hey PrepHole, i got a, at home mushroom grow kit last week. the kind you cut into the plastic, soak in water, and it grows mushrooms. i got pic related kit. it is growing mushrooms just fine but i want to upscale this. i want to be able to grow pounds and pounds of mushrooms at once. this is my plan; use the colonized substrate that came with the grow kit as a "seed" for a larger grow. i can get a shitload of used coffee grounds for free (gf works at wawa) and i plan on buying hardwood pellets. put the pellets and coffee in a bucket and throw in a fe gallons of boiling water to sterilize the substrate. after its cooled off ill break up the substrate that came in the bag of the grow kit and mix it in with the sterile coffee and sawdust.
has anybody grown mushrooms here? any reason this wouldnt work?
The kits I've used all came with a bag that keeps the humidity in the proper range for them to activate and fruit, that's the biggest hurdle to scaling up...climate and humidity control.
The other thing is that when everything's perfect environmentally for one fungus there's about a gazillion others that like those conditions too and will try to take over if they sense a weakness to be exploited, which they literally do via airborne chemical compounds.
Think of it like securing your wallet vs a warehouse so full of cash that you can smell the ink from outside.
Mo mushrooms, mo problems.
so after sanitizing the container, sterilizing the coffee and sawdust, and washing my hands and work surfaces, short of making a clean room whats the best way to keep things clean?
>short of making a clean room
Thats the thing, there's elements of a clean room that can help but a typical clean room is designed to discourage fungal growing conditions, not make them better.
Supply air filtration and positive ventilation are good to keep unwated spores out, but doing that while maintaining proper humidity can be difficult. Sterilizing materials and tools and hygiene are necessary but the kind of sterile *environment* and related air treatment of something like an operating room or laboratory isn't conducive to fungal growth, it's intended to prevent it.
So you basically need a clean room designed to grow fungus. Not impossible but the larger you go the harder it gets to maintain and the more likely you are to lose it all when there's a problem.
For that reason I'd suggest duplicating multiple smaller grow environments to gain production volume rather than one big one.
You guys are really overthinking it. Oyster mushrooms are simple creatures. They just want damp sawdust. That's it. Don't add a bunch of random crap to the sawdust or try to rig up a cleanroom. Just get sawdust, make it damp, stick your "seeds" in, and watch nature do its thing.
>watch nature do its thing
Silly anon, that's not how nature works. You need an autoclave, a growing chamber with regulated CO2 levels, media with correct mixing ratios, and species-specific nutrient solutions (pH buffered, obviously), you need to get it contamination-free by regrowing the mycelium on Petri dishes. Mushrooms don't just grow in the ground.
That’s what I figured. I’ll buy a bag of hardwood pellets today and just make sure to clean everything well. And if a competing fungus takes over it’s not like I’m deep in the hole or something
Financially you will be fine, but you, and the fungus will know who raped you.
>I might get cucked by a fungus
Stay out of my substrate you black mold
>They just want damp sawdust
So does trichoderma. Simply pasteurizing sawdust isn't reliable. Sterilizing it completely without proper grow bags is even worse, as trich and other fungal spores now don't need to compete with any beneficial bacteria.
Been there done that, it's not that simple.
Image related, 80% contamination rate. I've had very little luck with pasteurizing substrate and growing anything reliably like that, trich always seems to find its way into the substrate. I've had most luck with complete sterilization and proper grow bags and working under a flow hood.
And here's some oyster I grew with complete substrate sterilization. It's way more reliable as you exclude the possibility of foreign spores outcompeting your mushrooms, and they're really good at that. Once fully colonized the health and species of your specimen will determine how resistant it is to foreign microbes.
I wish I could get pasteurization to work as some people do have success with it, but so far I've had little to none.
Perfect example of overthinking it. You don't need bags for oyster mushrooms. Where did you get that idea? Of course your shit is going to rot if you wrap it up in watertight plastic. It needs to breathe. You're growing forest fungus, not fermenting beer.
I don't think you can see it on the picture, but I've cut a slit and taped it with micropore tape near the top of the bags. They got plenty of air.
I even did tests with poking holes all around the bags, same result.
I once did a tub, filled it around 1/2 with pasteurized substrate and it was growing well and also fruited nicely, but at the bottom you could see trich at one spot.
>Perfect example of overthinking it. You don't need bags for oyster mushrooms. Where did you get that idea?
From mushrooms growers and research papers.
this. used the actual cardboard of this exact model to grow some more oysters on along with some leftover sawdust I had.
Take meds, not 'shrooms
These threads always make me mad.
T. Mycologist
Get petri dishes, agar, spores, filter patch bags, pressure cooker, lab grade hepa filter. Otherwise you're gonna grow shifty product.
>gonna grow shifty product
How? If the mushroom Grows it grows.
Modern people are so fricking sterilized with everything they do.
>I wanna grow and sell magic mushrooms
Let me lay it out in a brutally honest fashion.
Mushroom protocol that need abs sterility aka laminar flow.
Making Grain Spawn {Unless you got a good liquid culture system set up.}
Agar Work
Spore Work
Things you can do in dirty air
Mixing grain with substrate {Be careful what sub, because some have chemicals that will moron your mushroom)
Spore Work
Things that don't work and are myths.
SABs or Still Air Boxes. This shit is actually moronic and a complete misnomer. There is no such thing as a SAB that you can make at home with 50$
Breeding mushrooms
Personal Stories
>Work as a bio lab med student
>Work lab
>leave bc hate school and the people in it
>Do DIY wet work
>Literally nothing works because I have to work in dirty air
>Somehow oyster doesn't give a shit at all
>Yeast are god tier fungus
I tried agar work at home. You know what I got for my time and money? Big fat green plates.
I tried spore work at home, do you know what I got? Mixed results. Agar of course didn't work. Liquid culture didn't work. But spores in great quantity abs destroy direct to substrate.
Sometimes get good liquid culture work. Made gaskets and ports for jars now. Still get contamed on a daily basis, but still get some results.
>build a still air box as a ghetto biosafety cabinet. you can just spray a big clear plastic box down with disinfectant, leave it to settle for 20 minutes and hang it half off the table so your arms can go in for aseptic work. sounds dumb but it's widely used in hobby mycology since laminar flow hoods are $$$
>inoculate sterile wholegrain microwave rice to expand the spawn so it colonises faster, reducing competition with contaminants. look up uncle ben tek.
>cold pasteurise straw substrate with calcium hydroxide, don't add random shit like coffee grounds unless you want more mould
>add to fruiting bags or a plastic shoebox
>let it colonise
>cut some slits if you're using bags
>mushroom mushroom
if you're using hardwood then you'll need to supplement it with wheat bran or onions husks, which will increase your contamination rate. start small and figure out what works for you. happy shrooming. also just boiling water isn't enough to pasteurise your substrate, it needs to be kept at 70c for 2 hours or so -- "bucket tek" was designed for coco coir, which is nutritionally inert anyway. you'll need an autoclave/pressure cooker if you want to actually sterilise stuff since endospores are hardly little frickers.
>complete misnomer
nope, you suck at aseptic work under ghetto conditions. chances are your autoclave isn't maintaining pressure if you're getting that much contamination, or you're working the world's dirtiest basement.
t. biomed student
air currents in the room from an AC or window will compromise the still air environment pretty quickly, even if the ambient air reasonably clean. spray the box, wipe down your materials, add to the box, leave it undisturbed for 20 minutes or so. beyond that, it's your sanitised hands that are going to carry the majority of contaminants so watch where they're going and the air currents you're creating inside.
the only time I've had consistent contaminations that weren't due to a shitty pressure cooker that didn't go to 121c was due to a clothes dryer exhausting air in the kitchen I use as a lab. you're educated enough to known there's no such thing as absolute sterility unless you're working in a BSL3 lab or semiconductor plant, just low enough probability of contamination to work 😉
given that everything that needs autoclaving has failed for you, I'd check the autoclave. sometimes grain can have super high microbe loads if it's been stored for a long time, but agar? that should be sterile within 20 minutes at 126c and your plates are sterile out of the sleeve. I've not once in 3 years had a problem with pouring agar dishes, just sterilising the media. what are you using as an autoclave?
I've recently bought some plugs since I had some fresh cut logs in my yard.