Anybody growing mushrooms willing to talk???

rkymtnman said:

wouldn't something like a steam table from a used restaurant supply place work?

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It might work perfect for my latest idea. NM the substrate.. I kinda want to crawl in and get steamed myself, lol. Take 2 identical free hot tubs (I looked and there are 50 of them within 100 miles), and set the upside down one right on top of the other, so its like one big 2 piece tank. Then put a hinge on one side so it can still open up like a box, with a hoist...

Or better yet, cut them up and fabricate a hatch mechanism that opens up like an airplane staircase, and leave the tubs bolted together. Add all kinds of cool water proof speakers, disco lights, tv screens, controls or whatnot (hookah tubes!) to the top tub lid section. Maybe even add a sky light (extra escape hatch!). Slap some kind of decent looking exterior around it, and maybe even put it on a mobile trailer frame.. With ski's of course, incase burning man floods out again haha....

When you crawl in, it's like your sitting inside some futuristic space ship pod, with seating arrangements for 4-6, or however big the lower tub is. Add the steamer, and you have the most awesome sauna ever!

It's nice that this topic just came up because I've been thinking about this all week. I do bucket Tek pasteurization with my CVG for my tubs since I started but lately I've been getting a lot of trich and I've been wondering if it's sterilizing it enough. So I was thinking about starting to pressure cook the CVG but it just seems like a lot of work

7L!fTeD24 said:

It's nice that this topic just came up because I've been thinking about this all week. I do bucket Tek pasteurization with my CVG for my tubs since I started but lately I've been getting a lot of trich and I've been wondering if it's sterilizing it enough. So I was thinking about starting to pressure cook the CVG but it just seems like a lot of work

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For the record, you want to pasteurize your substrate not sterilize it. I've actually had issues pop up when we first built a low-pressure steam sterilizer and the ran our substrate to hot and long the first 2 weeks. Everything colonized really well and extra fast when we built the tubs. Then within another day or 2 they all got trich right on the surface. The only notable variable we had was the cooking the substrate. We fixed the cook tie and temp so that it was properly pasteurized and it solved the issue completely.

7L!fTeD24 said:

It's nice that this topic just came up because I've been thinking about this all week. I do bucket Tek pasteurization with my CVG for my tubs since I started but lately I've been getting a lot of trich and I've been wondering if it's sterilizing it enough. So I was thinking about starting to pressure cook the CVG but it just seems like a lot of work

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I do not have any contam issues with the coco bliss>cvg bucket tek but i also load that into bags and pc for 2.5hrs. I then pull put the bags in front flow hood and seal. I open them up in front of flow hood when i spawn to bulk. In front of the flow hood.
I did do a test recently. That cvg, boiling water into coolers, loaded half of the bags with that and half with pc’d cvg in bags. Loading up from the bucket(cooler) tek into the bags before putting in the spawn in front of a flow hood. I’ve already cropped out some of the bags, not much of a difference. But the big test will be how many flushes i get.
Last round of the jack frost i’m runnin in tubs, i’m down to 5. Lost 2 more to trich, before the 2nd flush. Fuck the tubs.

What's even more weird is that I'm having this problem with the monotubs but I never got it when doing shoe boxes. The air coming into the monotubs is filtered and shoeboxes it isn't. Something I notice when doing bucket tek is when I dump the boiling water into the bucket full of CVG and snap the lid on, the sides of the bucket implode (suck in), an then when it cools, the sides of the bucket will slowly move back to normal. So when it's slowly going back to normal it's sucking air in through the lid probably pulling a bunch of bad stuff in with it. Maybe that's the reason why people wrap the bucket with a towel. I usually put the bucket inside of a garbage bag and tie it up but I don't know if this is good enough this could be my problem.

7L!fTeD24 said:

What's even more weird is that I'm having this problem with the monotubs but I never got it when doing shoe boxes. The air coming into the monotubs is filtered and shoeboxes it isn't. Something I notice when doing bucket tek is when I dump the boiling water into the bucket full of CVG and snap the lid on, the sides of the bucket implode (suck in), an then when it cools, the sides of the bucket will slowly move back to normal. So when it's slowly going back to normal it's sucking air in through the lid probably pulling a bunch of bad stuff in with it. Maybe that's the reason why people wrap the bucket with a towel. I usually put the bucket inside of a garbage bag and tie it up but I don't know if this is good enough this could be my problem.

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I use the water coolers from home depot. Being insulated it def cooks the cvg longer. The lids fit in there pretty snug too

Aeroknow said:

I use the water coolers from home depot. Being insulated it def cooks the cvg longer. The lids fit in there pretty snug too

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I might check that out I got to figure this thing out. I'm starting to lose a lot of boxes. Probably a quarter of them. I feel like it started when I started to use CVG instead of just Coco, but at the same time I switched from shoe boxes to monotubs.

I just had to dump a monotub before the first flush because it turned green but then I have a shoe box sitting right next to it doing great

This came from a year old syringe I just found.
Its jack frost from skeleton crew.

7L!fTeD24 said:

Its jack frost from skeleton crew.

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Eager to get started on my JF syringe from Skeleton Crew. Hoping to inoculate in the next few weeks. Be nice if I could get my surfaces colonized as nicely as yours this time around.

A couple tubs doing good

I noticed that there's air flow coming through the little holes for the handles on some sealed tubs. Maybe how some contams are getting in. I can tell because you can see around the handles where there's no condensation like the rest of the tub. Can't believe I never thought of that. I don't even know if there's a way to prevent it. Luckily I have a bunch with the white snap on Lids that don't have handles

7L!fTeD24 said:

I noticed that there's air flow coming through the little holes for the handles on some sealed tubs. Maybe how some contams are getting in. I can tell because you can see around the handles where there's no condensation like the rest of the tub. Can't believe I never thought of that. I don't even know if there's a way to prevent it. Luckily I have a bunch with the white snap on Lids that don't have handles

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We used to wrap the top rim with plastic wrap until the first harvest. Then it came off and we didn't worry about it.

Fangthane said:

I've seen people suggest massaging the bag to break up the clumps and redistribute the mycelium a bit. I'm thinking it's usually suggested for a bag that's around 1/2 colonized, though.

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I do it at three days. You can beat this mycelium up a lot before you might, might kill it.

Thundercat said:

We used to wrap the top rim with plastic wrap until the first harvest. Then it came off and we didn't worry about it.

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Sounds like a good idea just bought some plastic wrap to try it out.

Still trying to figure out when's the best time to shake my jars using lc. Lately I've been shaking at inoculation and when that grows a little ill shake it one more time, and if I shake it again after that sometimes it stalls. I'm thinking about going back to Justin inoculating down the side of the jar and waiting for about a third of the jar to turn white before I shake and then once more after that. I just feel like when shaking at inoculation when using Elsie kind of spreads it out too much and it takes it a while to get enough growth to shake again. When using liquid culture how do you guys shake your jars.

7L!fTeD24 said:

Still trying to figure out when's the best time to shake my jars using lc. Lately I've been shaking at inoculation and when that grows a little ill shake it one more time, and if I shake it again after that sometimes it stalls. I'm thinking about going back to Justin inoculating down the side of the jar and waiting for about a third of the jar to turn white before I shake and then once more after that. I just feel like when shaking at inoculation when using Elsie kind of spreads it out too much and it takes it a while to get enough growth to shake again. When using liquid culture how do you guys shake your jars.

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Right away but I use a big shot of culture, 30 to 50 cc.

That way I rarely have to shake again.

canndo said:

Right away but I use a big shot of culture, 30 to 50 cc.

That way I rarely have to shake again.

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I'd like to use alot more LC when inoculating but i don't wanna mess up the moisture content of the grain jars. I usually use 2 cc's of LC per quart jar and they're usually done in 10 to 14 days. I'd love to use more especially because i make jars of LC and always have extra that goes to waste. I'm sure they would colonize a lot faster.

I've always been a bigger fan of agar transfers then LC. I feel like its easier to see contams on agar, and it colonizes so fast in grain bags.

With the level of production we were doing I actually did agar tranfers into 3lb MASTER grain bags. Then I would grain to grain transfer that into 6-8 larger 7lb grain bags once it was colonized.

Thundercat said:

I've always been a bigger fan of agar transfers then LC. I feel like its easier to see contams on agar, and it colonizes so fast in grain bags.

With the level of production we were doing I actually did agar tranfers into 3lb MASTER grain bags. Then I would grain to grain transfer that into 6-8 larger 7lb grain bags once it was colonized.

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Yeah, man, I need to get a flow hood. There are so many things that I want to do that I don't think would be very successful without it.