Birthing a Monotub: how to make a mushroom cake

hey everybody this is pops coming to you from the mush lab today's video is to explain how to birth a mono tub when we talk about birthing a mono tub we mean basically doing our sub and our spawn mix and we're going to show how we do it in a 54 quart sterilite tub today there's a couple of brief things we're going to go over quickly before we actually get into the mix just take a couple of minutes and explain the concept of ratio and subspawn mix we also want to talk about the idea that those ratios stay the same no matter what size tub you're using let me explain what i mean when we're talking about a i don't know if this cameraman's able to move in a little bit on this or you know we're still learning how to do this filming part of all of this and by the way if you like any of the stuff that i'm saying here and you could go on youtube and put a like thing in there and maybe even subscribe to pop shrooms we would really appreciate that so the uh ratio typically when we're doing the kind of fruit growing that we're talking about here and it's pretty generic for most of the different kind of fruits that we're talking about the different strains the different types of wood loving gourmet edibles all of the different kinds these are pretty much the same concepts same numbers that we're going to talk about for all of those so you can also change these numbers a little bit when you're getting further into your own grow and understanding what you're up to but if you're starting out and that's probably why why you're watching a video like this my mantra my concept constantly is a be nature do everything we can to even though we're mimicking uh i mean we're in a laboratory kind of set up we really want to do what we can to mimic nature so a lot of what we're going to talk about will bring back down to nature and the second thing is stay basic the whole thing that we're doing here it's already a tough sport i call it a sport sometimes it's already a tough sport you don't need to make it tougher you don't need to add a bunch of rules that aren't in the game there's just a couple of basic things we stay basic you're gonna you're gonna have some wins later on flower it up later on add the things experiment test absolutely but if you want to really do this well and you want to start out with some wins start out basic follow just the basic rules all of that to say one of your basic rules is two to one ratio of sub to spawn what's sub pop we always hear this word sub but what's sub pop substrate substrate really is a soil mix that's all substrate is substrate ends up being why do we call it a substrate it's just this thick cake material that we're going to end up creating in the bottom of our tub it's a substrate so in our lingo we've cut shut we've shortened that down we call it sub we also are going to have a grain spawn the grain spawn is something that you'll bring to the tub already to the mix you've created your grain spawn it's whatever kind of grain you've used it's rye or a corn or an oat or a millet or something it's fully colonized and you're now ready to take your grain spawn and add it to your substrate soil mix that's our green spawn for this for this video so the grain spawn with your sub you're going to put two parts of substrate in with one part of spawn so if i'm going to give a random number if i'm going to do 10 pounds 10 pounds of substrate i would do 5 pounds of spawn because i'm doing two times the amount of five so two times the amount of whatever this is is what this number will be we'll give it another number we're going to say it's going to be a hundred we'll do a hundred pounds of this how many pounds of spawn would i need pops i would need 50 pounds that's how we come up with our ratios so it won't matter what size tub we use this is actually a mono tub if i use this i have to figure out how much weight do i want to put in this and then of that weight this percent of it will be actually 66 of it will end up being the sub and another 33 of it would end up being the spawn so every single different size tub that we can come up with you can figure out exactly how much sub and how much spawn you need to put in for this mix having said that we've already in our industry pretty much figured it out we have figured out that to do a 54 quart sterilite tub which is very standard here in the industry and a matter of fact there's a video coming of how you create this mono tub basically we do a video on how to where all the holes are drilled and the concepts and show you how to put liners in and all of that um our 54s are the standard to this industry so pretty much everything that we're going to do we're going to talk about 54 the numbers have already been figured out for us to do a 54 quart sterilite tub these are the numbers you want to do is this going to come off for you okay we'll go this way if we're going to do a 54 quart and why i know it's taking a long time it's kind of important here's your tub your holes here there's your your other one that's our tub when we make our cake in the tub we want our cake to be approximately three to four inches thick this is your substrate your soil mix this whole part here this is going to be approximately three to four inches excuse me three to four inches thick that section right there so we've already figured it out that to get a three to four inch thick cake in a 54 quart tub we need five pounds of substrate five pounds of substrate how many pounds then would we need of spawn we would need two and a half pounds of spawn to have a ratio of two to one so we would want two and a half pounds of spawn boy that's a wreck how i drew that but here we go so we're gonna put two and a half pounds of spawn in the tub and we're gonna put five pounds of substrate in the tub that gives us our two to one ratio and that's how we'll start out birthing the tub okay so we approach our tub and from here on everything we do we want to do with the level of cleanliness some of these numbers that i talked to you about i've already pre pre pre-weighed so the things that you're going to need to do to have excuse me to make your tub is going to be the tub you're going to need your tub should come to the table very clean we've already cleaned this up real good we're going to do one more small clean on it as we build our tub so you clean your tub bring it to the table you're gonna want a scale so you know that you've got five pounds of substrate and about two and a half pounds of spawn can you have a little less pops yes can you have a little more pops yes you can add a little more you can have a little less two pounds is okay with five pounds three pounds is okay with five pounds of substrate don't get too far off of those mixes at this point in the in the game for you stay basic so you've got your scale now you've figured out that you want five pounds of substrate and we here when we uh pasteurize and make our substrates we package it in five pounds because we know that when we're ready to make a tub we just have to grab a package and that package is an already pre-weighed correct amount for the tub so we'll have a five pound package of substrate and in this case here we have two pounds both of these bags just a little more than two pounds we have two pounds of substrate so we have a scale scissors to open our bags uh substrate spawn we're going to have an alcohol 70 alcohol spray 30 water we're gonna have a mister with us we like to have lice all around when we do stuff we're going to spray our our air get our air quality make sure it's decent you're going to have a pair of plastic gloves some paper towels here you're going to there's a couple of options there's actually a lot of options for the point where you're going to put filters at the end after we've built the tub birth to the tub we're going to put filters here we're going to there's a there's different options for filters on the market right now there's a fantastic filter out there by a company called micro pose and this filter right here is already pre-adhesived around the edges and it goes i'll just show you briefly it goes right here covers the port perfectly we use those these here a lot so it works just like that now for the purpose of the video we're going to end up using the poly fill because that's pretty much the tradition and available to a lot of people very easily even though these are as well but i did want to introduce these to you and show you that these are out there and they're really a very they're a neat product so you'll want polyfill which is basically that same stuff that you use to fill your pillows and the final thing you're going to want is a liner for your tub this is a liner that we make here there's different liners probably that you different ideas for liners that you can come up with we also have a video coming out how to make this liner to fit this tub we all you can use that same idea that we show you how to do it for this tub to make a liner for any tub that that you choose so it's the same concept okay let's get started i'm gonna not talk as much just sort of go through the steps and just explain them as i go so moving some of this stuff out of our way i guess the first thing you want to do is just make sure you're clean so often just get my airspace we stay real clean here as clean as you probably can in most home lab situations but we also will always monitor our air quality as much as we can especially if we're not working specifically in front of any kind of fans or fresh air flows every so often as you go just especially if you find yourself touching something foreign something outside of your zone of work here then go ahead and wipe your hands down again then i want to just these have all been washed before this show but we're going to wash them again just a quick show of how you might want to get them washed down use our alcohol spray get each of these elements clean slide down the funny one on this one is lots of times after you've done this side you forget the underside so what i'll do is i'll take my lid i've already sprayed some of this on my lid so now since this side's clean i can turn it over and wipe off this side and why are we doing all of this we're just trying to get any kind of germs bacteria contaminants anything that's going to go into the tub right alongs we're gonna try to keep them from going okay so most of this cleaning we did before like i said but you can't be too clean this is a place you just can't be too clean birthing a tub is real important we're taking it out of a completely 100 percent sterile environment that's inside of and we're bringing it out into the world we're showing it the world for the first time you don't want to show it a dirty world so let's get this guy clean nice okay i'm going to take my liner and i'm going to put it inside the tub get a little close-up on this we've got our liner inside here ready for our substrate mix next it might get this guy wiped off don't forget to wipe around your seal area here that's an important spot set that to the side for a moment okay so we are in pretty clean tub we're feeling good about all of that we're going to we're going to need some more alcohol spray so would you mind getting me some more alcohol spray it's over on the table over on the other side of the lab over there down on the lower shelf i'm just going to fill this up as we talk okay so what we do now is let's set this over here for them what we do now is we take our sprayer the first step thank you very much would you mind filling that up for me thank you very much so our first step we're going to spray the bottom of our liner that's the first thing we like to do is get the bottom of our liner already moist okay a nice little sprayer bottom of the the liner moist i'm gonna take my pre-measured five pounds of substrate what kind of substrate what's the substrate mix pops we have different kinds of substrate mixes and in this case right here we have a substrate mix of um 60 thank you thank you very much for uh helping me with that alcohol um so this substrate is it has 60 um coco coir 30 vermiculite 5 worm castings and in this case i'm not recommending this particular substrate but um this one has a little bit of straw in it you'll see just a little bit of straw in this one so i'm gonna take and with my substrate and just dust the bottom of my liner where i had got it moist earlier i'm putting just enough substrate to cover the bottom of my liner and sort of wick up that moisture that i had just sprayed to the liner okay this camera doing okay on that or you want me to tilt the tub it's doing all right okay so that's our situation there now i'm going to go ahead add a little bit more water i'm not even water just sort of a light mist there's different ways to at this point now there's different ways to birth a tub there's methods they call the layer method where you would put it in now i've got one layer of soil i could now put in a small layer of of spawn and then over the top of that another small layer of substrate over that another small probably another layer of spawn and depending on the volume you probably get two layers of spawn in there in the in the in the layer method i call it the lasagna method um it's not what we do typically here and it has its its own uh benefits that come with risks back to being more natural or b nature we think we think that if you see the mycelium network out there on in the earth it's just mixed in there and it's it's a it goes where it goes and there are no set layers already prescribed by mother nature so when we're in the lab and we're prescribing those layers it's understandable and it's it's a neat tech but for now if you stay basic the basic tech is going to be we're going to do a nice mix we're going to try to recreate mother nature in this tub by just having a mycelial network that's really mixed and spread out through all of the substrate and later when it's fruiting time we should be seeing fruit up just about everywhere in that tub as a result of a nice layer not layered but a nice mix so having put that first small dusted layer on the bottom of the tub i'm going to go ahead and put both of my bags of substrate right in oh god this smells so good oh my gosh when you first open these bags it can smell so amazing gosh this is i love it okay in the corner gussets of these bags that's there's some stuff right always in these gussets that because the life sort of starts in the corner of these bags so i'm always wanting to get that out god it smells so good can you smell it from the camera today can you gosh it smells good okay next bag we'll just get her in there stop smelling the spawn pops get in the tub so okay i got her in the tub got it out of a bag [Applause] now thank you again for that alcohol spray thank you so before i actually touch my spawn i'm just going to get myself a lot more time but make sure your hands are dry after doing that not wet with your alcohol and touch but okay now i'm going to this is the some of the fun stuff in the world to do i'm breaking up my spawn i used rye as the grain on this so it breaks up real nice and doesn't clump nearly as much as some of the others like say a popcorn or something but you'll see i'm reaching in here how much do you break it up pops even that clump is a little bit big for us we're going to even want to take a clump that size and break it up so the idea is inoculation points these are inoculation points the more inoculation points that i can spread across this whole substrate oh my gosh the smell is amazing um the more inoculation points look at this are you getting a nice close-up of that yeah good shot look at that so i'm just getting my i'm going to break all my grain up real nice obviously i'll usually do it a lot faster not doing all this talking but i first make a little pile of all my grain break it up pretty good don't have too big of clumps anywhere at all those clumps don't serve me as clumps they serve me better as grains spread across the fields if you consider this a field that you're planting i wouldn't want to put a big clump like that if i could put that across the field okay now i'm going to take about half of what i have left of my five pounds and i'm going to put it right on top of that right on top of it if you remember before i had moisture as my first level i had the dusted soil as my second level then i put in a little bit of we put in all that substrate broke it up then we put this pile on top now i'm gonna mist this pile so i'm adding a little bit of water to the whole situation but not a lot i've already was at proper field capacity with my substrate how do we get to proper field capacity pops you have to watch our other videos they're coming up now here's the here's kind of the neat part here's what you're doing you're going to take your hand you're going to reach all the way down through this pile and you're going to grab almost the bottom of the that liner where we were maybe the camera can get there i'm reaching all the way down and remember there was moisture at the bottom of that liner i'm actually grabbing that up and doing this as i go so i'm reaching down and i'm pulling up that moisture back up through the seed through the substrate and i'm doing this as i go so my seeds are all getting spread in through that substrate and you'll almost never see look at this this is just phenomenal okay so that's what i'm doing i'm grabbing down going kind of like a claw going down to the bottom grabbing oh see look at that all of that see that seed i'm bringing up with me and it's bringing up moisture into the soil and i'm just getting look at this see that mix but i have to go down to the bottom and come up with it it's this is kind of fun you're just raining it right back down and all of that mycelium that was on the grain is spreading through the substrate as we do this but gently it's doing it very gently and it's doing it with water attached to it almost raining back down into here so once i've done that i get a nice spread spread this out even it up there's a lot of other techs out there that at this point you could make mounds you could you could uh not pack the the cake so much there's different things you could do here at this point we're staying basic remember our original mantra stay basic what we want to do when you're first starting out just get yourself this cake like it is pat her down make it nice and level she's just looking amazing mushrooms like to grow around the edges they just do so that's where your moisture and all of that builds up so they they like to grow around the edges what we'll like to do here take your fingers go like this get your dirt that's loose around the edges almost like you're making this how i make a meatloaf yeah pops makes me looks i just take my edge i'm going to go like that and sort of tighten up my edges because your mushrooms when they grow around those edges they're going to when you go to pull them out they're going to take a bunch of dirt with them if you do this they won't take as much dirt with them later on in the game so you're real close to being done here now we've got this layer with all of our mix finished we're going to give another mist to this layer i hope you guys have been keeping track of all the misted layers because basically you're not overdoing it with water this is misting not spray this is a fog a mist something coming over the mountains across the earth this isn't rain this isn't we're not drowning anything there's a nice little atomizer mister so final after we've done that mist we're going to case the top of the the the whole mix there's different texts out there about casing in this particular one since we're staying basic and we're doing a basic mono tub we're going to use the same exact substrate that we used to build this whole thing we're gonna use to cover it so the last amount of what we had of that five pounds is gonna now go in to the to the tub and it's gonna become our final earth layer over the mycelial network that we've created so this is the final layer of earth that we put over the top it's called casing in our in our business here of mycology but we could also i like to call it frosting um i call it that all the time we're frosting the cake so i have a couple little clumps in there break those up and then lightly i want that frosting to cover the top of my cake like so i was a little bit moist underneath i have a natural frosted covering to the cake that we just made and i'm going to do the same thing on this one i'm going to walk around the edges tighten down my edges and this right here i can tell you is going to be one beautiful tub okay so we'll get our mister we're going to mist it again this final mist well there will be one more after this but this mist right here we're going to go ahead and miss the side walls too because we're not going to have to go back into the tub with our hands for much more than to put our filters in so if the camera can get an idea of the kind of moisture level we're looking for there that's about all we need our tub wall is moist the top of the frosting just a little moist definitely not wet wet but moist that's what we have so we take our gloves off at this point our final thing is we're going to add our filters to our tub so using polyfill i'll just plug my holes like so this is one of the reasons micro pose is a very very good product because you don't have the the um the polyfill part sticking into the tub itself but if you stay clean this isn't a that big of a deal so plug in our plug the tub plug it up and basically these our other videos explain the whole concept of a mono tub but these are our our air flow holes where you get your fresh air exchange and this poly fill you're going to want to just keep it in the whole time the whole grow some people plug these they take them in they take them out they'll they close them sometimes they open them sometimes let's go back to being basic you put your polyfill in day one today you don't take it out until you're ready to clean your tub to use it the next time and that polyfill of course just throw that away you just use new polyfill so we have plugged our tub beautiful tub i i i wish you guys could smell how good it smells that that substrate and that spawn mix its mother nature is in the house so our final thing we're going to go ahead and take our lid this is key key to tub maintenance we have other videos on top maintenance but key when we've started our tub we have misted our walls we want to mist our lid the whole concept here being we're trapping moisture we're trapping humidity in this container so boom locker down that right there is a birth 54 quart mono tub it will go from here into a colonizing tent or chamber or whatever conditions are you have it should go from here to a dark chamber for a period of approximately 10 days colonization period of these about 10 days a temperature of between 72 and 75 degrees if you do that and you built a tub pretty much following the guidelines of what we've done here today you're going to have a really nice tub so that's pops at the mush lab i hope you understood and i hope it was uh something that that everybody understands just said that um if you like what you saw please push a like and if you feel like subscribing we would appreciate that too so pops at the mushlab signing off

Channel: Pop Shrooms

Views: 144,133

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Id: Wb8tS_wiUeM

Length: 35min 46sec (2146 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 19 2021