pf tek noob, where are my mushrooms? am i being impatient?

Hi guys,

I inoculated a bunch of jars at the end of Nov. and after about 3 weeks they looked 100% white, I waited about a week after that to make sure they were done, then around new year's i took them out of the jars, washed them and soaked them for a day. I got a big plastic tub at target, drilled some holes on the side, filled the bottom with wet perlite, rolled the cakes in verm and put them in the chamber on top of jar lids, i've been spraying the sides and fanning 3x a day and it seems nice and humid in there. they smell mushroomy and nothing bad seems to be happening, but nothing else has happened either, and they've been in there for about 10 days now. is something going wrong or am i just being impatient? the top of the chamber is a solid color so i hung a light over the side of the chamber instead. could that be the problem? it's a fairly bright light, 26W cfl.

It can be a nervous wait for the first pinheads to start appearing, once they do the growth explodes. I was convinced I could see them growing the last I did a batch. I once waited 20+ days for anything to show. They really don't need that much light, I just used a few leds in the top of the box.

Sounds like you are doing everything right. Just be patient. I've had them take 2 weeks from dunk and roll to see pins. It's not Albino A+ or Puerto Rican is it? They were a bitch to fruit.

If there is a problem (and I'm not implying there is) it could be with the amount of holes drilled into your shotgun fc. The teks I've seen are sometime pretty vague on that. Often times people don't drill enough.

They're Cambodian and Ecuadorian. I think I should have enough holes, there's about 4 on the long sides and 2 on the short sides that I did with like a half inch bit. Patience I can do, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't messing anything up that I could fix. The stuff I've read on growing mushrooms is pretty in depth but their time estimates make it seem like you go from spore to shroom in 4 weeks.

A shotgun chamber uses MANY holes on ALL six sides of the tote and the tote HAS to be elevated from each corner so air flow can travel underneath the tote. Mediocre results are achieved at best with modified units like you have. Build it right, get better results. Simple. Did you know the #1 pinning trigger is fresh air?? Good luck mate.

sonar said:

Sounds like you are doing everything right. Just be patient. I've had them take 2 weeks from dunk and roll to see pins. It's not Albino A+ or Puerto Rican is it? They were a bitch to fruit.

If there is a problem (and I'm not implying there is) it could be with the amount of holes drilled into your shotgun fc. The teks I've seen are sometime pretty vague on that. Often times people don't drill enough.

Click to expand...

Wtf... I just started both of those strains.

Actually I didn't know the trigger for pinning is fresh air. I dunno, the community for mushroom growing is way less helpful than people here are for just growing regular old weed. The mushroom dudes have more acronyms than the army, there's like 4 million different ways to do things, and stuff from 2007 is "way outdated tech". I guess I'll drill some more holes in the box (although I'm not messing around with the bottom) and see what happens. You think a box fan pointing at the box would be helpful?

i thought i was being overkill with my holes because i was going by this dude: https://www.rollitup.org/hallucinatory-substances/345213-how-mushroom-brf-tek.html who basically made one hole and stuffed it with polyfill.

uallach said:

Actually I didn't know the trigger for pinning is fresh air. I dunno, the community for mushroom growing is way less helpful than people here are for just growing regular old weed. The mushroom dudes have more acronyms than the army, there's like 4 million different ways to do things, and stuff from 2007 is "way outdated tech". I guess I'll drill some more holes in the box (although I'm not messing around with the bottom) and see what happens. You think a box fan pointing at the box would be helpful?

Click to expand...

i totally agree with you

WBS, BRF, SGFC, Hpoo, Verm, PMP, FFAE, FAE, TIT, D&R, G2G, 50/50-has 2 meanings

Along with casing and substrate and overlay and many others- What is worst is that people use different terms for the same thing and the same terms for different things

Finding solid info for a newbie is very difficult.

It is quite tough to get a basic understanding of the stuff, but once you read for about a month it will make sense

Careful, the number one pinning trigger is not really fresh air but low concentrations of Co2 - unless your fresh air has plenty of humidity, you are going to have problems.

ok, so part of the problem is that i'm just an idiot. i went to drill more holes, so i took out the cakes for a minute, and when i was putting them back i noticed that some of the cakes actually are pinning, and quite a bit. i think everything is fine now. anything i have to watch out for as far as contamination goes?

Yeah don't touch them.

well, half of the cakes are pinning now. i dunno if they're the ecuadorian or cambodian because i mixed them up (because i don't really care) but i assume one is faster than the other. thanks for the help, folks. how long does it take to go from shroom nub to bona fide shroom?

uallach said:

well, half of the cakes are pinning now. i dunno if they're the ecuadorian or cambodian because i mixed them up (because i don't really care) but i assume one is faster than the other. thanks for the help, folks. how long does it take to go from shroom nub to bona fide shroom?

Click to expand...

Depending on temperature, as little as two days from pin to pick but count on 4.

ok, so they grew! nice. like half of the cakes didn't do anything, i think they got dried out by the time i fixed my fruiting chamber. i'm going to pick what's on there and then dunk them all again and drill some holes in the bottom of the chamber to make it even better. just one question: two cakes looked a little questionable to me, check it out:


I think the first one is fine, I was just worried a little bit about the blueness but I think that's probably normal enough. The second one, when I moved it, a little cluster of shrooms fell off, and you can see that some of them seem like they might be rotting a bit near where they connect to the stem, but i'm not really sure. should i pick these and reuse the cake, pick and throw away, pick and cut the parts off that might be rotten? thanks in advance.