frenzylock said:

This is my first time dabbling with the hobby, does this all look normal? Should I be concerned about that one pin already forming in jar 2? Also concerned about them all being ready at the same time

It's been almost 3 weeks @ 68-75 F.

A lot of mistakes were made but I'm still learning. Any advice or insight would be helpful.

Jar 1


Jar 2 - Front


Jar 2 - Back


Jar 3 - Front


Jar 3 - Back

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The prepinning points to a potential contam (although with those tall jars theyre known to start pinning early w or w/o contams)
Personally seeing that this is ur first go and you likely dont have anything else going right now if I were you id still fruit those.
(Before reading this advice, i am new. Trust a trusted cultivator over anything i say here) If i were you Id birth the one thats pinning and rub/cut off any uncolonized BRF and put it in your SGFC (id suggest building a small one since u only have a couple cakes) and try to let the others pull thru. it can take 4 or 5 weeks for full colonization from MSS so its not too weird for them not to be colonized yet.
If youre really trying to get fruits I think youll get enough for a trip or two out of those still but it prolly wont be anything fantastic.
These were early pinners, every jar. They all went green after the first flush thou

Mateja said:

You need to give us more info than that for us to be able to help you effectively
How did you make your substrates and how did you inoculate those, which methods did you use? You say you made lots of mistakes and I'm curious about that as well. Anyway, not being even 3 weeks since inoculation is still kind of early to expect full colonization (generally speaking) how did you sterilize the jars?

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frenzylock said:

Hey,

thanks for the input.


I'm not to concerned with the amount produced, I will probably use whatever ends up coming from this to take spore prints with and maybe a cup of tea.

I'll probably take your advice and make a small sgc for that early-pinned cake and birth that bad boy in a quarantined area.

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frenzylock said:

I'll probably take your advice and make a small sgc for that early-pinned cake and birth that bad boy in a quarantined area.

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But first you should probably check out the Water Tub before you decide to start building something that probably won't take your breath away anyway.. Just sayin..
https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/26601054

Mateja said:

I have two Prestos and I occasionally use both to steam sterilize BRF cakes at times its because I have difficulties gaining pressure both vessels are worn out and leaking but sometimes I steam sterilize simply cause it's easier and works as efficiently.

frenzylock said:

I'll probably take your advice and make a small sgc for that early-pinned cake and birth that bad boy in a quarantined area.

---

But first you should probably check out the Water Tub before you decide to start building something that probably won't take your breath away anyway.. Just sayin..
https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/26601054

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hazyhorse said:

i think grains are just easier to scale up. you only have to pressure cook a few quart jars vs pressure cooking 30 half pints. it’s a lot more work to inoculate BRF jars & you can’t use agar wedges (unless there’s BRF prep methods that aren’t PF tek w the verm layer)

BRF gets results for sure tho

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frenzylock said:

I'll probably take your advice and make a small sgc for that early-pinned cake and birth that bad boy in a quarantined area.

---

But first you should probably check out the Water Tub before you decide to start building something that probably won't take your breath away anyway.. Just sayin..
https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/26601054

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Awesome tip man, many thanks. You saved the life of some plastic today. I'll put the drill away.

Ashtray161 said:

Mateja said:

I have two Prestos and I occasionally use both to steam sterilize BRF cakes at times its because I have difficulties gaining pressure both vessels are worn out and leaking but sometimes I steam sterilize simply cause it's easier and works as efficiently.

frenzylock said:

I'll probably take your advice and make a small sgc for that early-pinned cake and birth that bad boy in a quarantined area.

---

But first you should probably check out the Water Tub before you decide to start building something that probably won't take your breath away anyway.. Just sayin..
https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/26601054

---

Do you do BRF cakes for clones or is this the main way you cultivate? just curious. I really like BRF and have considered doing both those and grain but it seems like most ppl dont fk w BRF once theyve gone grain

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I started growing kits in 2011, then in 2016 I joined the forum and at first I had like only a couple of cake grows before I 'transitioned' to grain lol. Still to this day I have very varied results with grain and success rate is sporadic and partially its because of this inconsistency that I at times do larges batches of cakes, up to 80 of them (mostly I do 1/2 pint Oatmeal-coir cakes cause it cheaper and easier to come by) inoculated with LC or LI and fruited inside several 35L tubs with about 15 cakes in every tub. Consistently almost all of my cakes result in a full healthy flush and if you do the math real quick 80 cakes X 6g dry per cake on average leaves me with 480g dried, which is a pound of shrooms and that's the first flush only, the following flushes any given cake no matter how few/many flushes they generally tend to produce when combined roughly as much as the first flush so quick math again Im left with a kilo of dried fruits with a method that isn't necessarily considered viable for bulk growing but my dehydrator is sometimes running for weeks without switching it off and while I only grow cakes so yeah I disagree a little about cakes not being suitable option for acquiring lots of shrooms fast I've mostly grown clones so far but honestly I don't see lots of difference between multistrain cultures and clones one clone even if we'll isolated will display more variance based on environmental conditions such as sub size, type and method of cultivation more so than you will notice variance between MS fruits in the same environment if that makes sense?

Ashtray161 said:

I actually planned on knocking up 12 BRF jars that i forgot i ordered a while back w some LC I made and just tested on agar. Seems clean

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Do it! I'm warning you tho, seeing them fruit in Water Tubs might make you into a sucker for growing cakes too
Also I should add that testing LC for mold on agar is effective tho testing for bacteria on solid media's like agar is not regarded to be reliable enough due to bacterias inability to spread on solids or even on semi solids like the standard 2%agar density and that's why 'Motility Agar' is made in micro biology labs to test for growth. It's the same agar only with much softer 'pucks' that are made of up to 0.5%Agar but even on this very bacteria friendly media you're still left with a huge number of non-motile types of bacillus that won't be able to sustain growth on that media and will require a broth, like a standard LC media that we make mixing water with ~0.2% LME. And I guess here's another thread worth checking out IMO https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/27007467 it shows you basically that detecting bacteria in LC's is way simpler and more straightforward than detecting it on agar.


I'm doing even more experiments right now regarding how mold and bacteria view the world around them, the more I understand their point of view the easier it becomes to manipulate them and their environment conditions. No liquid media ever goes 'slightly bacterial' as you might sometimes read, but bacteria will in all cases either rip through a liquid media start to finish within a handful of days or it will not make its presence known at all. (I'm no expert in anything by all means I'm experimenting and learning as I go) but at this point a few PDF files have been downloaded and read about these Germs) and so far I can confirm that what I'm reading in published peer reviewd science papers about bacteria many times contradicts the general consensus on random drug forum, so who would have guessed that microbiology professors could know even more about microbes than a bunch of magic mushroom cultivators online right?

tiptrippy said:

Also you can exponentially expand your colonized grain to a hundred quarts very quickly with grain to grain transfers.

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Yes technically that is the idea if everything goes as planned. A hundred quarts of this, a hundred quarts of that.. Personally I don't feel confident to commit to 100 jars of g2g since the few times I've tried it it has backfired substantially, but I'll try more in the future for sure, I believe a flow hood is excellent for this kind of work. I might also mention that a colonized 1/2 pint cake inside a blender with two cups of water added and mixed thoroughly can inoculate more grain jars than a qt of grain and you're looking at record colonization times between 3-6 days usually from inoculation to fully colonized and consolidated grain jars. I haven't had consistent results with this and have tried it only a few times.


@frenzylock I'm glad you're not spreading plastic waste and you don't need a drill for home cultivation anyway if you ask me gl

Mateja said:

Ashtray161 said:

Mateja said:

I have two Prestos and I occasionally use both to steam sterilize BRF cakes at times its because I have difficulties gaining pressure both vessels are worn out and leaking but sometimes I steam sterilize simply cause it's easier and works as efficiently.

frenzylock said:

I'll probably take your advice and make a small sgc for that early-pinned cake and birth that bad boy in a quarantined area.

---

But first you should probably check out the Water Tub before you decide to start building something that probably won't take your breath away anyway.. Just sayin..
https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/26601054

---

Do you do BRF cakes for clones or is this the main way you cultivate? just curious. I really like BRF and have considered doing both those and grain but it seems like most ppl dont fk w BRF once theyve gone grain

---

I started growing kits in 2011, then in 2016 I joined the forum and at first I had like only a couple of cake grows before I 'transitioned' to grain lol. Still to this day I have very varied results with grain and success rate is sporadic and partially its because of this inconsistency that I at times do larges batches of cakes, up to 80 of them (mostly I do 1/2 pint Oatmeal-coir cakes cause it cheaper and easier to come by) inoculated with LC or LI and fruited inside several 35L tubs with about 15 cakes in every tub. Consistently almost all of my cakes result in a full healthy flush and if you do the math real quick 80 cakes X 6g dry per cake on average leaves me with 480g dried, which is a pound of shrooms and that's the first flush only, the following flushes any given cake no matter how few/many flushes they generally tend to produce when combined roughly as much as the first flush so quick math again Im left with a kilo of dried fruits with a method that isn't necessarily considered viable for bulk growing but my dehydrator is sometimes running for weeks without switching it off and while I only grow cakes so yeah I disagree a little about cakes not being suitable option for acquiring lots of shrooms fast I've mostly grown clones so far but honestly I don't see lots of difference between multistrain cultures and clones one clone even if we'll isolated will display more variance based on environmental conditions such as sub size, type and method of cultivation more so than you will notice variance between MS fruits in the same environment if that makes sense?

Ashtray161 said:

I actually planned on knocking up 12 BRF jars that i forgot i ordered a while back w some LC I made and just tested on agar. Seems clean

---

Do it! I'm warning you tho, seeing them fruit in Water Tubs might make you into a sucker for growing cakes too
Also I should add that testing LC for mold on agar is effective tho testing for bacteria on solid media's like agar is not regarded to be reliable enough due to bacterias inability to spread on solids or even on semi solids like the standard 2%agar density and that's why 'Motility Agar' is made in micro biology labs to test for growth. It's the same agar only with much softer 'pucks' that are made of up to 0.5%Agar but even on this very bacteria friendly media you're still left with a huge number of non-motile types of bacillus that won't be able to sustain growth on that media and will require a broth, like a standard LC media that we make mixing water with ~0.2% LME. And I guess here's another thread worth checking out IMO https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/27007467 it shows you basically that detecting bacteria in LC's is way simpler and more straightforward than detecting it on agar.


I'm doing even more experiments right now regarding how mold and bacteria view the world around them, the more I understand their point of view the easier it becomes to manipulate them and their environment conditions. No liquid media ever goes 'slightly bacterial' as you might sometimes read, but bacteria will in all cases either rip through a liquid media start to finish within a handful of days or it will not make its presence known at all. (I'm no expert in anything by all means I'm experimenting and learning as I go) but at this point a few PDF files have been downloaded and read about these Germs) and so far I can confirm that what I'm reading in published peer reviewd science papers about bacteria many times contradicts the general consensus on random drug forum, so who would have guessed that microbiology professors could know even more about microbes than a bunch of magic mushroom cultivators online right?

---