My friend told me he had used Coco Fiber, not Coir as a moist bed to lay his PF cakes on, in a pan, sitting in water, on the bottom of a larger plastic bin.
The myc would send out many rhyzos deep into the Coco Fiber layer beneath the PF cake.
These seemed to act like the roots of a typical plant, digging deep into the water soaked Coco Fiber and transporting H2O to the cake above.
After said cakes were finished fruiting my friend emptied the pan of PF cakes, and found that large sections of the Coco Fiber were now connected to the cake, much like the root ball of a pine tree, the underlayment became in a sense, substrate.
His busy schedule did not allow time to clean out the "spent" trays with moist rhyzo laden Coco Fiber, so he peeled away the moist Coco Fiber sticking to the PF cakes and dropped them back into the tray and left them in a stack, in 3 or 4 bins.
After a few days time, he went back to clean out the Coco Fiber and to his amazement, it was absolutely loaded with thousand of tiny aborts, as well as several small fruits.
More than one of the fruits grew from seemingly ridiculously small chunks of Coco Fiber sitting on just the bare metal of the tray.
Even more ridiculous, he had dropped a chunk of this Coco Fiber into his desiccant bin by accident, while harvesting some fruits, and having not removed it, it too grew several decent aborts and one small fruit! Sitting in a drying chamber for 3-4 days!
My friend also reported eating a few small chunks of this abort/rhyzos infested fiber out of pure curiosity and he said the resultant trip was far stronger than he would have expected.
Maybe this is partly a reiteration of the beauty of aborts/very small fruits, but it also opens up an almost, dare I say HYDROPONIC method of providing moisture to PF cakes.
The rhyzos were capable of producing aborts and small fruits with NO NUTRIENTS, save those in the tap water used to moisten the Coco Fiber.
Furthermore, the PF cakes acted like spawn to the Coco Fiber, creating a thin layer of myc/fiber, laden with innumerable aborts as well as several small fruits. Creating a final flush of the highest potency, without any cakes present in the chamber!
Also, spores germinated in the standing water at the bottom of the FC, and the water looks like highly successful LC, again, with no added nutrients.
My friend reports zero contam problems using unsterilized Coco Fiber with a pH range of 5.4 to 6.8, no pH adjustment and moistened with tap water, used in this manner.
In summary, my friend suggests using Coco Fiber as the bottom casing layer, and 50/50+ as the top casing layer.
Simultaneously encouraging rhyzos to "root" for moisture, and pins to reach for the sky!
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