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KlUe

'Edible' Fungi Grow Log :)

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Yep "Cucinaware" but it's badge engineering - if you peel the sticker it's actually a "Homediscovery . Made in China.

What's in a name sob :) ? China is a production juggernaut with a finger in every product pie, so I wouldn't worry about country of origin, and regardless of selling name they are the real deal. You don't have to try them KlUe, but don't be put off by 'badge engineering', or asian products for that matter :wink:

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Have you guys tried Rev's rice-cooker tek?

You can fruit ala PF cake style or crumble and case into alu-trays with pretty good results and it's fast.Great for small trial runs too when isolating a strain with desirable traits(schooner glasses colonise fast and form a good cake).

Hmmm birdseed..never had success with WBS myself but you should give rye-grass seed a go as it has a smaller surface area and inocculates fast.If you put a dash of dishwashing detergent in the mix,it'll break the anhydrous nature of the seed hull faster allowing moisture absorption.

You can get it from a rural supply shop cheap-as too!

A prep method I had great success with and will be using again in my next grow, was to put the rye/water/detergent(go easy it fluffs up and can spill all over the bench :rolleyes::wink: ) into a slow cooker on low for most of the day stirring every 3 or 4 hours,then strain,washed with cool water,loaded 3/4 into pint jars and PC'd as usual...transferred agar wedges and all went well.Next I expanded to pasturised (with lime and cow-poo) wheat-straw,then layered into tubs with 6mm perlite and 10mm vermiculite on top...THE best flushes yet!

I've nearly finished my transfer case project too, and I will post pics when she's finished.

Happy shroomin'

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What's in a name sob :) ? China is a production juggernaut with a finger in every product pie, so I wouldn't worry about country of origin, and regardless of selling name they are the real deal. You don't have to try them KlUe, but don't be put off by 'badge engineering', or asian products for that matter :wink:

Hey mate, most stuff is made in China, but do you think the jars withstand boiling/steaming for 1.5hrs in a pot though?

Thats one of my concerns, and is why I use the whiskey glasses as they have a thick base.

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Hey guys,

My Guatemalan pen pal has asked me to share these pics with all, as he has no computer, though he happens to have a camera - go figure... He says they are cube mexi - whatever that is...?

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He rekons that he has only recently done a double end casing (I think that means that he added moist verm on top of PF cakes instead of just the original bottom layer) to increase his yield. I dont know much about these sort of things, but it all looks great to me :) Any questions/comments/etc I can forward onto him, I'm sure he'd love a little conversation with us folk :P

Anyway, enjoy folks :lol:

Ace

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Have you guys tried Rev's rice-cooker tek?

You can fruit ala PF cake style or crumble and case into alu-trays with pretty good results and it's fast.Great for small trial runs too when isolating a strain with desirable traits(schooner glasses colonise fast and form a good cake).

Hmmm birdseed..never had success with WBS myself but you should give rye-grass seed a go as it has a smaller surface area and inocculates fast.If you put a dash of dishwashing detergent in the mix,it'll break the anhydrous nature of the seed hull faster allowing moisture absorption.

You can get it from a rural supply shop cheap-as too!

A prep method I had great success with and will be using again in my next grow, was to put the rye/water/detergent(go easy it fluffs up and can spill all over the bench :rolleyes::wink: ) into a slow cooker on low for most of the day stirring every 3 or 4 hours,then strain,washed with cool water,loaded 3/4 into pint jars and PC'd as usual...transferred agar wedges and all went well.Next I expanded to pasturised (with lime and cow-poo) wheat-straw,then layered into tubs with 6mm perlite and 10mm vermiculite on top...THE best flushes yet!

I've nearly finished my transfer case project too, and I will post pics when she's finished.

Happy shroomin'

Sounds good mate, let us know how you go :)

I'd like to try out some aluminum tubs, not sure if i'll do it this time though.

Cheers

KlUe

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Nice marshmallows Ace :wink: Lookin' nice and healthy, if they turn out to be a good isolate, try and clone some of the fruits, it should give you some nice material to work with.

LMAO mesc, the detergent...is that what happened when it spewed over into the powerpoint? :wink:

yah nice rundown :) Looking forward to the transfer box pics...mine looks very similar to yours in size, but I ended up ripping the gloves out and do it kind of open air bare skin which works, but can bugger up very easily, have lost about my last 16 small grain jars, bloody trichoderma. I used to have very little issues with grain and lots with agar, these days I've done too much agar and that's all 100% whereas my grain skill went downhill and constantly contam lol Time to rebuild the glovebox I reckon.

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Cheers Gerbil - though I cant be taking my pen pals credit lol

By isolates, do you mean taking the bigest-fattest fruits and cloning them to start a batch of bigger-better fruits? I have only seen and heard a tiny bit of info about this - does anyone have experience or teks involving the cloning of isolates? Sorry I should look it up... :P Does it work well?

Ace

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Wish I could help you in detail Ace but my knowledge is quite amateur, I should remember more but too much indulgence in some things eh :)

It's something i'm coming to terms with as I progress in practice, I can generally understand things better on a visual level rather than written theory, so explainations are hard, but that also stems from me not really knowing what i'm talking about lol

Mushroom cultures can decline over time and issues can arise, such as slow growth, mutations, aborting fruitings, poor fruitings, less resistant to contamination etc.

A good practice is to create stock cultures, which I suppose could be described as a mycelial storage bank in which the mycelial culture is at a stage of great health and is generally one that is not far removed from the original isolation whether it be spore or tissue cloning. For example if you steak 10 plates with spores and isolate 10 individual sections of each of the 10 plates and then grow each of these out (whilst keeping the backups of each original isolation) you can specificly pick the isolates for characteristics that suit your goal, for example maybe plate #4 isolate #5 fruits heavily whereas all the others perform poorly, then you will trash the others and work with that specific isolate. You maintain genetic integrity by constantly working off the initial isolate that you saved back at the original step, so every time a culture that you've grown out many many times starts to perform poorly, you can go back to the storage stock and start fresh from the initial isolate, these stored isolates have undergone very little cell division and associated culture techniques for example it was first plated on agar by being streaked, then possibly subcultured once or twice to establish it as a clean isolate.

Now tissue cloning is a slightly different issue and I'm a little confused so need to refresh and read a lot more information about it, but from teachings i've been taught, is that the cloning of a fruit body from a culture that is starting to degrade should bring about a good fresh start in terms of genetic stability and related performance. If the culture that is being fruited is a clean known isolate, then the fruits produced should be true to type ??? (just guessing, this is part of what confuses me) as oppossed to fruiting a mass spore culture which may possess multiple types of mycelial strains in the one fruiting bag, hence multiple fruits with different genetics (???); but if it's a known clean isolate, then cloning a fruit should give a culture of similar quality to the degrading culture that is being fruited, or at least to an extent.

But i'm still not too well educated in such matters so alot is guess work. From logical thought my thoughts are thinking that if a pure isolate that is degrading is being fruited, then the tissue of mushrooms produced will be of the same genetics as what the mycelium is that gave rise to the fruits, but I can't really understand how the fruits will bring about a re-invigoration of the isolate simply by cloning them because my logic is telling me that if the fruiting culture is degrading and the mushrooms it produces are of the same genetics, then those mushrooms should probably be on the same degradative path with no invigoration of the culture.

hmm if any of that made sense lol ... that's what i'm talking about when I mean I can visually create learning scenarios in my head, but with words it gets complicated :D am i'm not talking hands on visual learning, that's a different aspect :D

The actual procedure of cloning and creating spore isolates is dead easy really...but agar work will generally be needed. Rev has some good cloning pictorials on his FF site.

Essentially you rip the mushroom cap or stem open (it's said to be best and the base of stem or in the cap) and you tear little bits of flesh out from deep inside and lay them on agar, which you then further subculture and clean up to create a clean isolate....spores are the same except it's a little trickier as you are trying to just get a tiny bit of mycelium as many spores would have fused together to create multiple strains per plate...all you really want with spore isolates dikaryotic mycelium, essentially 2 spores that have fused, you really only need to take a pin head in theory and then take another pin head of the pin head isolate and so on lol

Edited by gerbil

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Thanks for that well written post Gerbil B)

Sounds like an interesting process - similar to creating a new and pure strain of cannabis (so I have read), although that involves cross breeding and imbreeding and various other methods dissimilar to this...

So, by taking the better fruits (i.e. faster colonised, larger, meatier, etc) and cloning these you will get a pure strain of quality mycelium (Mother Strain). This is then used to innoculate another generation of agar plates (F1/Generation 1 Strain), and these are cloned (F2 Strain). The F2 Strain is used for fruiting. When the strain loses its vigour - go back to the F1 and create another batch of F2s and so on.

I think this is sort of a simplified explanation (at least of what I can understand), but please comment if I'm not on track ;)

Ace

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Yep that's pretty much it...except the question of genetic stability from cloned fruits off a senescing culture is where i'm confused; but applying that process to spores would be where the diversity would lie (besides wild clonings I suppose which essentially would be spore stains anyway)

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I've seen the first bit of growth on one container of my BRF mix. It's definitely too wet.

It has an area of fluffy mycelium with areas above that are saturated and look very wet.

I'm guessing that this is not going to be a success and should probably abort it so I don't waste any more time on it but a part of me says just wait and see.

What does everyone else think? Wet looking BRF... wait or ditch?

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I've seen the first bit of growth on one container of my BRF mix. It's definitely too wet.

It has an area of fluffy mycelium with areas above that are saturated and look very wet.

I'm guessing that this is not going to be a success and should probably abort it so I don't waste any more time on it but a part of me says just wait and see.

What does everyone else think? Wet looking BRF... wait or ditch?

Thought so mate :(

Too wet isn't good - you can definetally keep trying it out though, it can't hurt! They don't need too much maintenance either - just remember to keep their environment humid. Might not even need too much humidity due to the wetness, so I rekon stick it out :D

Have you got any pics?

KlUe

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Ok, another update.

I've uploaded some pics - this is day 5 since inoculation.

All glasses are nicely growing mycelium, except one of them i've got some doubts..

I didn't get a pic of it because it was that small, but it looked like on the tops of the mycelium in one area it was turning slightly black in just one area.

So to be safe I have moved it to a different location - will let you know if its just me seeing things when it progresses.

Anyways check out the pics (taken from phone, apologies for the crap quality, cam ran out of batteries).

I estimate another 1.5 weeks until they're ready to birth.

KlUe

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Ok, another update.

I've uploaded some pics - this is day 5 since inoculation.

All glasses are nicely growing mycelium, except one of them i've got some doubts..

I didn't get a pic of it because it was that small, but it looked like on the tops of the mycelium in one area it was turning slightly black in just one area.

So to be safe I have moved it to a different location - will let you know if its just me seeing things when it progresses.

Anyways check out the pics (taken from phone, apologies for the crap quality, cam ran out of batteries).

I estimate another 1.5 weeks until they're ready to birth.

KlUe

That's really nice mate. I wouldn't apologise about the quality of the pics either. They illustrate it perfectly. Top job and can't wait till we see more! :)

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Looking good KlUe - shame about that one jar - lets hope theres no contams!

Sob - definately keep going! Theres no harm in letting them sit - who knows, they might be fine in the end!

My penpal has sent me an update:

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Looks like we might see some open caps in the next 48 hours or so!

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Hey mate, most stuff is made in China, but do you think the jars withstand boiling/steaming for 1.5hrs in a pot though?

Thats one of my concerns, and is why I use the whiskey glasses as they have a thick base.

Looking good KlUe :) . Are you using anything as a buffer between the base of the pot and the bottom of the glasses? It seems this can make a difference. Here's some links regarding the issue, as well as a couple of useful ones including an aussie online mob that supply brand new pop-top lids suitable for supermarket jars. Hope this helps :lol: ...

Link...

Link...

Link...

Link...

Pop-top lids...

Link...

a good day to all...

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Looking good KlUe :) . Are you using anything as a buffer between the base of the pot and the bottom of the glasses? It seems this can make a difference. Here's some links regarding the issue, as well as a couple of useful ones including an aussie online mob that supply brand new pop-top lids suitable for supermarket jars. Hope this helps :lol: ...

Link...

Link...

Link...

Link...

Pop-top lids...

Link...

a good day to all...

Thanks for the reply mate. As the glasses are fairly thick, i've been not using any buffer in between. I'll check out the links though and let you know :)

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Ok another update all...

Finally, the glasses are almost done - I'll give it another 3-4 days to fully thicken up and spread across the substrate evenly. There are a few random patches that haven't yet spread on a couple of the glasses, so i'll be waiting for them all to be ready until birthing time. As for the suspected contam, it seems to have disappeared, so its good news for all cakes so far.

Anyways as you can see in the pics they're almost done.

KlUe

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Ok all.. Finally, i've birthed 3 out of the 4 cakes.

The other cake was sliced up and broken into some chunks to cover a 1 litre capacity black plastic tray.

I used a 50/50 peat/vermiculite mix, and also tried a small amount of moist rice flour over the top level (which is purely experimental), with a little bit of dry verm on top. It looks like a mould but its only rice flour btw :P

Substrate was sterilized in the microwave for 5 minutes and then let to cool.

My only doubt is that the vermiculite was a different brand than my usual and it is much finer than i'd have liked.

So this is going to turn out to be my new experiment.. :P

At the moment i've got some plastic wrap over the tub (My other humidity dome is in use for a few more days with some seedlings), but it will go in there soon.

KlUe

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Ok all.. Finally, i've birthed 3 out of the 4 cakes.

The other cake was sliced up and broken into some chunks to cover a 1 litre capacity black plastic tray.

I used a 50/50 peat/vermiculite mix, and also tried a small amount of moist rice flour over the top level (which is purely experimental), with a little bit of dry verm on top. It looks like a mould but its only rice flour btw :P

Substrate was sterilized in the microwave for 5 minutes and then let to cool.

My only doubt is that the vermiculite was a different brand than my usual and it is much finer than i'd have liked.

So this is going to turn out to be my new experiment.. :P

At the moment i've got some plastic wrap over the tub (My other humidity dome is in use for a few more days with some seedlings), but it will go in there soon.

KlUe

[edit] typos

Awesome stuff! This thread deserves to be an archival one. Best I've seen here for beginners.

One thing I've seen with the PF cake birthing is the adding of a bit of 'casing' moistened vermiculite to the top of the cakes to keep it moist. Don't know how much more it helps but there's a reason for everything as they say.

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Awesome stuff! This thread deserves to be an archival one. Best I've seen here for beginners.

One thing I've seen with the PF cake birthing is the adding of a bit of 'casing' moistened vermiculite to the top of the cakes to keep it moist. Don't know how much more it helps but there's a reason for everything as they say.

Cheers for that mate :)

I'm not sure why but i've only really done the top verm casing after the first flush.

Not sure if that is the norm but its just been my method.

Maybe because it makes it look messy in the grow chamber with vermiculite everywhere haha.

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It'll actually help induce fruiting where the verm is...like what grass and debris does in nature.Think of it as gradual micro-climate change as the pins form and gain strength from nutes in the cake :wink: .

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Thats what I'd recommend too, Ace.

Usually its just a bit less than the amount of vermiculite you use, but again it depends on the type as to how much water is required.

It shouldn't have a soggy or sticky feel to it, just wet enough to attach the BRP to the verm. The verm can also absorb the remainder of water if you have a little extra.. But yeah, it should have a more 'dry' consistency rather than wet.

Once the substrate is in the cups/jars, you shouldn't be able to see any wetness pretty much at all.

Trial and error my friend, but let me know how it goes!

KlUe

FOAF recently did two BRF cake grows side by side. One the water content was eyeballed, until just a little runoff was left in the verm. The other was exactly by the PF Tek (equal verm water). FOAF was shocked at how much 'wetter' the mix was using the exact PF tek specs. But if you look closely it is done this wet as the optimium fruiting environment. Meaning this will give better fruits but the dryer mix runs a lot less risk of contamination, so FOAF believes.

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Ok another update :wink:

5 days after birthing noticed first pins.

A day later there is large clumps of fungi forming.

Growth is going quite well so far, will keep the pics coming.

Also put some verm on top of one of the cakes that haven't had pins forming on the top yet to see if it can yield better.

Peace

KlUe

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Pic update - 4 days fruiting. Noticing some bruising, i'm thinking due to dehydration in the cakes, i'm gonna have to dunk early this flush I'm sure. Anyways they're coming along nicely - first flush should be ready to harvest within the next day.. didn't last as long as i'd have liked though! Hopefully 2nd does me better :)

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