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Stranger Registered: 05/02/22 Posts: 5 Last seen: 2 years, 8 months |
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I've done one grow before, using a kit, and it didn't turn out great. I got something, but the first flush was poor and only covered about 1/3 of the substrate, the second one was worse, I gave up and tossed it out after that. I didn't know why and I assumed it was my fault but after doing research, I now know it was probably contaminated out of the box.
That was many years ago. Now, many years later I've decided to try doing it from scratch, with hopefully a better result. For a tl;dr you can skip everything after this (other than the pics) and go straight to the bottom line, at the bottom. The steps I took are outlined in as much detail as possible to hopefully get some feedback on my methods, but it is a lot to read. The whole process is taking a lot longer than I expected based on what I read but it's colder here than the optimal temperature so that might be why. I started with multispore syringes, made in a SAB with sterilized shot glasses and syringes with sterile water that I boiled for a while before filling the syringes and emptying them 2 times and filling them a third time and then letting it all cool down. 5 syringes were made from 2 small spore prints, and I flame sterilized the needles before putting them in the SAB through the arm holes. Of course I sprayed and wiped down the SAB, my hands and arms with 70% IPA first and kept spraying my hands and arms throughout. I forgot to wear a mask though. I don't expect that would pose a big contamination risk since I wasn't exactly breathing into the arm holes in the SAB and I placed my SAB upside down so I was only breathing onto the bottom of it, but I'll try to remember it next time. I used 2 shot glasses here, which might have been a mistake as I could end up cross contaminating my syringes by putting them into the same shot glass. Didn't really think about it at the time and it wasn't mentioned in the TEKs either. Injected into rye grain in 4 mycobags (0.5 um filter, sealed before PCing, each filled with about 1.6L of boiled rye grains), one 10ml syringe in each bag. This seemed the easiest way to start. Using bags that were already sealed before PCing prevented one possible entry point for contamination. Using multispore syringes was just easier to start with. But in the future, I will be using jars since I will be doing agar and the bags can't be opened and easily resealed after inoculating. As a first timer it's a lot of information to wrap my head around but I tried to follow all the proper procedures with sterile work in a SAB, pressure cooking my grains and the shot glasses I used to make the syringes, spraying everything down with 70% IPA and so on. I mixed and matched information from different TEKs as some went more in depth on certain parts and others went more in depth on other parts. Mostly following Bod's SAB and oat prep teks, Stro's syringe teks, some random pictorial for the spawn bags (which was intended for final fruiting substrate, but the only information I needed from it was the bit about strengthening the injection site with tape, sealing the hole with hot glue after innoculating and the proper way to fill the bags into the PC), Spitball's monotub tek mixed with Frank's "How to dial in your monotubs like a boss" for making and filling the tub, and Damion's Elementary Coir Tek for the bucket method, I initially strained the rye grain for 4 hours, under the top layer it still looked a little moist and the bottom was wet with a bit of slimy liquid, so I put it all in a pot into the fridge, discarding the bottom slimy layer and left it over night and the next day it all looked uniformly relatively dry. After this, i PCed 2 bags at a time for several hours. I think it was 4 hours. I use an Instant Pot as I can't get the Presto here (would have to import) so I pressure cooked for longer than the suggested time in the TEKs, as it doesn't reach as high of a temperature or pressure. Might import a Presto eventually, but will see how into this hobby I get first. I taped the opposite side of the filter patch on the bags with a layer of duct tape followed by a layer of masking tape, to strengthen the injection site, this was done before PC to sterilize the tape too. This worked okay, the tape came loose a bit on a couple of the bags and I had to tape it back down but the adhesive still held and I made sure not to touch the center where I would be injecting the syringe. When injecting the spore solution I first sprayed the entire bag with IPA and flame sterilized the needle, and immediately sealed the hole left by the syringe afterwards with a hot glue gun. I did not do the injection in a SAB however, as the bags are kinda large and my SAB is kinda small, and i figured this would be fine as the bag was still wet with IPA when inoculated with the syringe and the hole was immediately sealed up afterwards, it was all over in a matter of seconds. The bags wouldn't be sterile on the outside anyway as they had been sitting in open air so I felt sterile work was not necessary. These steps were following along with information I read on the forum from someone else who used pre-sealed mycobags but not necessarily from a trusted TEK like most of the other information I am following. I had a 5th bag that I pressure cooked on its own but didn't inoculate, just to see if any contaminations would develop that would indicate my pressure cooking was not good enough, no signs of contamination ever showed up in that bag which made me feel reasonably certain that any contamination that showed up in the other bags would likely be from the spore solution. 1 week after inoculation with spore syringes The first sign of mycelium in one of the bags has showed up: 12 days later (19 days after inoculation) 3 bags are showing good progress but the 4th bag seems to have stalled. I gave them all a mix a few days before in an attempt to speed things up a little and one of the bags never recovered, the mycelium ended up rather wet looking and collapsed and never grew fluff on it again. At this point I assumed a bacterial infection as it didn't smell out of the ordinary, in fact it smelled quite delicious. They looked a little bit wet at this point but I thought I strained the rye enough and it didn't look wet when I filled the bags. No liquid pooling at the bottom though, just a lot of condensation all over. Which could be a sign of bacterial infection from what I read. Not much I could do about that though so I just waited. The 3 "good" bags. One of them seemed to be colonizing a bit slower than the others but I didn't see any obvious cause for concern at this point: The bad bag,looking a bit mushier than the others, you can see the mycelium collapsed after shaking the bag up and never recovered: 3 days later (now 22 days after inoculation) It looks like one of the bags might be just about ready. But I need at least 2 bags to make a tub, and the other bags are still not close. This is when things started to slow down as the second bag wouldn't be ready for a while. A couple patches took forever to colonize but I was advised in the end to push the mycelium away from the bag on the bottom so as to give the mycelium some breathing room and that helped, a few days later it had colonized the two small patches that were left. 12 days later (now 34 days after inoculation) The second bag is looking quite ready. However, I lost another bag in the process, it looked like it stopped colonizing and when I mixed it up to see if I could see any growth afterwards, the grains just turned to mush. I assume it was taken over by wild yeast as it smelled rather lactic (like yogurt, or sour milk) through the filter patch but that's just a guess considering my limited experience. I assumed at this point that the other bag had also suffered the exact same fate although it didn't turn to mush in quite the same way, but it was much earlier on. No matter, I only needed 2 bags to fill a tub, although 3 would've been ideal as 2 bags would put me (at worst) at more like a 1:5-1:6 ratio instead of 1:3-1:4, depending on how much substrate I ended up using. Most people say not to use less than 1:4, but I could see from search results that using less is possible, it just takes longer and increases the risk of any contamination in the spawn taking over. At this point I wanted to fill a tub but I discovered the cheap coco I bought was gardening coco, and had trich added to it, and that I should be using reptile coco instead. I discovered this after already performing the bucket tek and while I was waiting for the coco+verm mix to cool down. So I had to order some and wait for it to arrive, and I tossed out what I had already made. It was the weekend, so I had to wait until over the weekend for my coco to ship. From what I've read here, a lot of people do use gardening coco and as long as properly pasteurized, it should be fine ("coir is coir"), but reading all the horror stories about trich, and considering I was using the bucket tek which isn't exactly proper pasteurization as you aren't controlling the temperature, I didn't want to take any risks with my first grow. But the reptile coir I got isn't ideal either, as it's made of large chunks of coco. I think that in the future, it should be fine to use the gardening coir and the boiling water poured into the bucket will probably kill any trich, as when I wrapped the bucket in a towel it stayed HOT for hours, mixing it with my (gloved) hands around 1.5 hours after pouring it in the bucket there was steam rising and I had to be careful not to burn myself. I assume the temperature would have been high enough to easily kill trich. I did measure the temperature with a probe, don't remember what it said though, but it took several hours to cool down to room temperature and I had to unwrap the blanket a few hours in. 5 days later (now 39 days total after inoculation) I had my new coir(+ verm) cooling down in the bucket, and it was time to fill a tub. You can probably tell the chunks of coco here are quite large. It's all chunks like this, and some hairy strands, not powdery like the gardening stuff. The coco chunks feel very hollow and also didn't absorb water very well, so I had to add a bunch of extra verm to adjust the water content to where only a few drops of water comes out when I squeeze it relatively hard (ended up being 3-12 drops depending on which handful of coir I grabbed but while cooling down I assume the water content would even out more, I didn't think to check again once it was fully cooled down though) I had about 3.2L of spawn, which I was aiming to add to about 11-12L of substrate, which I estimated would give me around 4 inches of depth in the 45L tub I was using (without really doing any measurements of the volume in the tub to make sure these figures were right), at least not more than 4 inches, probably a bit less, but as I had to add a bunch of extra verm to get the moisture content right, I ended up with about 14.5L of substrate which left me with a less than ideal ratio between spawn and substrate but not too far off from where I was hoping to be. The substrate also ended up a bit thicker than 4 inches as a result, but again, not too far off from where I wanted to be. I poured most of the substrate in, added the spawn, mixed it well, packed it down (not too hard) and added the rest of the substrate on top (which made a thin layer), and packed it down again. All the holes were taped up, and for good measure I covered the tub in a towel to prevent light from shining on it, even though from what I read light doesn't matter much at this point, it just seemed like good practice. While waiting for things to start happening with the tub, I decided to inoculate some agar with a left over spore syringe. I hadn't bought a roll of clingwrap to cut up yet so I just used the one I already had laying around. The result is maybe not as clean as it would be with a cut up roll, but it should still do the job, I assume. I did everything in a SAB. I was careful when making the plates to only open the lids slightly, immediately pour the agar in and close them up, never moving my hands directly over the plates. I followed bod's tek to make the agar and the plates, so they pretty much immediately solidified, and it didn't take long at all for them to cool down until I felt they were cool enough to inoculate. Around a month after taking this picture there is still no growth on the agar, mycelium or otherwise, maybe the syringe was too old (had been left in the fridge for well over a month since making the syringes originally), maybe I just didn't get enough spores when I swabbed. Maybe the agar was still a little bit warm, but certainly should not have been warm enough to kill spores as it had been around half an hour since pouring the plates which immediately solidified. Not sure. Probably should've inoculated more than 2 dishes, but no matter, I can clone some mycelium samples later on, or wait until I have fresh spores of my own as the spores I had might've been old. Or both, just for good measure, but cloning is easier and quicker. 18 days after spawning Here is the tub 18, 20 and 23 days after spawning, respectively. There is some nice progress visible between each, so things seem to be going well. It's kind of hard to see through all the condensation, I wasn't actually sure if anything was still happening until I compared the pictures. The LED lighting is for fruiting, I turned it on just to take the pictures. I'm aware LED lighting isn't ideal for mushrooms, but they are cold white and I figure they're better than nothing, I already bought them before I found out that LED lights aren't ideal. 31 days/1 month after spawning the tub Took the lid off to get a better look. I was advised at this point by someone I know that I should set the tub in fruiting conditions, even though it wasn't fully colonized, as it might take a long time or never fully colonize. My best guess is that the chunky coir is probably to blame here. So I removed the tape, packed the bottom holes as tightly as possible with polyfill and the top holes as loosely as possible. Set it in the middle of the floor and pointed a fan blowing above the tub, but not directly on it. 5-6 days after setting the tub to fruiting I started seeing pins, no bigger than peppercorns but unmistakably shrooms. Exciting! I don't have a picture of it, but there wasn't much to see yet anyway. Someone I know suggested at this point that it looked like there was too much condensation on the surface of the substrate which indicated not enough FAE and I should increase the fan speed or remove some of the polyfill. I increased the fan speed at this point to max, I'm only using a small fan with off, low and high settings, which obviously doesn't blow as much air as a bigger fan. 9 days after setting the tub to fruiting Things are definitely getting exciting. I removed some polyfill from the bottom holes at this point following the advice from my friend from a few days earlier. I wasn't seeing the evaporation lines going down from the top holes indicating good FAE that one of the TEKs mentioned. I also misted the surface, as there weren't that many beads of liquid on the surface anymore and one of the TEKs suggest this is important to promote pinning. Looks like I'm getting a small first flush, all the clusters are concentrated around the center. Probably because the tub wasn't fully colonized. But that should mean my second and third flushes will be bigger (assuming all goes well), right? The total yield capacity should still be the same. So it might not be a bad thing. Or do you guys think the pinset is still developing at this point? I don't really know, but it looks to me like the shrooms are well enough developed that they're past the point of just being pins. One thing I will say, is that even if the LED lights aren't ideal for mushrooms, they sure make for some nice pictures. Bottom line Each step of the process has taken a lot longer than I expected. Initial colonization in the grain took 39 days, colonization of the tub took a month and still wasn't finished. Part of that is probably due to the low temperatures (around 21-22C rather than the ideal 24-27C), part of it is probably due to the chunky coir. I was nervous at multiple points that growth had stalled or I thought I might be seeing contamination but it was probably just my imagination. 5 days from fruiting conditions to seeing pins is pretty decent though. I think the first flush is guaranteed at this point, so I'm less worried about contamination. I will keep updating this thread with more pictures and info as things progress. Next time I will obviously be using agar instead of spore syringes, losing 2 out of 4 bags was far from ideal and it could've been worse. But it seemed the easiest way to get started, and I was already rather overwhelmed by all the information in the TEKs I was following, adding more to that might just increase the risk of making mistakes. I'd love some feedback on the process and the pictures up to this point. What I'm doing right, what I'm doing wrong, anything I might have overlooked. Edited by Psionicent (05/02/22 08:49 AM)
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Never.Trust.A.Prankster Registered: 01/07/17 Posts: 8,169 Loc: Shakedown St. |
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![]() Pics all look bacterial which slows things down. Clean spawn goes a long way. I fruit and flower under led so...
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Smoke 1 Registered: 06/08/21 Posts: 1,775 Loc: Florida Last seen: 21 days, 1 hour |
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If you have a syringe there is really only one good option and that is to put it to use with the updated Pf tek.
Once you have clean jars then you can mix four of them with coir and make a Shoebox. Syringes have bacteria and mold in them especially is you made it yourself(no offense) most of us don't have a lab. I certainly don't. Pf tek works with this because there is no shaking involved so the mycelium has a chance to take hold before other funky shit. The bacteria will usually stay localized and get out competed usually. Spawn that shit and get you a few mushrooms but don't expect much. There are a lot of thick white areas as well as it being wet as hell. All signs of bacteria. Good luck!
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Stranger Registered: 05/02/22 Posts: 5 Last seen: 2 years, 8 months |
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Quote: I figured someone would say this as every first grow thread I've seen has had someone saying it looks bacterial, it seems to always happen with MSS. What makes it look bacterial to you, though? I've never seen it explained in any of those threads and the pictures don't look notably different to my untrained eyes than pictures of known good spawn from multispore. Just curious so I can identify it in the future. Bacterial contamination often seems to be the hardest to spot. Quote: I am aware, I knew this before I started the grow too, still decided to go with spore syringes just for simplicity's sake since it was my first time, but it will be all agar from now on. The intention was always to move on to agar after my first grow, unless things went perfectly with MSS (which I wasn't expecting them to), losing half my bags to contamination just solidified that thought further. I've heard many times that PF Tek is the recommended method for beginners and harder to mess up, my friend told me this too, monotubs are just far more appealing to me for a few different reasons, but mainly I just think they're cooler. Love seeing the pictures of big even pinsets and huge flushes that people get from monotubs and I hope to get there too, even if it will take some practice. Switching to PF Tek seems like a step backwards to me. I'd rather go through the learning process to learn how to do monotubs right. Might eventually pick up a flow hood too. Thanks for the information on spotting bacterial contamination. I did notice there was unevenness in the density of the mycelium (or whatever it is) in the two bags that colonized fully, quite a while ago actually, some areas looked thicker and whiter and some areas looked more dull off-white and thinner. Thought it might be contamination. And also, something I forgot to mention in the OP is that the spots that colonized first seemed to colonize thicker/fluffier and whiter and the spots that took much longer to colonize (that being the majority of one bag) looked thinner and more off white. I asked a friend who was giving me advice, who said it looked clean and the difference was probably just in how developed the mycelium was in those areas and the grain being squished up against the side of the bag in areas not letting the mycelium fluff out (although he worded it better), he has a lot more experience than I do so I trusted him. Good to get a second opinion though. The difference was a lot less noticeable once they had sat for a few days after fully colonized for the spawn to be fully saturated with mycelium, but it's more noticeable IRL than it is in the pictures and I found it hard to take a picture that showed it to my friend as clearly as I could see the difference with my own eyes. This grow will also give me the opportunity to clone some tissue onto plates for my next attempt. And get some spore prints while I'm at it although I don't expect I'll be needing them any time soon, but they're always good to have around in case I don't have any usable plates left for whatever reason. Cloning from tissue just seems like the easier and more reliable option compared to innoculating agar with spores. I was worried I wouldn't get anything, and I have a few clusters of nice looking and fast growing mushrooms right now, so I'm not disappointed. Since I took that last picture this morning, the two clusters in the center have grown so much that they've merged into a single cluster. These guys sure are fast growers. I feel like I could probably see them grow right in front of my eyes if I had the patience to stare unblinking at them for about an hour. And thanks! Edited by Psionicent (05/02/22 01:25 PM)
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🤮 Rotten-Pins 🍄 Registered: 01/11/22 Posts: 4,738 Loc: in (front of) the hood Last seen: 2 years, 26 days |
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Quote: Bacterial mycelium looks thicker and "creamier" than healthy mycelium, if that makes sense... once you know what you're looking for, it will become a lot easier to spot... there is a sticky thread about spotting contamination, its definitely a good thread to spend some time reading... hope that helps -------------------- Wire-Lock Challenge Grow Log Spore to Grain H2O Agar Plate Pins: Clone & Test at the same time Updated PF Tek H2O tub Signs of contamination Agar Transfers Surface Conditions
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Stranger Registered: 05/02/22 Posts: 5 Last seen: 2 years, 8 months |
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Update a day later, 10 days into fruiting.
![]() I see some new pins popping up since yesterday, which is good. Quote: Makes perfect sense, thanks. I spotted a difference in the mycelium density early on myself, just wasn't sure what it was. Have read the contamination thread several times, it just doesn't go into much detail about how to spot bacterial contamination and none of the pictures looked similar to mine, plenty of information about other types of contaminations though. Edited by Psionicent (05/03/22 12:53 AM)
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Registered: 10/15/21 Posts: 920 Last seen: 3 months, 4 days |
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another indicator of spawn health imo is how quickly they recover after a shake, if they are still stalling after 3 days they go directly into the trashcan
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Stranger Registered: 05/02/22 Posts: 5 Last seen: 2 years, 8 months |
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I was surprised when yesterday evening I noticed that a lot of shrooms had opened up their caps, and a few of the biggest ones had even began to sporulate. I didn't think they were that close, thought I had at least a couple days.
I was going to make some clones too, but since my SAB is now occupied making spore prints, that will have to wait. So I had to rush to harvest them before they made a mess of everything. I picked about half of the mushrooms and cut off the 5 biggest caps to make spore prints. I pulled them out instead of cutting because I was in a rush, this being my first time I didn't know how much time I had before the mushies just unloaded all their spores all over my beautiful harvest. ![]() It worked okay. A lot of mushrooms came out easily enough but the clusters ripped out big chunks of substrate and I lost a whole bunch of pins in the process that were growing on the side of the mushrooms I picked. I found it hard to get good access with the xacto knife, I was holding it in my hand the whole time but ended up pulling all the mushrooms out anyway. I was also worried about cutting into mushrooms right next to the ones I was harvesting as they grew so close together. Maybe a knife specifically made for mushroom picking would work better. Most people seem to prefer cutting rather than pulling, or they do a combination of both. It would be nice to not have a bunch of verm stuck to all the shrooms that I need to brush off so cutting is probably less work overall. Followed "Bod's proper spore printing TEK" for making the spore prints. The second set of prints are currently being made. I picked more mushrooms last night, and again this morning, and there are still some smaller ones left that don't look quite ready to open their caps yet. They just keep coming, feels like the flush is never going to end. Can't complain though. Between the 3 harvests below, I've harvested 668g, and there's another probably 150-200g left that I will likely harvest tonight. Pretty happy with that for a first flush. Edit: The last few shrooms made another 150g so in total 818g for the first flush. There are a couple very small shrooms left not much bigger than pinheads, I left them there not wanting to pick shrooms that young and gave the substrate a good misting to start preparing it for the second flush. Hope that's OK and they won't rot or anything. I'll just pick them in a day or two before I mist again. Fan is still running which should hopefully take care of any excess moisture on the shrooms. Edited by Psionicent (05/04/22 03:19 PM)
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