1st shroom grow, need help
- Thread starter Brizzy
- Start date
Zaehet Strife
Well-Known Member
Well, it seems you are doing PF tek by the sounds of it. What are you using for your substrate? Usually after you birth your cakes and put them into the fruiting chamber you want to sprinkle a layer of verm over the entire surface of the cake, sides and bottom, to provide a protective layer to reduce chances of contamination as well as a keeping moisture in.
Yeah, but you gotta give him a link to a previous discussion where the options were shown, so we don't have to go through it again and again.
Of course, I'm too lazy.
zer0ed
Active Member
You will need
Rubber gloves
Can of Lysol
rubbing alcohol
Face mask if you can find one
Cotton "rounds" (pads) or Cotton balls
a cigarette lighter. (no child safety if you can)
medical tape
permanent marker
A storage bin (to keep jars dark, and from drying out during incubation)
can of red bull (lol)
first set up a table in a small room (ive even used a large cutting board on a bathroom sink before)
close all air vents, turn off all fans
wipe down the surface with alcohol.
spray the shit out of the room with lysol, the entire ceiling, and let it float down.
close the door and let the room sit for 30 min or so.
while that is sitting, go take a good hot shower wash your hair real good.
Brush your teeth, and use mouth wash.
put on the gloves and face mask before re-entering the small room.
set aside a cotton round/ball wet with alcohol. Not too much, you dont want an alcohol pool. or you could accidentally catch your table on fire.
flame the needle of the syringe until its red hot.
then wipe with the alcohol cotton pad to cool.
then inject the cakes with the syringe. you want the needle to be pressed against the glass.
stare at the tip of the needle, and then apply pressure to the plunger.
you want just enough so some liquid comes out, and gets sucked up by the cake, or slightly dribbles down the glass.
if you inject 4 holes per cake, they will colonize twice as fast.
if you inject 2 holes per cake, you can innoculate twice as many cakes.
Do you want time? or yield?
place medical tape over needle holes. and mark with strain, and date.
Place in storage box, and if i were you, i wouldnt check on them for 10 days.
Why? because it is highly unlikely that they will finish in less then 10 days.
and it does no good to look at them.
so in 10 days, you might have really good growth. or you might have contaminates. or you might just be starting to show growth.
but regardless there is nothing you can do to intervene.
once the jars are 100% covered in white, mark them with the date that they finished. and then wait another 7 to 10 days.
there is usually a jar or two that are quicker then the rest. you could wait till the majority catches up. and then wait 7 to 10 days to birth them together.
there is also usually a couple jars that are slow. dont worry about those.
the reason for waiting, is just because the surface gets covered, dosnt mean that the jar is 100% colonized.
It will still take another week or so for the fungi to colonize the core.
if you birth early, the cakes will just sit in the fruiting chamber, and do nothing for 7 to 10 days anyway, while it colonizes the core.
and during that time you are going to be freaking out over why its just not fruiting.
what happens, is once the cake is 100% colonized, the fungi will realize that it is out of food. and freak out.
it will then switch from colonize mode, to fruit mode. in order to save itself. right before this happens you can sometimes even see little fingers poke out of the cake, reaching out, looking for food.
once your cakes are 100% and the 7 to 10 days has passed, pop the cakes out of the jars, and rinse them in the sink with gloved hands.
and then soak under water for 24 hours.
then roll them in dry verm. and place in the fruiting chamber.
the most important part of the fruiting chamber, is misting the walls. trying to get as many water droplets to stick as possible. make it a game.
then monitor the water drops, to determine the humidity level. if most of the droplets are there, your good.
if they start to disapear, then the humidity is dropping, and just like the humidity is leaving the walls, the humidity is also leaving your cakes.
make sure to mist your cakes directly, but dont blast them point blank. you want them moist.
i hate the perlite fruiting chamber. and the shotgun fruiting chamber.
my favorite fruiting chamber, is make two quarter size holes, on two ends of the chamber, and stuff with polyfill pillow stuffing.
make the holes about a quarter inch, to an inch off the floor of the chamber. just enough so that pooled water dosnt leak out.
to this you can add a air pump with a cup of water and air stone.
this will create positive pressure, and push co2 out of the polyfil holes. and bring in fresh o2.
zer0ed
Active Member
heres my tek if you want to read it.
i break it down for people who have never grown before.
https://www.rollitup.org/hallucinatory-substances/345213-how-mushroom-brf-tek.html
i break it down for people who have never grown before.
https://www.rollitup.org/hallucinatory-substances/345213-how-mushroom-brf-tek.html
Brizzy
Active Member
zer0ed - that is some great and very very thorough info. Thank you, thank you for spending the time to type that and share your knowledge. As of now I'm going to inoculate 3 jars and once they're colonized fully, I'm going to crumble them and use the cake method with coco coir. That's what I'm leanin towards anyway
polyarcturus
Well-Known Member
so you did a PF tek?
snickers....
its cool though its a learning experience, i would play with popcorn and straw in the future tho, for 10 bucks you can grow enough mushooms to trip out a herd of elephant.
snickers....
its cool though its a learning experience, i would play with popcorn and straw in the future tho, for 10 bucks you can grow enough mushooms to trip out a herd of elephant.
Brizzy
Active Member
Well I kinda jumped into it and bought the presterilized jars before I even posted on here. But yeah, this is more of a learning experience than anything. I got a 10cc sirenge of golden teachers. As with most products, Ive seen lots of mixed reviews. But even low potency will work for me cause Ive only tried shrooms twice. Now I have a couple qs.
Would it be alright to put about 2ccs in each jar to help them colonize faster? And would 3 cakes crumbled in the casing method with coco be likely to yield an oz? I understand that theres lots that goes into yield. But an oz is my goal
ChesusRice
Well-Known Member
Why not?
it actually works
He's a hater, lol. Canndo knows his mushies better than most I've see though so you have to respect that, but some of us just aren't excited about bulk growing mushrooms, even if the claim is it's easier wtf would a guy like me do with more than a personal stash? Not a dealer and I already give what I don't need away to a couple long time shroom buddies. Besides, I really don't want that much around to be honest. I can barely eat an O a year, wtf do I do with pounds?! lol
For about 25 bucks in spores, vermiculite and brown rice flour, I can fry balls with friends/alone a dozen or more times. Plus those are items we always have around anyway, so I just never bothered with anything else. My shrooms make the floor crawl like any others so I'm more than just content.
The way I do it though is about as ineffciant as you can get as far as yields go, BUT, its maintenance free. For a guy just wanting a couple O's for a rainy day, PF TEk combined with Chronic tek is how I do it. no misting, no fanning, no anything, just fucking sit and wait. Im not really into the whole mushroom growing thing, I just want to fry balls so as little contact with the grow is my preference. Fungus is kinda gross, I wish carrots or something else made you trip balls, lol.
polyarcturus
Well-Known Member
2cc per jar will be fine, speed things up? no it wont really, but your mycleium will be thicker and healthier.
GT low potency? i dont think so, i grew both GT and B+ and both where very potent. it a matter of how you grow as well as the strain, for the most part cubes are cubes and pretty equal in potency.
hmm, i dout youll get an oz of you first tub, but collectively over a month of growing mushrooms an oz is achievable for a first timer, i veiled only 2oz on my recent half assed attempt. but i have more knowledge and better plans now, plus exp so i plan on a lot more with just one flush on my next attempt. then i will be taking a break from it for edibles.
what i would do is make some agar using this tek
http://www.shroomery.org/9427/Grocery-Store-Agar-Tek
inoc 3-4 of them with .5cc then make some liquid culture from those, or fill them with sterilized grain(popcorn wbs rye ect) and do grain to grain transfers. this way you can still do your original plan and while that is in action you can be learing some new things and have more to grow in the future. i would also plan on taking prints from you mushrooms too so read up a little on that too.
and to be honest, its all a little complicated, but its really just a a matter of will power if you can scrape up 20$ you can probably get all the stuff you need to do the things above.
zer0ed
Active Member
I wouldn't crumble the cakes to coir.
I've always been against using cakes as spawn.
The fully colonized cake is already ready, and willing to produce mushrooms for you.
Why smash them, and wait another week or two?
I suppose, it might be ok, in narrow circumstances, if you dont have a pressure cooker, to make more jars.
But ive never liked that idea.
If your gonna do bulk, then do it right. and inoculate some grain to use as spawn.
and if your gonna do cakes. Fruit them!
i consider breaking up cakes, as the worse of both worlds.
also, i wouldnt use 2cc per jar.
It will not make them faster.
It might actually make it slower.
and it could mess up the moisture content of your jars, and fuck them up.
if the jar has the correct moisture content, it dosnt need 2cc.
shoot for .25cc per hole
in my experience in the mushroom world, less, is more.
less spores, creates a more isolated, and aggressive growth. (it dosnt have to fight off the other spores)
and even less nutrients will create faster growth.
that sounds backwards. but the way it goes, if the jar has too much nutrients, you will get "lazy" myc.
the growth will be very slow, because it dosnt "need" to grow. it has all the nutrients it need sitting right where its at.
so it takes its sweet ass time.
but if you make a "lean" cake. the myc will have to stretch out, and reach for the nutrients, and colonize the cake faster.
head over to "shroomtalk.com" it is easily the friendliest mushroom forum. there is no stupid question there. no one will flame you for being new. and we love answering questions.
I've always been against using cakes as spawn.
The fully colonized cake is already ready, and willing to produce mushrooms for you.
Why smash them, and wait another week or two?
I suppose, it might be ok, in narrow circumstances, if you dont have a pressure cooker, to make more jars.
But ive never liked that idea.
If your gonna do bulk, then do it right. and inoculate some grain to use as spawn.
and if your gonna do cakes. Fruit them!
i consider breaking up cakes, as the worse of both worlds.
also, i wouldnt use 2cc per jar.
It will not make them faster.
It might actually make it slower.
and it could mess up the moisture content of your jars, and fuck them up.
if the jar has the correct moisture content, it dosnt need 2cc.
shoot for .25cc per hole
in my experience in the mushroom world, less, is more.
less spores, creates a more isolated, and aggressive growth. (it dosnt have to fight off the other spores)
and even less nutrients will create faster growth.
that sounds backwards. but the way it goes, if the jar has too much nutrients, you will get "lazy" myc.
the growth will be very slow, because it dosnt "need" to grow. it has all the nutrients it need sitting right where its at.
so it takes its sweet ass time.
but if you make a "lean" cake. the myc will have to stretch out, and reach for the nutrients, and colonize the cake faster.
head over to "shroomtalk.com" it is easily the friendliest mushroom forum. there is no stupid question there. no one will flame you for being new. and we love answering questions.
It is a crapshoot on time since you can't shake a PF jar. I've had PF jars take MONTHS, while others took a minimum 3 weeks.
When I noc up grain jars, I can be very sure they will be done in under 10 days, then when I layout the substrate, I can be sure it will be done in a week, consolidated in another, and pinning the next.
The ability to seed all the points during shaking jars and mixing substrate during layout enables a huge jump in speed, and it becomes more contam resistant since it doesn't give contams a chance to get a foothold. Cakes can look great for a month and then contam when a "bad" spot is grown into.
And it can be maintenance free as well. Tubs maintain their own humidity, and you don't HAVE to fan them, at least no more than a cake. Even a worst case "ignore" tub will fruit far better than the amount of cakes that would fill it.
polyarcturus
Well-Known Member
PC should be the first thing you buy before even attempting to grow mushrooms, unless your just doing a straight grow through, even then you should be thinking about it, the PC has so many more uses beyond mycology.
Sigh. Yes there are. Plenty of them. When something has been carefully explained to someone else and then that person continues to argue silly points, and ask questions in support of those silly points, then those questions are STUPID questions.
Not that anything so far here has been, just I wanted to nip that bullshit in the bud.
Also, when given a link to read, and the person asks a question that makes it obvious they have not read the link and have done no research, even when directed, they simply want someone to tell them what to do, step by step, and want it phrased JUST for them, well those are stupid questions too.
zer0ed
Active Member
I was going to admit that you are right. Maybe there is a stupid question.
But instead, i will hold my stance, and say that it was not the question that was stupid.
It was the person who dosn't WANT to learn. and yet still asks questions with fingers in their ears. the question isnt stupid. the person is.
You are confusing stupid with unmotivated.