Finally got round to entering the world of indoor mycology again.
Looked like a massive weirdo for getting a 9Kg bale of straw delivered to my office but hopefully it'll be worth it.
Starting off small with some elm mushrooms, not tried them before but they're meant to be similarly easy to grow to oysters.
On a whim I also got some oyster mushroom wood dowels and stuck them in some firewood I had lying around, not sure if it'll take but worth a shot I guess.
I've been having a nightmare sterilising my woodchip substrate, even pressure cooking it for an hour and a half it still reliably colonises with some scary looking black and green moulds instead of what I innoculated it with. That takes, sometimes, but hasn't spread very well even in the one grow bag that hasn't gone green/black. Any suggestions?
>>2793 I'm by no means an expert, but I'd make the assumption that you don't have a problem getting the woodchips sterilised, you have a problem with contamination getting in afterwards. Are you inoculating with spore or spawn?
Professional setups do as much of the smaller-scale work as possible under a laminar-flow hood providing HEPA filtered air, large-scale inoculation of the substrate is ideally done in a dedicated room with positive-pressure filtration. These things are way out of the reach of our-ilk but cleanliness is vital.
Spawn. I transfer the substrate from the pressure cooker to the bags with nitrile gloves on then tie it off before innoculating it in the kitchen. It just seems surprising that there's enough of this one specific saprotrophic floating around to invade every time I do it.
Doing it smaller scale with spores is easier as you can sterilise in a semi-sealed container and inject through but I've tried doing a boil in the bag and it melts the bag.
Progress.
Not ideal in that I've got a massive clump that are going to crowd each other out, but it's to be expected with the very poor temperature and humidity control I've got.
>>2796 Sorry for the slow response, but yeah it's easy to get that sort of contamination in a kitchen like that.
What sort of bags are you using? I've ordered cheapo growbags off ebay, and they stand up to being boiled with no issue, although that's boiling in an open pot, not in a pressure cooker.
Well stuff happened last year and I never grew any more over the course of 2020.
Kicked off the new year, got a couple of bags of sawdust spawn from a new supplier (used mushroom box previously, they sell spawn in little 100g baggies which is somewhat convenient for a hobbyist but ends up being false economy, not only due to the price/qty ratio, but using such small amounts of spawn leads to poor results.) Now I'm using gourmetmushrooms.co.uk who offer a pretty good service and sell 1Kg bags of spawn for a reasonable price. (sawdust spawn only though so lack of nutrients means it gets off to a slower start colonising media, but it at least has a good shelf-life.)
Forgot to get any pictures of the start of the process a month back, but now I've got a back of grey oysters fully colonised ready to start fruiting, and some enoki which is struggling a bit (probably partly because I left the straw too wet, as well as it just being trickier to grow than oysters) but it should be ready soon.
Got half a block of the enoki spawn in my fridge still to try and start another soon, and just a little oyster spawn left that I might have a go at making an outdoor bed on the top of a vegetable planter.
>>2913 Spruce chippings from a garden centre that have been sat unopened outdoors since I bought them last autumn, and they were pretty much soaked through.
Filled some into the growbag, part filled it with water and boiled it for about 10 minutes or so to make sure I've killed off most of the nasty stuff that might be in there then drained most of the excess out. Chucked in a couple of weeks worth of used coffee grounds for a bit of extra nitrogen, and a couple of teaspoons of lime to reduce the acidity.
This is very unlikely to work for any other species, but oysters are insane.
