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LyleChipperson

Registered: 09/29/23
Posts: 61
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So while waiting for the jars to colonize, I did a test run of mixing agar, PC my glass petris (I don't have an oven), setting up the SAB and pouring the agar in the petris. I left the petris in the SAB and will check them tomorrow, maybe try out inoculation from the syringe if it looks ok. It was a bit of a shaky first time, with maybe too much movement going on inside and the dishes felt very slipery and awkward to handle, so that will take some getting used to.
If I am leaving the dishes overnight, should I wrap them first? Or do you just wrap after the inoculation?
What is the preferred way of inoculating agar from a spore syringe? I couldn't find a consensus in the threads I found. Should I add a drop directly on the agar, or drop on a loop and scrape the agar in a z pattern?
Edited by LyleChipperson (10/10/23 03:10 PM)
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LyleChipperson

Registered: 09/29/23
Posts: 61
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Jar update: 1 jar got contaminated, I noticed it beginning 3 days ago and moved it in a different room. The other jars look good, all of them are 90-98% colonized at this point.
I noticed a small bit of growth on some agar plates from the first batch I made so I'm waiting to see what develops. I did a second batch 2 days ago with less agar-agar, as the first batch had some dishes where the agar solidified before it covered the entire bottom of the dish. The second batch had much better coverage so I'll stick to using 3 - 3.5 g of agar per 400 ml water in the future.
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Bluewidow
New Guy



Registered: 10/09/23
Posts: 53
Last seen: 28 days, 1 hour
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Woo congrats keep it up!
I am in the same boat reading thread after thread, trying to figure out everything it can get a little confusing.
how are you going to fruit the PF Jars?
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LyleChipperson

Registered: 09/29/23
Posts: 61
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Re: First grow GT PF Tek [Re: Bluewidow] 1
#28509220 - 10/18/23 09:38 AM (3 months, 9 days ago) |
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Quote:
Bluewidow said: Woo congrats keep it up!
I am in the same boat reading thread after thread, trying to figure out everything it can get a little confusing.
how are you going to fruit the PF Jars?
I'll be using the water tub tek suggested previously in the thread.
If all goes well and I can get a harvest, I'll make a few spore prints and move on to agar and grain. I'm already inoculating small batches of agar in a SAB to see if my work is clean enough.
Edited by LyleChipperson (10/18/23 09:39 AM)
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Bluewidow
New Guy



Registered: 10/09/23
Posts: 53
Last seen: 28 days, 1 hour
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Quote:
LyleChipperson said:
I'll be using the water tub tek suggested previously in the thread.
If all goes well and I can get a harvest, I'll make a few spore prints and move on to agar and grain. I'm already inoculating small batches of agar in a SAB to see if my work is clean enough.
Great, i am glad you decided on the water-tub. that is what i am planning on doing as well, just waiting for some of my jars to colonize, already lost one to trich . Best of luck to you friend!
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MushroomMommy
Myco N00b


Registered: 08/21/23
Posts: 230
Loc: La Luna
Last seen: 17 minutes, 27 seconds
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Just read through your log/journal and am eager to see how your grow pans out—definitely going to follow this thread.
I’m pleasantly surprised you’re having such success given that you used a spore syringe directly in (as opposed to agar first) and didn’t use a SAB. I hear GT is very forgiving/great for beginners.
I am on my first grow as well and just moved colonized grain to monotub a couple days ago
-------------------- 🅃 🄴 🄰 🄼 🄲 🄻 🄸 🄽 🄶 🅆 🅁 🄰 🄿 ABCD stands for Always Be Collecting Data “I don't know anything about anything, but I know enough about everything to know that you don't know what the fuck you're talking about”
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LyleChipperson

Registered: 09/29/23
Posts: 61
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I moved the jars and petris to a warmer room as the temperatures dropped suddenly the past few days and it's 64 degrees where they were previously.
Quote:
Bluewidow said: Great, i am glad you decided on the water-tub. that is what i am planning on doing as well, just waiting for some of my jars to colonize, already lost one to trich . Best of luck to you friend!
Sorry to hear that. I lost one as well but so far I've been very lucky with how this is going. Good luck with your grow!
Quote:
MushroomMommy said: Just read through your log/journal and am eager to see how your grow pans out—definitely going to follow this thread.
I’m pleasantly surprised you’re having such success given that you used a spore syringe directly in (as opposed to agar first) and didn’t use a SAB. I hear GT is very forgiving/great for beginners.
I am on my first grow as well and just moved colonized grain to monotub a couple days ago
Not only did I use a spore syringe directly with no SAB, I also had to open every jar for inoculation because the holes were too small for the needle... And I didn't pack the upper dry verm layer tight enough in all the jars as I can hear some of it rattle inside when I pick some of them up. Very forgiving so far. Good luck with your grow! I'm already itching to try out colonizing grain.
We are in the final stages of colonization, most jars are 100% covered so in 2-3 days I think I can safely say they will all be consolidating, and middle/end of next week should be time to birth them.
I read in some threads that using hot water to hydrate coir is no longer considered necessary. I have pre-expanded coir in a bag, should I just add cold water to it until I get it to field capacity?
Attaching a photo of some clean jars.
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Kinoko314
Stranger Danger



Registered: 12/16/22
Posts: 1,521
Loc: Colorado
Last seen: 13 days, 19 hours
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Quote:
LyleChipperson said: I read in some threads that using hot water to hydrate coir is no longer considered necessary. I have pre-expanded coir in a bag, should I just add cold water to it until I get it to field capacity?
You can use cold water if you want. I figure you might as well at least use warm water though.
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MushroomMommy
Myco N00b


Registered: 08/21/23
Posts: 230
Loc: La Luna
Last seen: 17 minutes, 27 seconds
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Quote:
I read in some threads that using hot water to hydrate coir is no longer considered necessary. I have pre-expanded coir in a bag, should I just add cold water to it until I get it to field capacity?
The cold vs hot debate is really about how much you trust the source. While it IS technically pre-pasteurized during the compression phase, it’s possible to have gotten contaminates like fly eggs or airborne pathogens during storage. Especially if stored outdoors like you might find in a garden center—less likely if marketed for use in an indoor terrarium/vivarium for a pet. At the point you’re using the coir in the process of mushroom cultivation, you’ve already done so much to avoid contaminates and get to that point, so why risk it when you’re halfway through?
When preparing coir for use in a terrarium or vivarium the hot water recommendation is more about speed than anything else. It will expand quicker using hot water than cold.
If you’ve already got a bag of pre-hydrated and it came from a pet store, as long as it’s a popular item sold at the store and hasn’t been on the shelf for ages, I say go for it and just add distilled water until at field capacity 😊
-------------------- 🅃 🄴 🄰 🄼 🄲 🄻 🄸 🄽 🄶 🅆 🅁 🄰 🄿 ABCD stands for Always Be Collecting Data “I don't know anything about anything, but I know enough about everything to know that you don't know what the fuck you're talking about”
Edited by MushroomMommy (10/19/23 10:44 AM)
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LyleChipperson

Registered: 09/29/23
Posts: 61
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This bag of coir is old and has stayed outside at least for a little while, so I'll use boiled water.
Since it's already expanded I have no idea how much water it would absorb, so I'm thinking of adding a small amount initially and adjust if needed.
My BRF and verm mix was probably underwatered. I recently found some videos on field capacity and water was dripping after light to moderate squeezing. When I did it I was going mostly off of written descriptions of seeing 2-3 drops, so I added water until I had to squeeze very hard for several seconds to produce 1-2 drops of water.
When I found out I was thinking that might lead to trouble, but the jars seem to be doing great so far.
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Kinoko314
Stranger Danger



Registered: 12/16/22
Posts: 1,521
Loc: Colorado
Last seen: 13 days, 19 hours
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FWIW I consider field capacity to be a few drops with a very hard squeeze. I know people's squeezes are different anyway, but it always worked for me.
You can add water to your coir by weight if you have a kitchen scale. It may be a little harder to weigh the bag on it, but maybe it has a weight measurement on the bag and not just a volume. For Eco Earth I use 3.5x the weight of the substrate worth of water. For example, 100g of substrate, 350g of water. For Coco Bliss people use 4.6x. I don't know what your "magic number" will end up being, but probably somewhere in that range.
However you do it, try not to overshoot on the amount of water. It sucks to have to squeeze water out of all of it. It's much easier to add a little at a time until you get there.
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fiddle_head
I'm not the dude, guy



Registered: 08/05/08
Posts: 1,877
Last seen: 2 hours, 52 minutes
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You really need to have the use of an sab, you may have gotten lucky but each experience is different and there are a million+ factors. Spores to grain=bad. open-air inoc: not a good idea for beginners or kind of in general with few exceptions. Felt like I needed to say this. I read your log and think you may have something, just keeps close eye on it. Hoping you get fruit and go to Home Depot get a 104qt or bigger Sterilite for your sab mate. Cheers good to have ya!
The sab is really absolutely indisposable
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LyleChipperson

Registered: 09/29/23
Posts: 61
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Thank you for the tips!
I do have an SAB and I have been using it for the agar work. When I did the PF tek, I had found mostly older guides that didn't mention SABs at all, so I hadn't prepared one at the time.
I'm using glass petris and I noticed a lot of condensation in some of them as they got out of the pressure cooker that still isn't going away. I wonder if leaving them spread out for 1-2 days would help, as the remaining condensation was mostly on the bottom of the stacks of 4-5 dishes. The dishes were wrapped with a single layer of cling film.
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LyleChipperson

Registered: 09/29/23
Posts: 61
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So, I will most likely birth the cakes this weekend. Most of them were fully colonized about a week ago, some had tiny spots left that were colonized over the past few days, so this should give about 6-8 days of consolidation for almost all cakes. One still has a spot that isn't colonized but there has been visible progress in the past days and it should be done by this weekend.

I have several options ahead of me that I haven't decided on yet:
1. Birth all the jars this weekend. or 2. Leave the last jar for an additional week and then put it in with the others.
and
3. Split the jars and put half in a shoebox and leave half to fruit from the cakes or 4. Put them all in the water tub tek and don't bother with testing a shoebox. They are smaller jars (225 ml) so even with a small box I'll probably have to use at least half of them.
I'm also trying to take good pictures of my agar plates so I can get some feedback and so far they suck. I have some growth, but a lot of the plates got contaminated or still aren't developed at all. I probably should have used a narrower strip of cling film as it's too much and it hides details from the photos, but with the glass petris the tops move around a lot and I'm not sure if a narrower strip would stay attached. The second batch of plates had a lot of moisture on the inside after pressure cooking and I think that caused some contamination from the water droplets on the agar. Adding some sample photos. I would appreciate tips on how to set up the plates so photos come out detailed.


Edited by LyleChipperson (10/25/23 11:29 AM)
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LyleChipperson

Registered: 09/29/23
Posts: 61
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I birthed 9 cakes today, left the last one to finish colonizing. Going in the water tub tomorrow.
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LyleChipperson

Registered: 09/29/23
Posts: 61
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The water tub got nice and misty overnight. The coir layer might be thicker than 10mm in some places but it was difficult to get it to stick to some of the cakes, next time I’ll have to add a bit more water and make it slightly stickier.
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LyleChipperson

Registered: 09/29/23
Posts: 61
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~ 30 hours after placing the cakes in the tub and shutting the lid, I can see the first signs of myc growth on the coir.
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LyleChipperson

Registered: 09/29/23
Posts: 61
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3 days in the tub now, the coir is getting colonized but it's going slow. I opened the lid yesterday and put it on backwards to allow some FAE, that seems to have helped things a bit. The added FAE made the lid dry out, but the sides are still covered in condensation and I can see tiny droplets on the long coir strands, so the conditions should be good.
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LyleChipperson

Registered: 09/29/23
Posts: 61
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Progress pic from earlier today After opening the lid I misted 2 days ago and again today
Edited by LyleChipperson (11/05/23 09:44 AM)
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meta_mmxxii

Registered: 08/03/23
Posts: 598
Loc: PNW
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I believe most people that use glass petri's dry sterilize them in the oven to avoid the condensation issue with those. I don't use them so I would not be able to help guide you through the process, but I am sure there is someone in here that can explain.
-------------------- Lots of up-to-date Teks: Trusted Cultivators Teks The most comprehensive explanation of things I have read on the forums: Ultimate Tek Compendium Another very good read for new members: The Hitchhikers Guide 🅃 🄴 🄰 🄼 🄲 🄻 🄸 🄽 🄶 🅆 🅁 🄰 🄿
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