Hey shroomin' gurus - your folks' posts have been wicked insightful as I got started in this hobby, and now at a slight impasse, I'm hoping you can help! Included as much detail as I could to help.
TL;DR: have a grow tent to create a humid microclimate. Should I treat it like a martha and fruit my shoeboxes without a lid on, or reduce my RH from the 90's and use a regular dub tub tek?
Extended post:
I live in a high desert climate around 6500ft in the middle of the country, as such, RH is awful and my first grow suffered immensely from it. While I had decent (slow) luck getting going using the all-in-one bag tek (wouldn't recommend), once I took the mycelium out of the bag to fruit in a SFGC, it dried out despite my misting very, very regularly. Eventually I tried dunking in hopes of saving the blocks, figuring, "what the hell?" Experiment 1 went back into the SGFC - after I left it alone while I took a weekend trip, I came home to find ~5 pins (hooray!).
In experiment 2, I took the second block (post dunk) and put it in a ~24qt unmodified tub with a shoebox-type lid with 2" of perlite soaked pretty good, on top of tin foil. Humidity was clearly maintained in this tub, as it had clear signs of condensation on the sides, but FAE isn't as good as on a regular shoebox. After the same weekend trip, it too had ~4 pins, but they weren't developing.
Yesterday, I finally decided humidity being so low is killing my grow, so I invested in a grow tent, along with a humidifier on a timer and a bright 5000k (closest to daylight I could find at the store) lamp overhead. Finally, I've been able to keep RH very high! The SGFC and the other tub went into the tent on racks, and I figured I'd see what happens. After a full 24h in the tent, the block from experiment 1 now has ~25 pins (yay!) that look to be growing well, and experiment 2 has ~5 after i left the lid off (again, thinking "why the eff not at this point").
While these terribly lagging grows (started in late Jan) continued, I inoculated 4 qts of rye with GT and let them go - they colonized beautifully, after which I spawned them to bulk in 6qt shoeboxes. 1:2 spawn to substrate ratio. They've been in a closet for the last week, and they look AWESOME. Definitely ready to fruit soon.
Now the question (finally, eh?) - Originally, I was planning to just do a regular unmodified dub tub tek on the shoeboxes, but now that I've got this beautiful microenvironment, I'd like to take advantage of it. I plan to put the tubs in the grow tent regardless, because of the high RH, but the way I'm running my humidifier, RH varies between 75% (before timer comes on) to 99% (just after timer shuts off), should I just leave the shoe boxes uncovered and treat the tent like a Martha? Or should I go ahead and still dub them?
I do plan on getting a humidity controller soon, but with the Cov-19 bullhonkey, getting a reasonably priced one quickly, even from a hydroponics store, is difficult (thanks, Amazon). So assume I've got the best setup I can get for now.
Sorry for the long post - have searched, read, and watched everything I can about this hobby. Beating my environment into submission has been the single hardest part about being successful! Appreciate y'all in advance
-------------------- ------ Grow 1: All-In-One Bag Tek to SFGC - minor success after stressed mycelium Grow 2: Bod's Unmodified Shoebox Tek w/Auto-Fruiting Tent (Experiment) Grow 3: Shoebox Tek + Auto Tent Upcoming Experiments: Monotub tek, agar cloning
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