Nabbers
Well-Known Member
Breaking up the bag needs to be considered a personal preference option - you need to remember that unless you spawned from cloned material, even though it all looks like the same white fluffy mycelium, you're looking at many different mushroom colonies in that bag (each spore pair creates its own organism with its own slightly different DNA) each expanding to take up their own territory on the substrate and they don't necessarily share their nutrients and such as one. If you break them up you're separating each one into lots of little ones and mixing them up. In my experience, too much mixing can lead to a plethora of tiny colonies that barely have the energy to produce decent fruit. Also, breaking them up will stun them a bit and it can take a few days to recover and start growing again. If you're working from cloned material, absolutely break it up because it will just grow back together. If you're going to transfer your grain to a bulk sub (which is a good idea), then break it up when you do that, there's lots of bulk sub for each bit to grow into. But to answer your question: generally, once you've broken it up, a lot of the little white hairs tend to break up and disappear and it looks a lot more like rye again, the mycelium is still alive and well inside each rye berry.
