Hello Blue Helix,
I like this post above. It's very informative.
My recent crop was overall successful. Some of the trays had very dense even pinsets, but some were uneven, and a very few produced only a few pins.
Blue Helix said:
1) Proper moisture content of the casing and casing evenness - Putting the casing on as loosely and evenly as possible should go without saying. Moisture content is a little more tricky: do not water to near saturation before the casing incubation. A perfectly watered casing for the super critical casing incubation stage means a casing that feels rather moist. A good way to hit the right moisture content is to remove about 10-15% of the casing material in the dry state before you add water, moisten the rest near saturation, and add the dry back. That will get you in the ball park for casing moisture. I personally can sense it purely by feel when it's just right. Especially if you are using peat moss, you got to be careful about over saturation. Too much water will stifle the mycelium in the casing incubation. You will raise the casing moisture to near saturation prior to the first flush AFTER incubation, not now.
Here is what I did (I am following the items in your post):
1. I made a casing from 60% verm 40% coir and balanced to ph 8 with using oyster shell calcium and hydrated lime. Brought the moisture to the point that a dribble would come out when squeezed firmly.
Blue Helix said:
2) Incubation of the casing in the case of a small tray - In the case of a larger tray, enough heat is generated typically for self-incubation if the room is around the mid-70s, but you should cover the whole thing with a blanket. If you want to make certain, push a temperature probe in the core and make sure it doesn't go above 90F in a thick tray or 86F in a thinner tray.
During incubation it is absolutely critical that the tray not be exposed to excessive light or fresh air. I believe every really good pinset I've had was on a tray covered with some sort of pin-poked cling wrap or a loose-fitting lid. Don't look at the tray on a daily basis either unless you have a deep red bulb (I don't mean just the decorative ones. I mean deep red.). Even with the bulb, I would minimize looking at the tray. If you give the mycelium light and fresh air triggers, it often--not always but often--will stop running the casing layer. Once it stops vegative growth for whatever reason, it will not start again no matter what you do (at least in my experience).
2. It's a weakness of my FC that I don't have a proper antechamber to protect the cultures from exposure to light when I open the door. You mention covering the trays, but my experience with covering the trays is not favorable - I had very slow colonization and contamination when I covered my trays in an earlier crop. Now my method is to have the tops exposed, but covered with a dense and flat layer of pure cow manure that is heavily spawned. The bottoms of the trays are completely open with aluminum window screen inserted (I also use a layer of verm on the bottom too, but it is not fully moistened like the casing layer - but I get a lot of
fruiting on the bottom this way). Anyway, with the tops exposed I get a very dense colonization throughout, but there were a few trays that were an exception and did not colonize so evenly due to excessive drying on the surface, but I think this drying may be due to having too much air circulation in the room.
I like to have a look at the cultures everyday so that I can monitor the substrate temperature carefully, and keep an eye out for any contamination (I get a bit of chaetomium (I think that's what it is . . . ) here and there, but find that catching it early and just picking it out keeps it at bay, and it does not seem to be an issue after the trays are cased). I also just like to look at the mycelial growth.
You mention using a "deep red" bulb. Are you suggesting the use of a dark room bulb? I typically wear an LED head lamp, but I use the white LED. The head lamp I have also has a red LED, but it's not too bright. I have assumed the LEDs don't give light and/or nough of it in the correct color temperature for fruiting, but I have never checked on this.
Blue Helix said:
3) Patch or disrupt mycelium that comes up too fast - patching works well and is popular around these parts. However, I mostly take a fork and just disrupt the early poking mycelium a bit to even out the flush without introducing more casing material like in patching. A general very light scratch 24 to 48 hours before taking the tray out to fruit has proven VERY useful to getting a high density, even pinset in my trays. I almost always lightly scratch my casings like this. A light scratch should be one no further than half way down the casing layer. A deep scratch all the way down to the substrate may be counter productive, and I don't recommend it. Note that patching or disrupting give the mycelium triggers to end vegative growth, so you want to do this only at the very end of the casing incubation or else you might mistakenly stall the casing run.
3. I haven't had a need to patch the coir/verm casing, but I did not give it more than about 12 hours of incubation. The casing was laid to a depth of about 5/8 of an inch. This is the third time I have used a verm/coir casing, and the first time I used it I gave it three days to incubate, and found that it had overlaid the surface. Mycelium really grows quickly through a coir casing! It has occurred to me to let the myscelium
really overlay the coir casing (as it wants to do . . . ) and then scratch as you suggest, give it a day to recover and then initiate. On the other hand I am thinking of switching back to a verm/peat moss casing.
Blue Helix said:
4) Provide proper fruiting conditions - prepinning the first flush that means 95-100% RH with misting to slowly bring the casing to near saturation. Once it's there, stop misting until the flush comes.
4. What I did was to very lightly mist using a pressure spray misters several times a day and maintaining 100% humidity with a mix of fresh and recycled air. My objective was too just maintain the moisture content of the casing, but without disrupting the delicate activity of the pinhead formation. I continued in this mode until I saw that the pins were mostly a quarter-inch tall, and then I switched to a a Dramm seedling nozzle on a garden hose to lay the water on more heavily. All in all this worked pretty well, but it became tricky because I had uneven pinning. I think the source of the uneven pinning was definitely exposure to daylight via opening and closing the FC door. When I put the casing on I saw that the trays closest to the door had significant numbers of pinhead initials already formed. Later I noted that mushrooms formed prematurely in what seemed to be the trajectory of light entering the room, but this caused trouble in all the beds it occurred in because buttons (or "fingerlings" if you will) have different watering requirements versus pins. It is my impression that if developing pins receive too much water, i.e.; anything more than a super light misting, that they develop more rapidly but the mushrooms are smaller.
Blue Helix said:
Final notes:
I cannot over-emphasize the importance of incubating a casing, especially a peat-moss-based one. Without proper incubation of the casing, your pinsets will either be uneven, not very dense, or worse. You'll probably get a dozen mushrooms a square foot or so if you are lucky, but a good first flush pinset should have a hundred pins per square foot or more. Below are two of my trays that had good pinsets.
Results in my room really varied, as I said at the top. I definitely had some dense first flushes with big mushrooms too. Some of the densest flushes were dominated by small mushrooms, hordes of small mushrooms, and personally I do not care for that. I'd like to have very dense flushes of very large mushrooms, but I have not yet found the way to get that result uniformally every time.
After the first flush I find that it is difficult to sustain the proper moisture to get a vibrant second flush. Perhaps this is a nutrition problem, or perhaps it has to do with strain. My current crop has been "Thai", but last time I grew "Palenque" and it gave a better second and third flush than the Thai seems to, but was no match for Thai on the first flush.
Thanks,
Mr.Caterpillar
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