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OfflineBlue Helix
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Breaking the old spawning habit * 2
    #27072302 - 12/04/20 05:37 PM (3 years, 2 months ago)

Problem statement
So I became interested in monotubs recently as I know a grower that was enthused by it, and who said it was hands down the best way to grow cubes.  And it is good, but I was annoyed by the fact it requires spawn.  I don't making spawn.  It's a big hassle when you are used to just injected fruit-out substrate with LCs as I always have done.  So how to get rid of the annoying spawn?

First step: what the hell is the recipe most are using? 
Well, trying to get it was literally like pulling teeth, but I finally got someone to show me how they spawn the now-famous coco coir vermiculite mix.  I had about 5 people tell that the recipe was "1 part spawn" to "1 part coco coir" to "1 part vermiculite" per volume.  They kept throwing around this 1:2 ratio, but looking at their spawn jars I could see they were 75 to 80% full whereas the coco coir and vermiculite mix was a full 2 quarts.  Just to be clear 1 does not equal 0.75.  It just doesn't, so your mix is not 1:2 but 0.75:2. 

Who even cares exactly what it is?
Anyway, the reason all this matters is that that if you don't want to spawn, you will have problems with loosey goosey volume-based recipes like that. Why?  Because when you make a bulk sub in a spawn bag, you got one time to get it right (right before you seal the bag), and nothing is hydrated so feel is out the window.  You can't just add stuff after that.

So I had to reverse engineer what a mix of 0.75 parts grain spawn to 1 part coco coir to 1 part vermiculite is in terms of weight (since the ingredients will not be hydrated).  That took a lot of testing for density and such.  So here it is for 10 pounds, which is about what you want for a 60-quart monotub (well, it worked for me but it might a little short for others.  You can increase the recipe by half if you want to be sure and it will still fit in a 21-quart cooker like the AA921):

Quote:

*** Cube Spawn Buster ***
Ingredients (in dry ounces, except water)
30.0 oz rye berries
14.0 oz vermiculite
  10 oz coco coir
108 oz water
TOTAL 162 oz (108/162 or ~66.7% water)




What next?
So right now I am doing a comparison run between the usual spawning coco coir and vermiculite and the LC-to-bulk in the bag techniques.  For me the LC-to-bulk spawn bag is, of course, much easier, but I need to make sure the yields are comparable.  I'll update this thread when I find out, but until then, if you'd like to streamline your growing, use LC-to-bulk and spread it out in a monotub once it's colonized and you open the bag.


Edited by Blue Helix (12/04/20 05:51 PM)


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Invisiblemushhead
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Re: Breaking the old spawning habit [Re: Blue Helix]
    #27072327 - 12/04/20 05:46 PM (3 years, 2 months ago)

:takingnotes:


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OfflineBlue Helix
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Re: Breaking the old spawning habit [Re: mushhead]
    #27072350 - 12/04/20 05:58 PM (3 years, 2 months ago)

PS - I want to add this one more thing: for some reason people's substrate density are more fluffy than what I experienced.  Keep in mind that the monotub full of the recipe above is about 10-pounds @ 66.7% moisture and was about 3 inches deep for me.  That means that one monotube should yield about 3.75 to 7.5 ounces dry (corresponding to 100% to 200% BE at 7% solid fruits).  I had someone tell me that his trays were about 60% that weight at 3".  I don't know how that could be because I tried both spawning and the bulk-to-LC bags and both were way denser than this grower reported.


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InvisibleBuddaking
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Re: Breaking the old spawning habit [Re: Blue Helix]
    #27072442 - 12/04/20 06:51 PM (3 years, 2 months ago)

:popcorn:


--------------------







  AMU Q & A


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OfflineAtria
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Re: Breaking the old spawning habit [Re: Blue Helix]
    #27079346 - 12/08/20 07:27 PM (3 years, 2 months ago)

Blue Helix,

I finally made my account and ended years of lurking here to join in on this thread. I'm so stoked to be in on some current shit that I can tell is gonna completely revolutionize my workflow. I've gotten pretty familiar with your LC-bulk growing style recently and I dig it. Last night I got stuck doing a G2G in a too-short SAB, and I was like I'm so done with grain spawn.

So lemme get this straight, are you pre hydrating your grains like in the old days? Or are you just mixing up the dry ingredients like in a bucket, adding the water (temp??), letting the mix hydrate for a bit, putting it in spawn bags, and PCing?

Is that 108 oz of water leaving it slightly drier to accommodate your 140 cc of LC?

Thanks in advance and many blessings.


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Offlinebw86
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Re: Breaking the old spawning habit [Re: Atria]
    #27079373 - 12/08/20 07:43 PM (3 years, 2 months ago)

hmmm


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OfflineAtria
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Re: Breaking the old spawning habit [Re: Blue Helix]
    #27081048 - 12/09/20 07:14 PM (3 years, 2 months ago)

Nevermind, I believe Pitcher Crab answered my question in your "Notes about LCs thread"

Search function for the win.


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InvisibleJosex
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Re: Breaking the old spawning habit [Re: Atria]
    #27081071 - 12/09/20 07:28 PM (3 years, 2 months ago)

Call me a troll but I don't think grain spawn is annoying or a hassle. On the contrary, it's an easy to prep shakable substrate and a great and quick way to expand mycelium. It's also easy to tell the health of the spawn upon inspection.


Edited by Josex (12/09/20 07:39 PM)


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OfflineAsuraS
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Re: Breaking the old spawning habit [Re: Josex]
    #27081089 - 12/09/20 07:41 PM (3 years, 2 months ago)

:camping:


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Re: Breaking the old spawning habit [Re: Josex]
    #27081103 - 12/09/20 07:49 PM (3 years, 2 months ago)

The reason I like spawn for cubes is because it expands in open air to a simple prep substrate. This maximizes the amount of fruiting colony I can produce given my sterilization capacity.


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InvisibleJosex
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Re: Breaking the old spawning habit [Re: Pastywhyte]
    #27081114 - 12/09/20 07:57 PM (3 years, 2 months ago)

That too, if someone wants to go big, grain spawn allows them to do that easily.
But even if you don't, it still is a great and easy way to grow mushrooms, fast...


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OfflineAtria
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Re: Breaking the old spawning habit [Re: Josex]
    #27081126 - 12/09/20 08:05 PM (3 years, 2 months ago)

Whatup Josex, I've learned alot from you.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not necessarily against spawn by any stretch.

I do, however, see the appeal of colonizing the final fruiting sub in a sealed sterile environment. It eliminates several vectors of contamination, and while I'm pretty confident in my SAB work (when working in the 19" tall SAB that I usually use), it would be cool to eliminate all those extra steps yknow?


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OfflineBlue Helix
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Re: Breaking the old spawning habit [Re: Josex]
    #27081129 - 12/09/20 08:07 PM (3 years, 2 months ago)

Quote:

Josex said:
Call me a troll but I don't think spawn is annoying or a hassle. On the contrary, it's an easy to prep shakable substrate and a great and quick way to expand mycelium. It's also easy to tell the health of the spawn upon inspection.




The reason I say that is multiple.  It's really just a matter of more work.  First, you have to soak the grain overnight and rinse it.  Then you got to heat it up and drain it!  That alone is too much work for me, and even if that is all there was to it, I wouldn't do it.  But it doesn't stop there: if you use quart jars rather than spawn bags, you actually have to load a bunch of jars, sterilize them, and--and this is the absolute worst--add agar wedges to each one.  I hate agar.  I throw agar in the trash as soon as possible in fact.  All my stored cultures are LCs in vacutainers.  Rarely I'll save a slant.

Now I did consider that I could eliminate the agar by using LCs and the tiny little quart jars by using spawn bags (which is what they are for).  And truth be told that is a lot better, but colonization is still broken up into two substrates that are heat-treated.

Let's compare that to lc to bulk:

1) Throw a bunch of weighed stuff in a spawn bag.  Seal it.
2) Sterilize the spawn bag
3) Inject the spawn bag with LC.  Wait for colonization.
4) Spread the substrate out in a mono tub and cover. Wait for harvest.

It's literally half the number of steps, which made me wonder why anyone would have ever used spawning in commercial button operations.  I think there are at least three reasons: (1) commercial operations have to compute power costs in their grows and sterilization of all the bulk substrate would be far more expensive than pasteurization, (2) very large sterilizers are expensive, and (3) spawn generation is often done by a different company entirely than the farming.  And, actually, that's a fair division of labor since spawn generation is actually at least half the work if not more and requires expensive sterilizers.

The elimination of spawn was just one aspect to this.  I also want to see if one or other yields better too.  Elimination of the spawn will not make sense if it yields far worse.  If it's about the same or better, though, then I'd just go for lesser steps which is LC to bulk.

PS - I think to maximize production--if that is your goal--I'd still go with spawn made in spawn bags.  In spawn bags you can easily sterilize 20 to 25 pounds of spawn in a 21-quart pressure cooker (as opposed to 12 quart jars which is about 13 to 14 pounds) and you don't need to mess around with agar wedges.  You just inoculate each spawn bag with an LC.  Also, if you are going for yield, you sure as hell would not use non-nutritive ingredients like coco coir and vermiculite.  You would use manure or compost and spawn about 1/10th the amount here (a few percent is all farms use not the 33% we see here).


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Re: Breaking the old spawning habit [Re: Blue Helix]
    #27081147 - 12/09/20 08:17 PM (3 years, 2 months ago)

If I run 12 bags in my 75x and spawn them each to 14 quarts of coir verm to build a single mono, I’m in essence getting 168 quarts of colony in my 12 tubs from one sterilizer run. I’m not sure how I can get more from it.


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OfflineAtria
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Re: Breaking the old spawning habit [Re: Pastywhyte]
    #27081154 - 12/09/20 08:21 PM (3 years, 2 months ago)

That's true, with LC-bulk, the bottleneck eventually becomes sterilizer capacity when scaled up. But then one would have the sterilization capacity/time that would have gone into spawn making freed up for the bulk subs. Obviously there's pros and cons with any method, but it seems like OP's is less labor-intensive.  :shrug:


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Re: Breaking the old spawning habit [Re: Atria]
    #27081166 - 12/09/20 08:26 PM (3 years, 2 months ago)

I’m making 40 quarts of sub at a time. Takes me the time it takes to get the water hot and perhaps 10 min to bust up the coir bricks and measure out the verm. It’s far less labour intensive IMO than preparing manure or straw.


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Re: Breaking the old spawning habit [Re: Pastywhyte]
    #27081171 - 12/09/20 08:30 PM (3 years, 2 months ago)

Honestly I've never done bags with the 'final' substrate already mixed and sterilized at once but I've done bottles like that and they can take their sweet time to colonize. I know you can break up the colony in the bags but even then I wonder if it could begin to compare to grain spawn as far as speed is concerned.

Yes I know you then have to spawn the colonized grain to a substrate but the air increase will speed things up greatly.


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OfflineBlue Helix
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Re: Breaking the old spawning habit [Re: Pastywhyte]
    #27081177 - 12/09/20 08:34 PM (3 years, 2 months ago)

Quote:

Pastywhyte said:
If I run 12 bags in my 75x and spawn them each to 14 quarts of coir verm to build a single mono, I’m in essence getting 168 quarts of colony in my 12 tubs from one sterilizer run. I’m not sure how I can get more from it.




Well if you are willing to go to compost or manure then things get interesting.  Do you know the spawning rate that button mushroom growers use?  Are you ready for this?  They use 0.5 to 0.75% spawning rate, and there is zero reason you could not use that with cubensis too.  Instead what are we using here?  What 33% or something, right?  The reason we use these super high spawning rates is because coco coir and vermiculite are very poor nutritionally.  In fact the vermiculite has no nutrition at all, and the coco coir is very nutrient poor.  But they hold a lot of water, as much as compost or manure.  I kind of like to think of these mixes as "synthetic manure".  If you are looking for TRUE bulk, then you have to go back to manure or compost.  That's just the facts.  Generally, I don't see people on this site complaining about not getting enough from the monotubs, though.  I mean we are talking about something that is used in the realm of a couple dozen grams fresh (if that), and a single 60-quart monotub which can yield thousands of grams fresh, which is a lot for this purpose.


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OfflineAtria
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Re: Breaking the old spawning habit [Re: Pastywhyte]
    #27081183 - 12/09/20 08:36 PM (3 years, 2 months ago)

No doubt, I don't know shit about manure sub other than it sounds like a pain in the ass. it's not the sub prep where OP's method reduces labor, it's the elimination of the spawn prep. especially if you're comparing spawn vs no spawn given the same bulk sub recipe.


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OfflineBlue Helix
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Re: Breaking the old spawning habit [Re: Atria]
    #27081186 - 12/09/20 08:39 PM (3 years, 2 months ago)

Quote:

Atria said:
No doubt, I don't know shit about manure sub other than it sounds like a pain in the ass. it's not the sub prep where OP's method reduces labor, it's the elimination of the spawn prep. especially if you're comparing spawn vs no spawn given the same bulk sub recipe.




It is kind of a pain.  It also smells like a barn.  That's why I was so excited when I read about this spawned coco coir and verm mix about two months ago.  I actually had not been paying attention to this site all that much for many years, so when I read that, I was immediately interested.  It doesn't seem to work, though, with pan cyans and pan cambos.  I don't know why either.


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