Oops - I meant to upload the vid of the substrate absorbing the water.
I'm pretty sure that the sound you can hear is from the wood rapidly expanding. I would have recorded the lot but the pot of water was pretty heavy & it got to this stage within 10-15 secs.
Definitely not sterile/clean conditions.
The contents were still quite hot in the middle 6 hours later. I turned the tub on its side on an angle and left the water to drain for 5 or so hours. It was barely dripping by then.
I mixed the contents and then transferred it to a bigger 100L/25gal tub. I put a layer of the medium on the bottom & sprinkled a good layer of inoculated grain spawn on top. I ended up with 5 layers of medium & 4 layers of grain spawn by the end. Everything was moist but not dripping, probably just a tad too moist of anything.
I don't love the firebricks I used which look like they contain recycled softwood (probably pallets) & cardboard. I'll probably just burn them for heat if this doesn't work out.
Now I need to wait 2-3 weeks for the tub to colonize & for me to figure out what I'll do with it (if it doesn't get covered in mould). If the whole tub gets a nice white covering of mycelium, I'll probably end up fruiting directly in the tub to see what these things look & taste like.
Do you know what weight of the substrate you ended up with?
And what was the weight of grain spawn?
No I didn't measure any of it, a total crap shoot.
I'd guess I added about 30L of water to get to the desired 65% hydration so about 45-50kg of substrate would be a guess.
The grain spawn was a big bag as it was when I changed my hydration method (why I think it colonised so quickly). I'd guess it was about 3-3.5kg.
I'll weigh it all in a week or so when I check on it & let you know. It's currently buried under other storage boxes 😆
That’s big!
Yeah - like I said total crap shoot, a gamble.
I'm betting that the low nutrient value of the substrate, the aggressive fungi & the little bit of wood ash I added, will allow the substrate to colonize without contamination.
I didn't know what else to do with the big bag of grain other than inoculate a pile of wood chips.
I figured I should try the mushrooms before letting them loose in the garden.
I also used some of the grain to inoculate a bag of straight sterilized sawdust. I will probably add 30% wheat bran to the sawdust spawn bags in the future. Sawdust spawn bags seem less susceptible to contamination in the substrate but provide less yields.
Yeah I got too excited.
It's closer to 25kg of medium & 3kg of grain spawn.
I forgot about all the water that I poured out when I drained it too.
4 days later
It looks like I left some colonised grains close to the top layer.
A bit happy to see some growth though.
