Successfully growing =)

Yeah, but the fact that Cubensis is a phototropic mushroom I assumed more natural light might encourage the mycelium to produce more 'shrooms. Incandescent light doesn't work worth a shit for plants. I figured the desk lamps would work well enough though.

 

.

 

I really dont think the type of light matters at all, fluoros work great on plants.

stamets says.....

Diffuse natural or exposure for 12 -16 hours/day of grow-lux type fluorescent light high in blue spectra at the 480 nanometer wavelength.

 

damn im getting really excited about the fruiting stage coming up.

i have one jar that seems to be leaps and bounds ahead of the rest. it should be fully colonized in a day or two, and i plan on allowing for further growth for about a week or so before i begin to get it fruiting.

i have 4 other jars besides this one that are pretty solid, but they are all looking as if they will be done colonizing at different times.

my plan at this point is to have one cake fruit at a time, which is also a little more conducive to my plan to keep all of this a secret to my parents as one cake will not require a huge growing tank.

anyways, my questions are there:

1. Upon removal of the cake from the mason jar, should i dunk it into water and let it sit for a day before laying it out on my perlite (which will have been saturated with water), or should i simply place the cake directly into the tank immediately thereafter?

2. Would i incur any negative results if i let cakes sit without fruiting for an extended period of time after they have reached full colonization?

im really excited, help me out guys and girls

 

LOL ! I find it really funny to have found this thread because it is exactly my situation. Well I mean I started a B+ culture and a Z strain culture around Sept. 10th and got my first jar fully colonized and transfered in the vivarium on Oct 19th.

I was wondering the same thing for birth dunking. I haven't done so for my first cake (the Z strain) but I'm thinking of it for the B+. All my other Z are dead :\

Can I dunk in the jar I used for colonization. I don't see why not except it might make it harder to remove the cake from the jar.

templeton, I've read about dunking and it can be done before birthing the cake. For the results, I really don't know yet if it would help that much. It is supposed to.

And yes you can leave the fully colonized jars sitting longer (I read it was ok for up to two weeks) but I really don't see why you'd want that. I'm so excited about birthing those babies

Do you break your cake when you birth it or you just leave it as is ?

 

I thought it was just to make sure that the mycelium has stabled itsself enough and won't come apart when you take the cakes out of the jars.



& where did you guys get your jars?

 

When the jar is fully colonized (you can see white everywhere and barely see the rice/verm), it should be stable enough to get it out of the container to be birthed. I found out that the bottom of the jar was especially hard to fully colonize because of lack of oxygen and really high moisture so when it was as colonized as it seemed it could, I flipped the jar upside down and tapped it a little bit to make the cake fall.

Make sure it's all mostly white 'cuz on one cake, some of the vermiculite stuck at the bottom and splitted the cake which resulted in infection. When the cake falls, there is some new air getting in the jar increasing the O2 but also the risk of contamination. Just be careful

Back to your thing, if you see white (even light) everywhere, the cake shouldn't break when you remove it. I should've taken pictures of that stage but it's too late now

I took my jars from a hardware store called Canadian Tire. Guess where I live The cakes seem pretty hard to remove from the jar so I guess they're not the best.

 

or you could just save yourself the trouble of doing all that crap and just leave the cakes in the jars...expose them to light during colonization for few minutes a day then when fully colonized expose to light for 2-3 hours a day but leave in jars to fruit....mushies will grow in the jar making it much easier

 

I have a few in there and am adding the last 2 today. They were taking forever to fruit so I transported them to a friends house where his rooms is always in the 70's. A few are growing nicely but the cakes themselves show signs of nothing. Just white with lumps and possible pins but nothing has happened in a few days for the white parts of the cakes. Might've been because they feel over during transporting? Lame. I usually learn things the hard way lol.

I got my jars at wal-mart

 

How long did you have them in the vivarium ? I got my first signs after 3-4 days and some small things seem to be growing. I'm confident they are mushroom but it is too early to tell. It's been 6 days and 18 hours they are in the terrarium now.

If you are getting close to winter and will start heating soon, I'd suggest you but your setup close to a heater but make sure the temperature won't go over 82F. If I remember well, mycelium will die at 86-88F but do not take any risk there. Maybe your thermometer isn't purely accurate.

I'm not sure if I want to leave the jars as is. I feel like it would reduce yields if they are only able to grow through the mouth. I had to remove 2 cakes today (a 500ml jar and a 250ml jar) and both were hard work as hell... gee I guess next time I won't compact verm+rice that much in the jars

 

It's not supposed to be compacted at all.

Fruiting has been taking a lot longer then I thought. I have no idea how long they've been in there, but it's been at least 2 weeks or more and I have a few coming off the first cake measuring a few inches in length. One of them is taller then the cake itself and it'll probably be a monster.

Any idea how to weigh these without a scale?
or rather how to dose without a scale.

EDIT::

Any ideas why they only grow off the bottom of the cakes?
http://img143.imageshack.us/img143/4521/lalalarz2.jpg

 

i bet that big guy is gunna be delicious

 

Get a scale They're pretty cheap in smoke shops or on eBay. Got one for like 15$ and it seems quite accurate compared to my friend's scale.

Also, I read today that you're *supposed* to put the cake on the same side it was colonized. Looking at your picture, it is "upside-down" but on PF's website, I read that it didn't matter. Seeing that your shrooms grow from the bottom rather than the top like mine leads me to the conclusion that it MIGHT change things a bit. Our jars both have the verm at the bottom but I flipped mine during colonization for the last 1½-2 weeks.

Since the first pinning of your monster, how long did it take to grow that tall ? I'm at week 1 after birth and no signs of pinning beside a few white headless sticks coming out of the cake.

UPDATE:

I just took a closer look at the bottom of the hidden side of my cake and there are 3 small pins coming out with a head.

 

Damn, so how many jars did you attempt to innoculate, and how many was free of contaminants?

Also you are doing this in a regular house hold as a first timer?

Also I think flipping it upside down may resolve your issue, as you may have faced it on the wrong side, just let the big guy rocket up and flip the cake?

Pf Tek said something about what side to face the cake

 

where did you guys get your spores from? any legit sites out there? haha

 

Most of them are. Use Shroomery's affiliates. They are guaranteed to be legit.

Normal household here, first time, 6 PF-style 1/2 pint jars. 1 lost to contamination (I assume it happened to the one I had knocked over). They were boiled for 80 minutes.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by placing the cake on the same side it was colonized.

Today is day 12 for the first cake (4th day for fruiting), not sure about the others but they all seem to be following in a fashion corresponding to the time they were put in. It's also noteworthy that the monster mushroom had been growing for 2-3 days before I started counting fruiting days (very, very slowly). I began to count those days when I transported the terrarium to my friends house where the average temp is nearly 10 degrees higher then at my house (78-80F). After the transport they began growing much, much faster.

So people are saying that I should flip all my cakes over (obviously wait 'till after the first flush for the ones that are already growing)?

 

http://www.geocities.com/butterweasels/9pfjars.jpg

Amazon strain inoculated on 10-18-07

 

Shroomery doesn't like remote linking.

 

fixed.. didn't know lol.

 

Good luck with those. What's the average temperature been like?