4 ms·
There is a lot of effort in those simple words though. Based on my experience— 1) Sterilize the substrate/polyfill. This is not trivial. I personally use a bag
by bergenty 4y ago
There is a lot of effort in those simple words though. Based on my experience—
1) Sterilize the substrate/polyfill. This is not trivial. I personally use a bag set in a hot water bath with a sous vide heater.
2) Use food grade buckets and make evenly spaced holes in them. Sterilize those buckets.
3) Prepare the buckets by layering substrate and then a layer of the inoculated material. This is not easy, everything needs to be sterile.
4) Manually spray them down every other day.
5) Control the light. Needs to be dark initially during propagation and then some light so the mushrooms know to grow out.
That’s a lot of work. It’s like saying anyone can just set up rsync, what’s the big deal with Dropbox.
That being said, it’s silly to buy these preseeded boxes. It’s going to be super expensive and your harvest is going to be tiny. Much cheaper to just buy the mushrooms at the store.
The only thing this makes sense for is super rare strains of mushrooms (if they can grow morels I’m sold) and of course psilocybin.
- uoaei 4y agoA tip: sous vide is guaranteed not to get hot enough to kill eg Botulinum nor many kinds of spores, because the heat conductor is liquid water. Pressure cooker (modern teks use Instant Pot) will achieve the necessary thermal properties because they produce superheated steam.
- bergenty 4y agoYes but I was using straw and if the temperature is too high it cooks the straw and then it’s useless. I guess it’s a crap shoot hoping there wasn't anaerobic conditions to grow botulism in the straw bale. For all other spores, the mycelium grows fast enough to make sure nothing else can gain a foothold.
- robbiep 4y agoyou do realise that you aren't sterilising anything though right? It's not a crap shoot - it's a unnecessary step since you aren't actually achieving anything. You might as well not do that step
- bergenty 4y agoNonsense, you get everything except things that are heat resistant (like botulism) at 170F.
- FieryTransition 4y agoWhen I make alcohol, I usually use a pasteurization equation to figure out what temp and time will kill pathogens [0]. Depending on what you do, and what you want to kill, your needs might differ, but this is usually good enough. But it is not, as you say, complete sterilization if that is what you meant. As you will notice, temperature can be lower, if you increase the time. [0] https://craftmetrics.ca/blog/2019/pasteurization-part-1-the-science-of-pasteurization.html https://craftmetrics.ca/blog/2019/pasteurization-part-1-the-...
- throwatrip 4y agoYou do NOT want to sterilize straw, or indeed most substrates. You typically only want to pasteurize your substrate, sterilization is what you want for for your grain spawn. There are all kinds of beneficial microorganisms you are killing off if you do, which help to prevent contamimation/re-colonization from wild micro-organisms. Pasteurization of the substrate is intended to kill off competitive fungus and mold spores while leaving these helpful organisms alive. You can get away with sterilizing your grain spawn because you keep it isolated in a sealed jar, away from environmental contaminants, until it is completely colonized by mycelium. But since substrate is exposed to wild molds and other ambient contaminants, it needs it's microbial defense team. Straw is quite a hassle, it contaminates with mold super easily, and is and about 20 years out-of-date to current practice. Yes, the Stamets book calls for it. The Stamets book is old. Any advise older than about ~5 years in this field is questionable at best. Most folk these days use coconut coir (shredded husk) as a substrate. It's cheap, convenient to ship and store, and it is more resistant to contaminant growth. Coir comes in compressed bricks, you rehydrate it in water just off boil, it expands about 10:1, then you psuedo-"pasteurize" by letting it sit in an insulated cooler for 2 or 3 hours until it is below 170F.
- FieryTransition 4y agoNice info, I have used coconut coir for growing vegetables in hydroponics, but it's nice to see that it's usable as a medium for mushrooms. I think I know what my next project is gonna be. Do you add anything to the substrate besides npk? Which I assume you would use, but I don't know enough about mushrooms yet. And if you do, do you control the mushroom stages by different ratios of npk as well? Besides of course, inspecting them as well.
- honkdaddy 4y agoI was about to make the rsync/Dropbox comparison. As someone who has little real interest in mushroom cultivation but a love for charming desk objects, if someone bought me this as a gift I’d love it.
- cheeze 4y agoI always recommend the "uncle bens tek" to people who are starting out. The tl;dr is that you use pre-sterilized uncle bens rice packets that are a buck a pop from the store. Innoculate, forget about them, and then fruit them. Fruiting requires some work for sure, but it's pretty minimal with this tek and you can really neglect it and still see results.
- bergenty 4y agoDo you just inoculate the grain and they fruit in there too? Or do you have to then take the grains and put them in a larger amount of substrate?
- ryanchants 4y agoYou can fruit in bag, but most people do "shoebox tek" where you mix the grains with coco coir in and fruit in plastic tubs.