanted some updates or maybe just because i'm a paranoid.
Now here comes the problem, today i noticed something out of the ordinary, it wasn't like this yesterday, i let the pictures speak for themselves

the colors are reproduced wery well in the pics, especially in the first one.
What is this? I already checked the common contaminants guide and some threads with similar problems but i couldn't identify something like this.
Kindly excuse my verbosity, i'm just worried. Thank you very much in advance, this forum is pure gold and it seemed the right thing to do to post here.
|