Anybody growing mushrooms willing to talk???

7L!fTeD24

Well-Known Member
Why? I think they are ugly and the mental effects include agitation, a sort of darkness and even a little confusion.


In my opinion the slight difference in potency is not worth the lack of clarity.
I've tried pretty much everything except a couple real exotic strains, and Natalensis is by far my favorite. For me It's the best all the way around. Potency definitely isn't everything. I do like ape simply because I don't have to ingest as much. After trying them although I have become pretty picky and all I'll eat is the Natals. Great visuals, nice relaxing body, buzz and an all around super positive experience. I see where you're coming from. When you say PE can kind of give you agitation, I was microdosing and I ran out of Natalensis so I started using PE and the micro dose was giving me a little agitation.
 

7L!fTeD24

Well-Known Member
Ok, lower temperatures do nothing but restart growth. This species doesn't much mind temps even in the 60's.

HOWEVER. condensation from cycles of high and low temps can actually move any contam spores from horizontal surfaces onto your grow. If there are spores anywhere that can eventually drip onto your substrate the fact that they are immersed in tiny puddles ensures that the spores will germinate even if they land on healthy mycelium.

Of your cycles go into the high 80's then the mycelium will exude small amounts of high acid and (I suspect) proteins that are conducive to trich growth.

So it's not the low temperatures (or even higher ones) so much as the changes.

Remember that trich spores are sticky so you can actually have horizontal surfaces only inches above your substrate and not get contamination so long as nothing dislodged them like water or insects.

I have seen this phenomenon. It really takes a good little breeze to move them off their localities. I suspect that there is a mechanism that discharges those spores from the sporulating bodies however. I know that other fungus eject spores with considerable force including cubensis, this is why you often see them evenly deposited on top of the caps. (I think)
I have had some temperature fluctuations recently, My space heater did shut off the one night and it went down to 58 degrees, and then turned it back on and got it back up to the 70s. I have my jar's, colonizing tubs, And fruiting tubs all in the same area So I set my space heater In the room at 77° But even with the space heater set, the temperature in the room fluctuates based on the temperature outside.
 

canndo

Well-Known Member
I have had some temperature fluctuations recently, My space heater did shut off the one night and it went down to 58 degrees, and then turned it back on and got it back up to the 70s. I have my jar's, colonizing tubs, And fruiting tubs all in the same area So I set my space heater In the room at 77° But even with the space heater set, the temperature in the room fluctuates based on the temperature outside.

You can put a sheet of paper on the substrate and check for drops of water if you don't see them directly on the top.

Seriously, this condensation has been the source of many of my contam problems.
 

7L!fTeD24

Well-Known Member
You can put a sheet of paper on the substrate and check for drops of water if you don't see them directly on the top.

Seriously, this condensation has been the source of many of my contam problems.
Sometimes I do spray the s*** out of my casing layer With distilled water when I make my tubs up. Maybe i'm spraying it too much Slowing it down and making it more prone to contam I could try doing the top casing layer just At field capacity It may be spray later down the road when it's colonized if I need to.
 

canndo

Well-Known Member
Here's some pictures of what i'm dealing with. Any thoughts?
View attachment 5354599View attachment 5354600View attachment 5354601
First off, you should never allow contamination to reach that level of coverage. You have seen enough trich (or penicillin, can't tell which from the pic) to be able to identify it before it sporulates.
Second, you need to figure out if that is purely surface contamination or if it originates from the substrate below.

I suggested that it is possible that it is a mite infestation. Rule that out before you proceed. Make sure your casing is not too wet. Ensure that there is no stagnant air anywhere on the bed. Bump up that ph to 7.5 or 8.0

While most hold that the casing should be sanitized or pasteurized you should look into sterilizing it just to check. Reduce your casing depth. You can try carefully removing an isolated colony and then spraying the area with dilute bleach.
(I once accidentally sprayed a large area of colonized substrate with my antiseptic level bleach solution. After discovering my error and having been horrified, I waited, expecting death and destruction of the bed. It never happened)

You can also cover the suspected area with baking soda and spray that with water. If the contamination has not migrated beneath the surface...and the contamination source is not your underlying substrate you will temporarily halt the spread. I have kept the spread at bay for a week or more. But all you are doing is attempting to discover a flaw in your technique.

Are you using peat moss? Try another brand. Coir? (I don't like using coir in my casing mix but when I do I always sift, and I now sift my peat as well.. the sticks for some reason are conducive to trich well before the fines. I mentioned somewhere that some coir is intentionally treated with trich spores. We talked about how heavily contaminated materials need more sterilization than can be functionally autoclaved..

Check for fungus gnats, they will spread spores as well but primarily bacteria rather than fungus spores...contrary to the mites. But I have seen it happen.

Get your dishes an use them. If you see tiny trails of growth then you definitely have mites. And they seem to love Agar the little eastwards are hell to eradicate.


As I posted some time ago, you will never ever be rid of the green. It is now everywhere in your grow, on your food, in your bed, your hair, eyelashes, your jeans and fans and the corners of your home.

Even if you had been totally aware of this eventuality and tried as hard as you could to hold it off you will have failed to stop it. You would need an industrial or medical level clean room to absolutely combat it.

Thus, as I have preached, your best weapon is ensuing that the grow itself is not conducive to those spores germinating.

They like acidic conditions, dead air like the corners or at the boundaries. If, for instance, you use liners and the liner overhangs the substrate, you may well find that this tiny dead air space is the first place it will grow.

Pick a reasonable number of failures for each stage. For instance, my limit for dishes is five percent. 100 dishes should see no more than five or six trich contamination. Any more triggers intense scrutiny. Bags are at ten to fifteen percent as are bins or fruiting bags.

I am a straw guy. My edibles and other varieties are finally grown in chopped and cooked straw with a miniscule amount of aged horse manure. My straw mushrooms and oyster varieties, king being my favorite have a limit of 20 percent failure rate. 11 inch depth setups can go as high as 25 percent but that is the result of overheating in the center especially if the manure percentage is high enough to touch off composting in the center.

So.. pick your limits.

In short though, use those dishes.. making them is insanely easy, you do not need a hood if you pour it hot because the steam rises from the dish and blows the spores away.

And get with precision ph manipulation


Merry Christmas.
 

7L!fTeD24

Well-Known Member
First off, you should never allow contamination to reach that level of coverage. You have seen enough trich (or penicillin, can't tell which from the pic) to be able to identify it before it sporulates.
Second, you need to figure out if that is purely surface contamination or if it originates from the substrate below.

I suggested that it is possible that it is a mite infestation. Rule that out before you proceed. Make sure your casing is not too wet. Ensure that there is no stagnant air anywhere on the bed. Bump up that ph to 7.5 or 8.0

While most hold that the casing should be sanitized or pasteurized you should look into sterilizing it just to check. Reduce your casing depth. You can try carefully removing an isolated colony and then spraying the area with dilute bleach.
(I once accidentally sprayed a large area of colonized substrate with my antiseptic level bleach solution. After discovering my error and having been horrified, I waited, expecting death and destruction of the bed. It never happened)

You can also cover the suspected area with baking soda and spray that with water. If the contamination has not migrated beneath the surface...and the contamination source is not your underlying substrate you will temporarily halt the spread. I have kept the spread at bay for a week or more. But all you are doing is attempting to discover a flaw in your technique.

Are you using peat moss? Try another brand. Coir? (I don't like using coir in my casing mix but when I do I always sift, and I now sift my peat as well.. the sticks for some reason are conducive to trich well before the fines. I mentioned somewhere that some coir is intentionally treated with trich spores. We talked about how heavily contaminated materials need more sterilization than can be functionally autoclaved..

Check for fungus gnats, they will spread spores as well but primarily bacteria rather than fungus spores...contrary to the mites. But I have seen it happen.

Get your dishes an use them. If you see tiny trails of growth then you definitely have mites. And they seem to love Agar the little eastwards are hell to eradicate.


As I posted some time ago, you will never ever be rid of the green. It is now everywhere in your grow, on your food, in your bed, your hair, eyelashes, your jeans and fans and the corners of your home.

Even if you had been totally aware of this eventuality and tried as hard as you could to hold it off you will have failed to stop it. You would need an industrial or medical level clean room to absolutely combat it.

Thus, as I have preached, your best weapon is ensuing that the grow itself is not conducive to those spores germinating.

They like acidic conditions, dead air like the corners or at the boundaries. If, for instance, you use liners and the liner overhangs the substrate, you may well find that this tiny dead air space is the first place it will grow.

Pick a reasonable number of failures for each stage. For instance, my limit for dishes is five percent. 100 dishes should see no more than five or six trich contamination. Any more triggers intense scrutiny. Bags are at ten to fifteen percent as are bins or fruiting bags.

I am a straw guy. My edibles and other varieties are finally grown in chopped and cooked straw with a miniscule amount of aged horse manure. My straw mushrooms and oyster varieties, king being my favorite have a limit of 20 percent failure rate. 11 inch depth setups can go as high as 25 percent but that is the result of overheating in the center especially if the manure percentage is high enough to touch off composting in the center.

So.. pick your limits.

In short though, use those dishes.. making them is insanely easy, you do not need a hood if you pour it hot because the steam rises from the dish and blows the spores away.

And get with precision ph manipulation


Merry Christmas.
Thanks. Ya i
First off, you should never allow contamination to reach that level of coverage. You have seen enough trich (or penicillin, can't tell which from the pic) to be able to identify it before it sporulates.
Second, you need to figure out if that is purely surface contamination or if it originates from the substrate below.

I suggested that it is possible that it is a mite infestation. Rule that out before you proceed. Make sure your casing is not too wet. Ensure that there is no stagnant air anywhere on the bed. Bump up that ph to 7.5 or 8.0

While most hold that the casing should be sanitized or pasteurized you should look into sterilizing it just to check. Reduce your casing depth. You can try carefully removing an isolated colony and then spraying the area with dilute bleach.
(I once accidentally sprayed a large area of colonized substrate with my antiseptic level bleach solution. After discovering my error and having been horrified, I waited, expecting death and destruction of the bed. It never happened)

You can also cover the suspected area with baking soda and spray that with water. If the contamination has not migrated beneath the surface...and the contamination source is not your underlying substrate you will temporarily halt the spread. I have kept the spread at bay for a week or more. But all you are doing is attempting to discover a flaw in your technique.

Are you using peat moss? Try another brand. Coir? (I don't like using coir in my casing mix but when I do I always sift, and I now sift my peat as well.. the sticks for some reason are conducive to trich well before the fines. I mentioned somewhere that some coir is intentionally treated with trich spores. We talked about how heavily contaminated materials need more sterilization than can be functionally autoclaved..

Check for fungus gnats, they will spread spores as well but primarily bacteria rather than fungus spores...contrary to the mites. But I have seen it happen.

Get your dishes an use them. If you see tiny trails of growth then you definitely have mites. And they seem to love Agar the little eastwards are hell to eradicate.


As I posted some time ago, you will never ever be rid of the green. It is now everywhere in your grow, on your food, in your bed, your hair, eyelashes, your jeans and fans and the corners of your home.

Even if you had been totally aware of this eventuality and tried as hard as you could to hold it off you will have failed to stop it. You would need an industrial or medical level clean room to absolutely combat it.

Thus, as I have preached, your best weapon is ensuing that the grow itself is not conducive to those spores germinating.

They like acidic conditions, dead air like the corners or at the boundaries. If, for instance, you use liners and the liner overhangs the substrate, you may well find that this tiny dead air space is the first place it will grow.

Pick a reasonable number of failures for each stage. For instance, my limit for dishes is five percent. 100 dishes should see no more than five or six trich contamination. Any more triggers intense scrutiny. Bags are at ten to fifteen percent as are bins or fruiting bags.

I am a straw guy. My edibles and other varieties are finally grown in chopped and cooked straw with a miniscule amount of aged horse manure. My straw mushrooms and oyster varieties, king being my favorite have a limit of 20 percent failure rate. 11 inch depth setups can go as high as 25 percent but that is the result of overheating in the center especially if the manure percentage is high enough to touch off composting in the center.

So.. pick your limits.

In short though, use those dishes.. making them is insanely easy, you do not need a hood if you pour it hot because the steam rises from the dish and blows the spores away.

And get with precision ph manipulation


Merry Christmas.
Thanks, ya I usually try to get rid of them once I see any green but been busy the last few days and it spreads quick. To the naked eye, it looks like it's coming from the sub But I haven't changed anything Really im even pcing it after bucket tek. I may just stop what I'm doing, deep clean, and start off small and everything new, it's getting worse I gotta be doing something wrong,I wonder if my presto PC is doing the trick anymore. Could modifying the weight to run at 16 psi silently have any negative effect?
 

canndo

Well-Known Member
Thanks. Ya i

Thanks, ya I usually try to get rid of them once I see any green but been busy the last few days and it spreads quick. To the naked eye, it looks like it's coming from the sub But I haven't changed anything Really im even pcing it after bucket tek. I may just stop what I'm doing, deep clean, and start off small and everything new, it's getting worse I gotta be doing something wrong,I wonder if my presto PC is doing the trick anymore. Could modifying the weight to run at 16 psi silently have any negative effect?
Higher temp and pressure would help but...it is after all a bomb, one of my cookers blew an over pressure release port and it was pretty scary. My wife might have been badly scalded had she checked on the thing just a few minutes earlier. A hell of a lot of water collected and dripped from the ceiling. It looked like far more than we had in the cooker.
 

Aeroknow

Well-Known Member
Higher temp and pressure would help but...it is after all a bomb, one of my cookers blew an over pressure release port and it was pretty scary. My wife might have been badly scalded had she checked on the thing just a few minutes earlier. A hell of a lot of water collected and dripped from the ceiling. It looked like far more than we had in the cooker.
I have 4 pressure cookers, two hot plates. I get 4 cycles in every day. I’ve had 2 blowouts so far. Why it happened each time i still don’t know but when that little piece of black safety thing pops off and out the lid everything on the inside is toast. But thats the worst i’ve had so far.
Here's some pictures of what i'm dealing with. Any thoughts?
View attachment 5354599View attachment 5354600View attachment 5354601
Oh fuck dude. That sure looks like the trich my tubs were getting. Are you micro pore taping holes? Does this happen before or after taping holes? Looks like its getting fucked before that top layer(or is it a casing layer?) even started to get colonized. My shit was fucking me right as the top layer was colonized. And it was all the way down through the cake by the time i realized i was contaminated.

Imo, if the shit is still happening even after sterilizing the coir/verm substrate, it IS either your spawn or you got a bigtime spore load of trich everywhere in the house. Bag tek time imo.

here’s a knew one i’m messing around with. It’s Stakz.
IMG_9080.jpegIMG_9090.jpeg
a 269g mushroom lol. I don’t like it when shit gets that big. I’ll take an even pinset all day over big fuckers.
It colonizes so rapidly i end up with some overlay. I’m messing around with fork tek and adding some FAE slits in the bags(taped with micro pore tape) and messing around with a real casing layer. Peat/verm and hydrated lime. Growing in bags you gotta find the right cube varieties.
 

MintyDreadlocks

Well-Known Member
Some Mazatapec mushrooms. Harvested just before Christmas. Came out to 34g dry. I enjoy growing them a lot. Very therapeutic and helps manage my excitement when I'm also growing buds. Keeps me from messing with my plants too much and gets me cultivating more medicine.
IMG_20231219_205432956.jpg
IMG_20231219_203644033.jpg
 
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7L!fTeD24

Well-Known Member
What does it mean when I have white floaters growing on the top of my liquid culture ? Starting to think that the room is just heavily infested with various types of mold spores. We're gonna have to tear everything down and clean really good I guess. So confused things went so well for so long. And now I can't get a single tub to work.
 
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MintyDreadlocks

Well-Known Member
What does it mean when I have white floaters growing on the top of my liquid culture ? Starting to think that the room is just heavily infested with various types of mold spores. We're gonna have to tear everything down and clean really good I guess. So confused things went so well for so long. And now I can't get a single tub to work.
Might be time to start exploring laminar flow considering you've been engaged in this hobby for some time now I think it would be a good investment if you go the DIY route.
 

7L!fTeD24

Well-Known Member
So I was making tubs out of this batch of CVG and this was the leftover. I just left it in the bucket sealed up here it is About a week later. This is also what's happening on the surface of my tubs. So either's just a bunch of Bold spores in the air and the room or my substrate is bad.20231228_084428.jpg
 

7L!fTeD24

Well-Known Member
So I was making tubs out of this batch of CVG and this was the leftover. I just left it in the bucket sealed up here it is About a week later. This is also what's happening on the surface of my tubs. So either's just a bunch of Bold spores in the air and the room or my substrate is bad.View attachment 5355751
Just dumped the bucket and it wasn't all the way through the substrate just On the top maybe some stuff landed on there when I was spawning
 
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