bubbleguts365 said:

I inoculated 3 x 2lb bags of sterilized rye with a multispore syringe. (I know better now)

Now I have two bags that are 95% colonized after shaking, and a third that is about 11 days slower to colonize than the others (sitting at maybe 10%-15% now). All look clean by my eye so far, and I was pretty anal about sanitizing when inoculating

I planned on using Bod's unmodified monotub tek, and just using coir, but I've got variables I didn't anticipate:

1. Is 6lb rye grainspawn too much for a 54qt monotub if I'm prioritizing success over yield? Without opening the bag, I'll have to calculate volume with LxWxH estimates.

2. Should I be assuming when I see "quarts" of grainspawn listed in teks, it's actually 2/3 quart jar based on prevailing practices?

3. How deep is too deep on my substrate/spawn mix before I'd start getting into trouble? 4"?

4. Should I be mixing all three bags in a single monotub considering how much slower the third colonized? Would I be much safer just using the two faster colonizing bags and isolating the third in another tub?

Thanks for any help.

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tbh i would recommend against unmodified monos personally but they may work well in your climate. i use pastywhyte's style monos with just a few strategic holes & they rock.

1. no idea what the lb to quart ratio is lol sorry. but 4-6qt should be plenty for a 54qt. if you wanted you could use a quart jar to measure out volume when spawning, but i'm sure someone here can give you a direct answer

2. yes. we consider that a "myco" quart. it's because the jars need to be shaken, & that's a bitch when they are too full

3. anything over 4" will likely be way too deep. personally i try to keep it between 2.5-3.5" including a top layer. lower sub ratios will speed up colonization a little but you want to make sure there's enough sub for the myc to pull water from

4. don't mix the slower one, very good chance that one is contam'd more than the others. it'll drag down your results. most of us send sketchy spawn to its own tub

Mycodemus said:

Merriam-Webster says mycelium has c as s.

But mycology and mycosis is a hard c. And they all have the same root, myco, which is new Latin, but comes from Greek.

In classical Latin, c is pronounced k. C as pronounced s is a newer pronunciation bc New Latin.

So I’d hazard that you could pronounce “myc” either way, depending on whether you want to sound like Julius Caesar or not (which was originally pronounced Kay-sahr, origin of the words Kaiser and tsar)

The more you know TM

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hell yeah dude, i feel less like an idiot now i didn't connect it until your post but the word "mycology" was definitely what my brain jumped to phonetically when reading "myc." sounds way better & feels better coming out of my mouth with the k rather than s anyways

didn't know that about the latin, nor about caesar. thanks for the education!

johnukguy said:

Bucket Tek is for coir mostly I think and I wouldn't recommend peat moss in general for cubes anyway. Maybe for some exotics.
Coir also doesn't usually need to be pasteurized, though some do do that. There is one TC as I recall who has a Tek on that,
but I can't find the link at the moment. Unless you're doing something that has to have peat moss, there's no benefit to using it over coir for cubes in particular.

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altford78 said:

I feel you. Really, I do. Some people shoot syringes in grain and get flushes, others toil in a SAB for months and get a moldy dick as a reward. This hobby is not fair and sometimes you don't learn shit from your failures. It's just how it is.

do you have any pics of the spawn? You say it's flawless, but what's you definition of flawless? At least if we can see it, we can determine if the contamination is upstream of the coir.

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Nichrome said:

It's good to know how to use tools.

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hazyhorse said:

dude i feel you on a spiritual level. literally the past 2.5 years i’ve been in that same boat, & shit has just gotten worse & worse as i’ve tried to troubleshoot. used to be able to get a canopy & a bit of a second flush before mold, lately haven’t even really been able to harvest much. here’s my journal on it if you wanted to peruse. i tried so many things, really tightened my shit up technique/prep wise, did like 5 straight water agar transfers etc. still nothing. i felt like i was going insane

im not out of the woods yet, but i have reason to believe my last jars were finally clean.

what kind of lids are you using on your grain jars??

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HILLBILLY OUTLAW said:

Nichrome said:

It's good to know how to use tools.

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Nichrome said:

HILLBILLY OUTLAW said:

Nichrome said:

It's good to know how to use tools.

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HILLBILLY OUTLAW said:

Nichrome said:

It's good to know how to use tools.

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That scene is peak sunny for me. You know how little kids will put the same shit on repeat for ever? Yeah, that's me with that scene.

Just fucking pure

altford78 said:

nice journal, following.

I see your jars and it's like I'm looking at my own jars. Except you get fruit, I get mold 100% of the time. I literally have 10 shoeboxes out of 12 with pin mold in various stages of sporulation as we speak. Even if they fruit, its just going to be a mold spore bomb in there.

Here's my journal, let me know if you see anything that you can relate too all help is appreciated. The humor is just a coping mechanism, this shit fucking sucks. https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/28356995/

What do you think made you break through? SFDs instead of unmodified lids?

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thanks dude! the journal feature of this site is so kick ass. i love it

if it makes you feel any better, most of my tubs from this past year of growing look like this:



i just stopped taking pictures at a certain point went from still pulling canopies to now basically having zero usable fruits on my subs. shit has just gotten worse & worse despite me getting "better" at shit. which sucks bc i'm currently in need of a fair bit of mushies. oh well.

just checked out your thread. i was getting PTSD at some of those jars, i've seen that shit too many times. it really sucks when you have jars that look perfect early on but go to shit on the final shake

i can't make any definitive conclusions yet, but the jars i did with the SFDs have colonized significantly faster than my unmodified ones & the tubs i spawned side by side from those jars are at very different points in colonization. the SFD tub is almost at 100% colonization today while the other is maybe breaking 30%. the 50qt i spawned with SFD grains is at like 75% so it's cruisin too. probably just due to more sub than the shoebox has. i haven't gotten a flush yet, so i'm waiting to see how the tubs fruit to start drawing conclusions, but the SFD seem to have made a huge difference if they didn't outright solve my problem. i also noticed the SFD jars don't have those "death star" clumps i can't break up like my other bacterial jars do

conventional shroomery wisdom says unmodified lids work so i never really questioned it, i got the SFDs on a whim. i never really got other contams in my jars, & when i see green i know it was from me being sloppy. they never visibly contam's when uncolonized on the shelf even i shook them & shit. idk if my lids were just warped after a lot of use or something, but even fresh unmodded lids didn't seem to change the results for me. the SFD jars being a full week ahead of my normal colonization speeds & looking healthier was pretty notable

johnukguy said:

Just use straight coir, or coir and verm in that case, same as for the substrate overall. PE is a cube, though it does seem to do better with a casing layer. There's a good writeup on casing for PE in particular here:

Top Layer/Pseudo-casing by p9

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