Hey everyone, I just wanted to post a few things, mostly my ups and downs. I don?t really post very much due to the fact that if I do a search on my problem in the forums then chances are that it will come up. Anyways, I am messaging about the Puerto Rican. I have not had any problem at all with them cultivating in the jars, but mostly once they have been birthed. I had 3 lost due to green mold and they were so puffy they looked not like cakes, but softballs. I have failed to have seen any posts about them getting that out of control. The spores I have are from SporeWorks (which is just down the road from me) my collection includes Puerto Rican, Treasure Coast, Pink Buffalo, and the popular Ecuador spores. I have 12 jars (fully cultivated) of each species and started out with 3 jars PR and 3 jars PINK B. Both species I hear from the forums are pretty hard to get to pin, so we kept the humidity around 95% and using pre soaked perlight (an inch thick) in two Rubbermaid storage containers. I know that with perlight, that misting is not really called for, but to me it seemed to be dry, so we would spray the walls down once a night and fanned it down. The 3 PR cakes like I said puffed up really bad (like softballs) then after one night was green so we threw them away and figured we would case the other bunch since the PINK B?s were looking to be doing good. We took 3 more jars of PR?s and crumbled them up and set them in a case of VERM and potting soil on top, sealed it off for a week, then come back to a pretty damn good looking case and we took off the lid, with perlight under the case, sprayed the sides each night along with the PB cakes that have seemed to made it a week and a half. In the ?SHROOM WIZARD?S GROW GUIDE? it states that once mycelium has reached the top of the case that it was time to remove the lids and let it breathe. Take a look: Using your spray bottle of water, saturate the surface of the soil with 10 to 12 good pumps of water. You want the soil to be fairly wet, but not to the point that your plants will be sitting in still water. The layer on the bottom of your tray (soil/vermiculite) should be able to absorb most overwatering and release it back into the soil as needed. The Mycelium was beautiful for just only 7 days of growing, I thought for sure that we had reached the top of the hill and ready to go down the other side. We took the lids off and sprayed the top surface and set it in a Rubbermaid container with the perlight for humidity. The next morning BOOM, it was covered in GREEN mold. I just about died! We threw away that case and I brought 3 jars of PR, PB, and Ecuador home with me, since I still live at home with my parents, its pretty damn hard to pull off growing mushrooms.. hehe.. and birthed them about 4 days ago and they are starting to look good. I am sorry but I don?t have nothing but a webcam I can take pictures from but I think these will do fine and I hope that it wont be much longer. The remaining 3 cakes of Pink B?s are doing the best of any so far. We have 2 pins growing from the side of only ONE cake that look to have light brown caps forming. The others seem to be getting closer. They have little white looking pins with no caps growing from all angles, so I am unsure yet what that is going to do. I have seen them in lots of pictures and appears not to be contaminated at all. Out past case died in one night, and we were thinking of what the hell happened and I picked up the bag of dirt that we got and started to read, yeah it DID say it was ORGANIC but also on the back in very fine print said ?plant food added?, so I thought that it was our fuck up. We burned that bag of dirt? hehe Our next try is a case as well. Just crumbled up the 3 jars of PR?s and put plain old cow shit on top of that. We have not took the lid off yet to see if its doing anything or not, but I hope nothing happens to these. If nothing is wrong, then does anyone think it could have been us spraying water over top of the casing or would that not do anything as to what we are having problems with? The temp and stuff are fine in the lab cause hell, the cakes are looking OK, I think? As far as my cakes are going, I have all three different species in the same huge as Rubbermaid container that I USED to put clothes in so it does not look obvious and they seem to only be getting fuzzy on ONE side? Would that be due to the fact of the lights in here? Thanks for the ppl that helpz me out? laterz I will post pictures soon.
Edited by AreA (04/07/02 01:50 AM)
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with my horse's cow's best experience the cakes felt like a thick sponge(if that helps). for the one sided fuzzyness his best guess is that there is a difference in temp causing a difference in humidity. sometimes when the terrarium is placed in contact with or close to an outside wall the temperature will transfer to the terrarium causing the difference in temp. my horse's cow had this happen where one side of the terrarium had a lower temp than the other side by a few degrees. the mold could be from not sterelizing the casing layer, i haven't heard of anybody using soil for a casing layer though. most people use a combo of verm and peat or coir or something else. you can spray the casing layer too much, which could have been your problem
-------------------- shit happens, you just have to grow shrooms on it
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