ihytsuna said:

i want to start growing my own mushrooms that contain psilocybin to treat my mental health. any help on what i jeed is appreciated!

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hidingbush said:

From what I have read people use the boiling water because it breaks the coir down some more, allowing for easier and faster colonization.

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andymc said:

I had nearly the same situation this morning, except worse: some chunks of coir weren't hydrated at all.  This was after a 4.25 ratio.

I first added 1 cup of boiling water, and then 2 more half-cups at intervals (allowing the moisture time to disperse) and stirred things around a bit.  Seems about right now.

[ confession: I did spill a little bit of water last night while carrying it over to the coir bucket (my PC), but it didn't seem like that much ]

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RhyzoPhreak said:

I would double check the accuracy of the scale just to verify that it is accurate. Get a roll of nickles and add one at a time to the scale and make sure it is increasing by exactly 5g with each nickle.

Other than that, when I did my first batch the top seemed to dry also. I then realized that the bottom of the bucket was more saturated than the top so I gave it all a good mix and let it sit for a few more hours and retested it and it was perfect. Not saying this is the issue here but definitely worth checking before adding additional water as it is much easier to add more water than it is to remove it. Keep in mind that you want to be on the dryer side of of field capacity also as over-hydration will lead to slow colonization.

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Phaethon said:

Meh, I don't think you need to boil the water you're adding to bring it up to the hydration level you want. Use cool water and then you can use it pretty much immediately, unless there are whole dry chunks in there that need time to expand.

4.25 L/kg seems pretty low. Even the shitty reptile bedding stuff I used to get would take 4.6 L/kg or so. The hydroponic 5 kg blocks I have now (Hydro Crunch from Amazon...no longer available) can easily take 5 L/kg and still have a little capacity left for a heavy misting after spawning.

Re. additives in the water: chlorine boils away, so no need to worry about that. If your municipality adds chloramine instead, you'll need a special filter to remove it (and you will need that even with an RO unit - the normal filters and the membrane cannot filter chloramine and it's not good for the membrane). Still, in the quantity found in city water, neither of those, nor fluoride, is likely to have any noticeable effect on bulk substrate or even grains. (I use tap water for everything other than agar and LC, and for those the RO is mostly about clarity and consistency since my place has two different water sources at different times of year.)

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