My 1st try at growing cubies:
was a half-assed job. Had no canning jars or a pressure cooker. Used thick glass cake pans that these little cakes used to come in, and "sterilized" them with steam. They were filled with popcorn that had been soaked overnight, boiled, soaked, and then boiled again before "sterilization." Since there were no lids, three layers of aluminum foil secured by rubber bands were used.
Had no sterile syringes, so I sterilized some old ones that have been laying around for years. My mom was a nurse and she brought them home to use the needles to pick ingrown hairs from my dad's beard. My sporeprint was a gift from a shroomery member.
The spores were scraped into a glass with boiled water, and sucked into the syringe. I inoculated them on the floor, on a carpet. Incubated at way over 80 degrees. I didn't have a decent thermometer, but it felt way warmer than what I now know 80 degrees feels like. Colonization in about 2 weeks, but during colonization the whole incubator was moved to a different house (by car) twice.
The corn was cased with coir that had been expanded with boiling water. Other than a rag soaked in peroxide, there was no sterilization here. Again, done in the open air. The coir ended up being too moist, so excess water was dumped from the pans.
I don't remember the details from here, but I do know that I had a huge yield, and two flushes each from two pans. The third contammed and was thrown out.
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I've done three tries since then. I have a pressure cooker. I have canning jars. I have clean, sterile syringes. I have spore prints both taken from the shrooms grown above, and from other shroomery members. I have peroxide, Lysol, isopropanol. I have a glovebox.
But no shrooms. Two of these times, the corn simply contammed. The third, nothing grew on it. Nothing at all.
WTF
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