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My first fully colonised bag of uncontaminated mushroom grain spawn.

This is a strain of Golden Wine Caps which has turned out to be quite an aggressive fungi. I inoculated the bag 15 days ago with purchased liquid culture & it's more colonised than bags that I inoculated over a month ago.

I'm still not sure what I want to do with it. A part of me wants to get a big pile of wood chips to inoculate. I'm thinking I might inoculate a tub of pasteurised sawdust & hay, & expand out the mycelium some more before transferring to wood chips.

Suggestions welcome

#shroomstr #mushlove

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Discussion

Little Spoon 1y ago

There is a free service that operates in many areas. See if they’re in yours…

https://getchipdrop.com/#activity

Tree companies often like a dump site and if you call around some may give you or sell for cheap.

Brisket 1y ago

I registered for something similar about a decade ago & got nothing.

It looks like it's available in my area (I was surprised) & I will register but not hold my breath.

I can buy half a cubic metre (1 bobcat scoop or nearly a full tray load in my ute) for about $40 AUD. This is about the cost of buying a ready made grain spawn bag online.

Thanks for the tip 👍

talej 1y ago

We have got a few of these deliveries over the years. They’re good if you don’t care what you’re getting or where it has come from but you can’t be sure on what plant material or if it has been sprayed with poisons etc

I’d go with whatever you can buy in bulk for the cheapest

Brisket 1y ago

You can never have too many wood chips & I've got plenty of places where it can be just dumped. Lots of overhead power lines around me & Energex trucks chipping trimmed gun trees. My hope would be that I get a load of that.

A while back I bought composted green waste from the local refuse centre. Never again. Lots of shredded plastic, glass & I even found a AA battery. It took years to get most of the garbage out.

It's more the waiting that concerns me. 40 bucks for a ute load of hardwood chips allows me some flexibility & is a pretty good deal if I get 4+ kgs of nice mushrooms.

Thinking I might mulch and inoculate around some fruit trees to get through the dry spell that's coming. The mushrooms will be a bonus.

talej 1y ago

Yeah that composted green waste is such a mess. You have to go for the certified organic stuff to avoid all the trash unfortunately

Baz. 1y ago

Coconut coir from a hardware or gardening store?

Brisket 1y ago

Coir is very low in nutrients but has a good structure & holds moisture well.

It's useful for indoor growing but with this variety, I want it growing outside in the garden. It's very hardy/aggressive & can easily compete with existing fungi. I want to be able to forage for them in my garden, knowing that I've inoculated them there.

Brisket 1y ago

I decided to grow the spawn out before doing anything with it. I poured a few of kilos of wood pellets (compressed dried saw dust), 4 fire bricks (mix of dried compressed softwood & cardboard), a little wheat bran (about half a kg for some nitrogen), a little gypsum & the wood ash from 3 nights of wood fires (to lower the pH of the substrate & inhibit non fungal growth) into a plastic storage tub.

I then poured about 30L of really hot water (80⁰C/175⁰F) into it to hydrate & pasteurise the substrate. The lid is on & I'll give it about 12 hrs to slowly cool before adding the Golden Wine Cap grain spawn.

I'm deliberately using non sterile & low tech methods. I'm trusting my intuition & the mycelium's natural instinct to multiply. Nature gonna nature & I'm gonna FAFO 😆

Brisket 1y ago

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.

https://v.nostr.build/8GlnJ.mp4

Brisket 1y ago

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.

talej 1y ago

Do you know what weight of the substrate you ended up with?

And what was the weight of grain spawn?

Brisket 1y ago

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 😆

talej 1y ago

That’s big!

Brisket 1y ago

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.

Brisket 1y ago

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.

Brisket 1y ago

4 days later

It looks like I left some colonised grains close to the top layer.

A bit happy to see some growth though.

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