GRAIN SPAWN 101, Start to Finish Tutorial on How to Make Mushroom Grain Spawn from Liquid Culture

hey guys what's up and welcome back to the mushroom lab so as i was going through my videos i realized i was missing something i should have made this video earlier but i'm gonna go ahead and make it now i'm gonna make a video on just basic grain spawn preparation and uh now i did do a previous grain spawn video and in that video i showed you guys a hack on how you can use these big pickle jars to actually get 13 pounds of grain spawn out of one run with a 23 quart presto pc if you're just starting out growing mushrooms you don't need to use these big mega jars you're probably just going to want to use quartz quart jars hold about a pound of grain spawn they're super easy to manage easy to shake they're just a nice size to deal with we're gonna do quart jars i'm gonna flip the camera around and i'm gonna show you uh what kind of grain i'm using in my hydration technique and how i do everything and why i do it okay so here's our presto 23 quart and these are quart jars in here and you can see if you stack on top you can actually get 10 jars in there it's tight it's actually really tight um you know you may have to manipulate the jars one way or another but you can't get 10 in there i don't need to do 10 this time i'm just gonna do seven so you can get seven quarts nicely stacked across the bottom and so that's what we're gonna go with this time i'm gonna be using uh plastic lids with our micro pose injection port and filter disc setup so this is the wheat i'm using this is blue seal wheat and it's sold at feed stores as chicken feed and it's a 50 pound bag and it costs just a little over 20 dollars right now i used to get these for 14. back in the day which i would love to do again but now they're a little over 20 but that's 50 pounds of grain so that's quite a bit now scoop some out here so these are what the grains look like um it's pretty good stuff you know occasionally i'll find a sunflower seed or a piece of corn or bean or something in here and i just kind of pick it out but if you don't get everyone don't worry about it i basically used every kind of grain under the sun and wheat is my favorite probably followed by rye there's a lot of different grains you can use and you can make them work but wheat works really well and it's cheap in my area so it's kind of a no-brainer so obviously your grain is going to increase in weight when it hydrates and the amount it increases varies by what type of grain you're using with this wheat i've been using it forever so i know the ratio i got it down pretty good it's basically going to increase 40 percent uh by weight when i hydrate it so we want to end up with seven pounds of finished spawn so i'm going to start out with about five pounds of wheat and we'll get our scale going here and i'm gonna weigh out five pounds usually i'll go a little over maybe by a couple ounces um just because you never want to run short if i have a little extra i'll usually just throw it outside for the birds if you have a lot extra you mess up your measurement you can actually freeze it and store it for later so five pounds two ounces that should give us exactly what we need by the time it's fully hydrated so the hydration method i like to use is just a hot water soak basically and i'll let it soak overnight i'll get my my tap water basically as hot as it can get which is about 135 degrees and i'll i'm basically going to fill this up just enough to cover the grain plus an extra few inches you want to get some extra water in there because your grain is going to swell as it sits overnight and what's going to happen as this sits for 12 hours or so it's just going to perfectly hydrate the grain and you're not going to get any burst kernels and you're just going to end up with some some perfectly hydrated grain in the morning so there's other techniques you can use to hydrate your grain some people use like a simmer or a simmer and soak or some people actually just put their grain right in the jar with a pre-measured amount of water and just go ahead and pc it and allow it to hydrate in the pc all those can work but i just prefer this method another benefit of the the soak method is that these grain kernels are full of little bacterial endospores and bacterial endospores are basically a survival strategy that bacteria uses so these endospores are designed to survive really harsh conditions and they basically germinate and create new bacterial colonies when conditions are favorable so by soaking this overnight you're gonna trick those bacterial endospores into germinating and then they're gonna be more easily killed by the pc all right we got our nice steaming hot water in there and i'm just gonna cover this up and i typically just let it go overnight probably about 12 hours it'd be about perfect so we're just gonna check on it in the morning it is the next morning and you can see our wheat grains are looking nice and swoll from the overnight soak that's the cool thing about this tech is that if you start with hot water you'll have perfectly hydrated grains with no simmer necessary simmering does work well too problem is you have to stir like constantly otherwise your grains towards the bottom of the pan tend to burst on you and that's not what we want because burst grains definitely lead to a much higher risk of contamination so next thing we're going to do is i just have a strainer here this is actually one of those like fly covers if you're having picnics outside but i repurposed it as a giant strainer for doing grandspawn and uh yeah so i'm gonna take take my grain here i'm gonna dump it off in the strainer and then what we're gonna do is i just have a um this is just a clear like a shallow clear plastic storage tote here and i have just a clean bath towel in it and i just use these little clips to hold the sides in so the sides don't collapse on you and so we're gonna pour our grain in the strainer and we're gonna rinse it real well with some cold water and then i'm just gonna dump it out on this towel and we're gonna leave it sit for a while um usually i'll leave it sit for i'd say at least three hours um sometimes you can go longer definitely probably up to like eight hours and that'll just allow your grain to kind of dry on the surface it'll still be perfectly hydrated on the inside but you want the surface dry you don't really want to pack your grain into your jars really wet or you'll end up you know after the pc you'll be just have way too much moisture in there so definitely want to let them sit down on a towel for a while to kind of air dry and what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna go ice fishing for three four hours probably and then i'll come back and pack it into the jar so that's my plan [Music] at this point too as i'm rinsing you know i'll kind of move the grain around see if there's any weird stuff in there i do occasionally find uh little treasures in here like beans or corn mystery mystery grain but uh this stuff right now is looking pretty clean so there's something a little piece of like wheat stock there or something so if you see anything just throw it out of there if you miss something it's not a big deal don't sweat it once it's good and rinse just dump it out on your towel and i'll just kind of spread it around get a nice even layer and usually i'll take these side ends just kind of tuck them in cover it up and you can come back and like i said three four five hours and your grain will be perfect ready to pack in jars uh you can speed this process up if you have like a fan blowing on it but the goal here is just to kind of air dry that surface of your grain so it's not too wet when you put it in your jars we are back and our grain is ready to be packed in our quart jars i'll show you guys a close-up here you can see those kernels are nice and hydrated and plump still but the surface has had a chance to air dry they don't look really wet so that's important point to remember uh wetter is better with some things in life but mushroom cultivation is not one of them we're looking for hydrated not wet uh when we're dealing with any kind of mushroom substrates because too wet just gonna burn you every time but we are ready to pack our seven quart jars um we're going to be using our pp5 plastic canning jar lids with our micro pose filtered disc injection port set up this is what i'm going to use on all seven jars and if you want more information on what kind of lids to use i have a couple videos on those and i just made one that talks all about different models of plastic canning jar lids and which ones i recommend and where to get them and all that so i'm going to uh load our jars up and what i usually use is just a plastic cup like this just scoop it up and dump it in and uh that's it pretty simple we're gonna uh fill our seven jars up get them capped off put a foil lid on each one and then they're gonna go in the pc this is about how full i typically fill my grain jars whether i'm doing pints or quarts or even those big boy pickle jars usually about up to where it starts to taper you do want to definitely leave yourself room so you have the ability to shake these in case you want to shake to redistribute moisture or speed up colonization our grain jars are all set ready to go in the pc um i did have a little bit of grain left over over there not much so they're looking good i'm just going to cover each one with a foil lid these are foil lids i reuse these so each one is just going to get a cap for their bath in the pressure cooker and with this style lid uh once they come out of the pressure cooker the foil lid comes off and it never goes back on so just for the pressure cooker session and before we put them in there i have my two quarts of water here and as always don't overload your pc with water this two quarts is going to do just fine for a 90 minute run we have the presto locked and loaded on our wearing pro 1300 watt side burner and i gotta plug it in still but we're gonna crank it all the way up to five and just let it run now in my last grain spawn video i had people commenting saying did you not read the directions you need to leave the rocker off for 10 minutes let steam come out for 10 minutes after you turn the heat on before you place the rocker i know it says that in the directions um basically what that does is it allows all the air to clear out of the chamber and uh so the chamber is basically you're sure the chamber is full of steam when it pressurizes you start the pressurization process okay i get that this time i'm going to do it hopefully that'll make everybody happy the point i was trying to get across is when you run thousands of pounds of spawn through these things like i have eventually you're gonna forget to do that and you're just gonna throw the rocker on kick the heat on and let it go and i've done that a bunch of times and it still turns out fine i still get good sterilization i still i don't get any contamination but again i'm not canon salmon here i'm not giving any advice related to food preparation i'm just making mushroom spawn and i'm telling you if you forget to do it with this pc it's going to come out fine so don't worry about it but this time in honor of all those who commented and told me to read the directions i'm gonna leave the rocker off and i'm gonna let steam come out escape from the uh from the valve here for about 10 minutes then we'll place the rocker start the pressurization process we're going to get it up to 15 psi and at that point we'll start the timer and we're going to run it for 90 minutes at 15 psi it is the next day and our pc and our grain are all cooled down and ready for inoculation i have the table set up here with the flow hood running and we're going to be doing some liquid culture that's how i start all my spawn and we have the oyster bar set up here these are all from gary from fresh from the farm fungi and if you guys haven't checked him out uh he has a youtube channel he does some really cool stuff so check him out and so far i love his cultures and he actually sent me one for free the one on top there is a michigan oyster which i'm excited to grow so we got the michigan oyster on top and then we have his uh black pearl king and then we have a true king or a plural serengi and uh so we're gonna be shooting our jars up with liquid culture uh typically i put about four or five cc's in each jar and these are 20 cc syringes if you have some left over in your syringe just uh stick them in a ziploc bag and refrigerate them and they'll last for a while so we're going to be moving our jars out in front of the flow hood here now i also want to say a couple things here uh you do not need a flow hood to do this method uh you can just do it in a really clean room i know people that do it in clean rooms and they have really high success rates that's a cool thing about liquid culture you don't have to actually open the jars up to inoculate them you're just shooting right through an injection port if you start cracking lids in an open room and dropping agar wedges in there odds are you're gonna get contamination or at least really high rates of contamination so i will tell you in your mushroom growing adventures you are going to run into liquid culture haters i've been doing liquid culture for 20 years with ridiculously high success rates you're going to but you're going to run into people that are going to say oh you shouldn't do liquid culture it's really prone to contamination it doesn't work good liquid culture is only really prone to contamination if you suck at it so if you follow the methods i show you it'll work great i promise you even the large-scale commercial growers are starting to switch over to liquid culture for starting their grain i'm gonna crack my pressure cooker and we're gonna move our jars in front of the flow hood and as i do that i'm going to pull the foil lids off because the foil lids are no longer needed at this point and we're going to shoot them up with lc and put them in a storage tote for incubation i don't incubate my jars in open air i never do that i always incubate them in a closed storage tote that just controls the air movement around them and there's much less risk of contamination if you keep them in a storage tote so as always i'm going to move the camera back and you guys can watch me work in front of the flow hood and as always guys everything on the table has been sanitized with 70 isopropyl prior to inoculation [Music] [Music] okay i'm gonna start my inoculations but uh one thing i forgot to mention too you might have noticed in the video there as i pull the jars out of the pc you definitely want to snug that lid back down sometimes they're tight but commonly they will loosen just a little bit in the pc so as soon as i lift them up i'm checking that lid for tightness snugging it back down and then removing the foil lid and in front of the flow hood [Music] [Music] do [Music] all right that's it guys everything's knocked up uh it took me about 10 minutes two seven jars not too bad so just make sure you're diligent with your labeling i always keep a sharpie on the table and label your jars syringes whatever as you go so you don't get confused as you're working so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to give the jars a little shake so when you pc typically you'll have some uneven moisture distribution it'll be a little wetter at the bottom a lot of times plus i just squirted about five cc's lc into each jar which is also going to settle to the bottom so i'm just going to give them a light shake and that'll redistribute the moisture and mix that lc around that's just the way i like to do it you don't have to do that but it seems to work better for me do i'm just using a basic propane torch to sterilize my needle with the trigger on it a lot of people like to use an alcohol burner there's a lot of different options this is just what i've always used gets hot real quick but just be careful obviously you're working with rubbing alcohol which is highly flammable and flame so caution advise basically i'm i'm flaming the needle before i inject through the injection port getting it nice and glowing red hot and i have a paper towel that's completely soaked with isopropyl so after i flame the needle uh i kind of hold that isopropyl soaked towel over it briefly just to cool it and wipe the soot off and then i go ahead and inject the jar um technically you're taking the needle from sterilized to sanitized by doing that with the paper towel but all i can tell you is that's the way i like to do it and it always works so as always do what you're comfortable with but typically i do uh i'll do two jars and then i'll re-flame the needle every every couple jars so if you're doing a run of like six jars in front of the flow hood you know flame it cool it inject a couple flame it again so on so on so on um if you have any other questions about that procedure just hit me up in comments or i do go through it in more detail in some of my other videos like my liquid culture videos so our jars are now in the storage tote this is the kind of container i like to use there's holes drilled in it that are stuffed with balls of poly fill and i am going to put the lid on the polyfill will allow a little air in and out one one thing you got to watch out for is these little filter discs on top of your jar lids you want those nice and dry when you put them in your totes they will dry out a little in here as well with the air exchange but i do typically leave my jars sit in front of flow hood for just a little bit or you can just let them air dry but you don't want your synthetic filter discs on top staying wet for a prolonged period of time because those can actually grow mold right on the disc and that mold will punch right through your jar and ruin your grow so we are all set here and now it's the fun part just get to watch them grow a quick note on light intensity and colonization as well typically when i have jars incubating whether it be lc or grain i'll cover the tub with a just a bath towel just to shade them a little bit a little bit of indirect light does not hurt the mycelium at all you just don't want any um like direct incandescent light or direct sunlight or anything like that that will actually hurt them or slow their growth but just a little ambient light is not a big deal so i just covered them with a towel and they'll do fine it's been about a week since we inoculated these jars and i just pulled them out of the container i had them in and i got them in front of the flow hood with the flow hood running and that's because i'm going to do a shake on them uh we got some nice colonization going on here um you can see the camera's picking that up we got some nice linear oyster mycelium growing there but uh it's spotty you know it's here and there the whole say the jars are anywhere from a quarter to maybe half colonized at this point so i'm just going to give them a shake and redistribute everything in there and that's going to speed up our colonization i typically do one shake at about this stage here anywhere from a quarter to half colonized and that's usually enough especially with an aggressive species like oyster i did just check the lids for tightness when i pulled them out of the tub and i gave the jars a little wipe down with some rubbing alcohol obviously you have to be really careful if you're labeling the jars like i do i just use sharpie to uh black sharpie to label the jars so when you're wiping them down with rubbing alcohol you got to be careful that you're not wiping your labels off as well if you guys don't have a flow hood and you are using plastic lids you do have to be careful because plastic lids are great they're easy to use but they do not seal as well as a metal lid does unless you're using a plastic lid that has like a silicone gasket these do not so i'm going to go ahead and just shake them anyway because i have the flow hood but if you don't there's a couple different things you can do you can get some parafilm like they use for sealing petri dishes and you can just seal this lower cap edge and that'll get you a nice seal like that and then you could probably shake an open air i do have a video specifically on different types of plastic jar lids used for mushroom cultivation so check that out but i'm just gonna let's let the camera run here and you can see how i shake these up i'm not gonna get real aggressive with them you're just looking for a light shake kind of mix everything up and then they're going to go back into the tub and probably within another week or two we'll have fully colonized jars so so this is going to be the last installment in this video guys but i didn't want to call it a done deal until i had some fully colonized jars to show you so these black pearl kings bpk finished out first and they are looking beautiful and some beautiful linear oyster mycelium in there uh the michigan oysters aren't far behind and the kings are a little bit behind that they all should be ready in a couple days i'm going to spawn them to some pasteurized fuel pellets and get some grows going so i'm looking forward to that i also wanted to mention uh this is the stage you want them at basically when you want to spawn them to substrate you really don't want to let them go until they're like a solid block of mycelium because at that point they'll be really hard to shake up and break up and distribute into your substrate especially with species with really tenacious mycelium like some oyster reishi turkey tail species like that so basically when you get them to this stage they're ready to be spawned out and uh just let me know uh in comments if you guys have any other questions or feel free to comment make suggestions tell me how you do your grain i always love to hear that stuff so we'll catch you next video

Channel: Renegade Mushrooms

Views: 177,522

Keywords: grain spawn, mushroom grain spawn, how make grain spawn, grain spawn tutorial, mushroom spawn, grow mushrooms, how grow mushrooms, grain spawn beginner, lc to grain, liquid culture to grain, grain spawn prep, grain spawn preparation, make mushroom spawn, grain spawn vlog, grain spawn soak, grain spawn simmer, grain spawn jars, grain spawn jar

Id: iWKnTKRwsU8

Length: 27min 58sec (1678 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 21 2022