Home Mycology/ Mushroom Cultivation Cliffs Notes... Step-by-Step, Spore to Spore.

what's up y'all today's video is a long one i basically uh i've been growing these mushrooms for i don't know over a month now and document every step of the way how i did things and how you know why i did it but this is a gourmet mushroom called deer caps and it is i grew this this is a dung slash um enriched soil loving mushroom so there's like 14 000 species of mushroom so you can't do it by species but uh the two broad categories are donald slash enriched soil loving and then wood loving mushrooms so i decided to grow a enriched soil loving mushroom for my first attempt and a document and all the steps and process involved in getting uh a this is the first flush so in getting to this point whereas uh from basically from spore or liquid culture uh starting there and going step by step process all the way to the end which is the fruits which are these so um since it's such a long video the whole purpose of the video is to kind of be a a guide for beginners to be able to go through step by step and follow along and make sure that they are successful on their first attempt at growing so what i did is if you tap on the title of the video uh i'm gonna put a list of what topics are covered at what time in the video so you can just click to that time in the video to watch whatever you're trying to watch but this whole video is going to be basically in you know step-by-step order from start to finish of how to get here but like i said it covers agar and all the other processes making agar things like that liquid culture inoculation so if there's anything specifically you're interested in seeing and not having to try and find too hard just go check click on the title go down there'll be a big list of all the contents and then that'll be how this video will be the easily the most easily used by uh i guess people watching it but uh if you haven't yet subscribed and you want to see more stuff like this go ahead and subscribe and like and i'm planning on doing another grow this time with a wood loving um wood loving species and i later in this video i inoculated a few agar plates with some uh liquid cultures that i bought um antler reishi reishi uh lion's mane and uh turkey tail i'm leaning towards growing the lion's mane out of those wood loving uh medicinal slash um gourmet mushrooms but if you guys want to see one of the other ones let me know in the comments or if you want to see the lion's mane grow let me know in the comments as well i'm probably going to do that in a bag inside the mono tub just like this so um let me know which one of those you want to see me grow because i'll probably do a follow-up video to this growing the wood loving mushrooms but either way uh like i said take a look down then down the uh description and check out what all this video covers and hopefully it'll help you out if you're especially if you're a beginner trying to figure out where to start and how to do this step by step it'll be the a good resource for you anyway let me get into it now and i'll start with the introduction i filmed a long time ago so here we go what's up everybody it's about 2 30 a.m and that's as good a time as any to do a video on home mycology lately i haven't been sleeping like terribly every day so the middle of night lay in bed and i sit there and read on my phone and study and watch videos and lately my main thing i've been interested in is home mycology um mycology this this is going to be by the way this is going to be the cliff notes version of mycology whereas it's not going to get you an a-plus on the test but it's going to cover everything that you need to know to make a b b plus the minimum amount of subject matter to make a b or b plus on the test it's going to get you what you need to know especially what most people want to know which is how to grow mushrooms at home we call that home mycology even though my college is a way bigger field so this will get you from point a this four to the finish line which is fruiting bodies and beyond that actually is what this video is meant to do uh but we're calling it home mycology because that's how this is referred to almost everywhere you go um mycology is actually the study of the kingdom fungi so it's a study of all fungi which is uh includes yeast mold um mushrooms obviously truffles toastals it includes a lot of things this entire kingdom which is what mycology refers to but the vast majority when people say mycology they're talking about mushroom cultivation but since this is a home mycology video i'm gonna go over the brief introduction of you know just everything kind of try and cover everything about what's what but it's not gonna take long i'm gonna get right down to mushroom cultivation once this intro's over um i'm gonna go after i get done with all these videos i'm going to go and put a little uh in the description i'm going to write little subjects each step of the way and what time they start so i'm going to start with the introduction now i'm going to go into materials i'm going to go into uh you know talking about sterilization sanitization talk about uh my kind of analogy for how mycelium works and then i'm gonna start talking about uh introducing spores hagar work uh inoculating grain jars and basically all this kind of goes together once you get past the spores into a whole section just mycelium just manipulation and then end up with finish with a building a mono tub which is basically the fruiting chamber and then uh how to basically get from spore all the way through the fruit at the end which is mushrooms but so like i was saying study of the kingdom fungi [Music] mushrooms are just a small part of that but they're the part that most everybody's interested in fungi is basically anything that produces spores and feeds on organic material um they're almost all mushrooms are sorry excuse me almost all fungi uh produced mycelium in of propagate themselves through mycelium except for yeast which is a single cell [Music] the one single cell kind of fungi and it it does a slightly different route to propagate itself and to feed on organic material but we're going to push squeeze aside just know it's there and it's not actually producing mycelium [Music] it has hyphae which is the basis of mycelium but yeast doesn't make a multicellular mycelial networks or hyphae networks so now we've got yeast all away everything else in mycology uses mycelium hyphy is the uh the basic kind of building block tubular structure which starts to grow from the spores and it is kind of a strand or a branch like a tree-like structure it's tiny it's the microscopic structure of mycelium a bunch of hyphae grows and grows and grows and when it grows and [Music] basically the collection of hyphae is mycelium so now we're at my ceiling mycelium is the uh the um basically the network that takes the multi-solar network it takes to get you know uh colonized areas and end up and to uh produce spores this is a little a little more in depth than i wanted to go but anyway so high fee is what makes it possible for the fun guy to feed on organic material high fee secrets enzyme breaks down the organic material for the um fungi to be able to absorb it that's all i'm gonna say about hype mycelium and now the rest of this is the rest of this is getting a little more macro level into what's important about mycology so the way i like to describe mycology or or you know going from spore to mycelium and producing mushrooms is the spore is like a match it takes two spores to start a fire or create mycelium when two spores combine they create mycelium and mycelium is like the fire so the entire you know field of home my quality mushroom cultivation is basically based on starting the fire with the match or the or the flintstone where you want to call the spores in this analogy and then once you start the fire which is the mycelium all homomycology is basically based around keeping that mycelium going keeping the fire going expanding the fire and then and then getting it from one spot to another colonizing it more making sure it's clean expanding it more to a bigger substrate expanding it more and finally when you got enough of it in a big enough network fruiting those mycelium to produce fruits what you're looking for so that being said now let's get into the i'm gonna go ahead and start talking about the um the materials here the main materials used for home mycology these are not all of them this is a pretty good overview of what kind of materials you need the number one uh most important piece of equipment for home mycology is a pressure cooker or pressure canner that is capable of getting to 15 psi that is the magic number in home mycology for sterilizing things so you do them for different amounts of time 30 minutes two hours an hour and a half whatever but 15 psi is the magic number for getting you to the um pressure you need to sterilize things appropriately here's some other things but like gloves basically your hands have yeast your skin everything all over them all the time so you cover those keep them clean keep the whatever might come off your hand and skin and get in what you're working with here's a flame some kind of flame source for flame sterilization uh cleaning products like isopropyl alcohol 99 is a little too high 70 is fine and this is for sanitization obviously these aren't absolutely necessary but they help a lot these are scalpel set here and then there's a mono tub which is a what i'm going to build uh or to make a fruiting chamber for the final fruits so there's a common theme and actually usually in these in these uh materials people would usually have a a still air box or a laminar flow hood and those two things are basically a way to keep your work area clean from spores floating through the air and contaminants because in the air there's you know spores of all kinds different stuff bacteria mold fungi whatever there's all kinds of junk just floating around the air all the time and that's that is the main trick to home ecology is keeping your area and your substrate and your your whatever you're working on clean so the common theme across all these things here is uh the whole purpose of most of these things is to keep your area and your your grain your egg area whatever it is everything you're working with the whole point of most of these things is keep it sterile and clean actually almost all the tools in my ecology are used to keep things sterile and clean so that's that's the the biggest trick to this home ecology is sterilization and sanitization because from the moment you sterilize something whatever you're working on agar grain whatever as soon as you sterilize something as soon as you sterilize a knife a scalpel anything you're working on from the moment you sterilize it the clock starts ticking on how long it is until that is not sterile anymore or basically how non-sterile it is as soon as you get done sterilizing it so the key to home ecology being successful is keeping things sterile and sanitized and working quickly and re-sanitizing and re-sterilizing the entire time you're working you just you just go through the process of keeping things clean and reclaiming things and keeping things clean and re-cleaning things over and over and over through the entire process of stuff because that gives you the best chance of um of success and like i said a still air box and a laminar flow hood are necessary things but i use this which is a a great i use with oven tech which i'll go into here in the next section but uh that's basically how this works and uh so like i said my point is keeping everything clean is ideal is the uh the main the main the main cornerstone i guess of successful mycology but uh here's here's an example this is a agar plate and this is actually clean right now there's nothing in there so i can get away with having this out with the lid on it because it kind of locks away here's the arc clay that's been called agar plate that's been colonized by mycelium and this was just uh something i threw a grain of my colonized grain on the middle of there just to grow it out you can already see so a little bit of a contamination right there which is it's harder to contaminate once it's only fully colonized like this but uh either way here's this is mycelium right here and it all started in this middle part right here and it grew out and uh while i'm talking about my ceiling let me talk about the two types here uh the two main types of mycelium are uh fluffy mycelium and rhizomorphic mycelium and this is mostly my rhizome right here the fluffy kind is like described it's fluffy rhizomorphic is more branching you see the way that basically the hairs here they're kind of branching tubular hair uh vein looking growth that's the kind of growth you want in home mycology so it's a it's interesting it's really this stuff is really interesting it's hard not to get sidetracked when i'm talking about it to different different uh different things about it because it's just it all kind of goes together but the the entire process is going to be getting this mycelium all the way through but either way so like i was saying this is about home ecology which is growing mushrooms the main two types of growing mushrooms at home are like i said before fungi feeds on organic material the two main types of mushrooms have evolved to feed on organic material are the type that feed on equine dung which is like horse or animals with hooves four legs and hooves their poop and the other one is uh fungi that feeds on the mushrooms that feed on decomposing wood so those are the two main kind of gourmet mushrooms or main kind of mushrooms in general that uh people cultivate at home the ones that form on equine dung and the ones that form on decomposing wood in this video so so i started out super broad with fungi kingdom and now i'm all the way down to growing one kind of mushroom in this video i'm going to concentrate on growing the kind of mushroom that grows on equine dung specifically it's going to be a gourmet mushroom from south carolina called deer caps is what i got a spore print for my buddy to grow so i'll be growing a gourmet rushroom called deer caps from spore and i'll be going through the entire process and i'll show you how i basically light the fire with a spore and take that mycelium fire all the way from inoculating a agar plate all the way through fruiting it at the end and then making more spores either way here we go let me start with the the first part of this process with which is getting your spores and inoculating uh i'm going to inoculate grain jars and some ar plates and i'm gonna start that right now and show you how i do that okay here we go now i'm gonna start with uh inoculating i'm gonna inoculate one grain jar straight from the spore syringe i'm going to inoculate three agar plates with the i'll do one with the sports branch one just straight from the uh actually i'll do two of them with a sports wrench i'm going to put it the some of the uh some of the sport syringe in here and i'm going to uh do one of those out of there with an inoculation loop here and the other one i'm going to do with um just just a drop straight from the syringe onto the ar plate so basically this is all the ways you can take your your spores and you know inoculate ar and grain jars and also you can do liquid culture basically the same thing just putting a couple drops of your spores in there but uh also i've got my sport primer i'm gonna go directly from a spore print in agar as well so basically this is starting from spores and obviously let's jump around a little bit because i haven't showed you how to make the agar yet or how to make the grain jars but this is how the grain jar is going to be once it's pressure cooked sterilized and ready and these are the obviously the the agar plates when they're all ready and already done being made and everything else so i'm gonna go ahead and start with the uh inoculating the i'm gonna pour some in there first usually what you get in the mail if you're if you're ordering spores or liquid culture you're gonna get a syringe like this and uh so anytime i say from mss that means from a syringe and it's gonna come with a little chunky black spores and this is not very good because i basically just put some spores off of a spore print in here to use because yeah if you look really close you can see but they're kind of mixed up and there's very faint they're not as chunky as the ones you get from uh somewhere online or whatever it'll have a lot more spores in it but this doesn't have that many so either way point is you take your sports wrench you put this needle oops you put the needle on there and then you take the needle cover off and try not to jack yourself because it is super sharp and then first thing is flame sterilizing the needle pow just want to do it to get it red hot there you go let's flame sterilized and a lot of people will take a take a uh alcohol wet alcohol paper towel or whatever and they'll wipe it off like this which is basically takes it from sterilizing the outside to sanitary on the outside but the inside is definitely still sterilized all the heat but anyway so first i'm going to take uh shoot some of this liquid into the shot glass here so now i've got some spores in my shot glass over here to work with oh you know what i didn't do i did not open up my my little oven tech here this is this is oven tech so this is like a steel air but this isn't a steel air box it's not a laminar flow hood but it's close to the liner flow because i've got the oven at 250 and open it up and all the hot air comes out of here and basically keeps the bad air from being in my work area when i start you know opening jars and air plates and everything else so now i've got hot flow coming up through here and this is basically how i do everything is is going to be uh on this oven tech uh kind of laminar flow head so anyway so i poured some of the spore liquid in there and i'm going to use this for the airplanes but first i'm going to use the rest of this syringe here not the rest of this wrench all you need is like one or two cc's of the uh the liquid and i take my jar and i open it up basically i'm going to do is put in a little bit like you know once you see there once you see over on this side and then put the lid back on as quick as i can don't tighten it up all the way just kind of leave it loose put my lid back on there and that jar is inoculated so i'll basically stow this away in a cabinet and then wait for it to start growing with mycelium so that's that done here's the first agar plate i'm going to use is just from straight from the syringe and you can go one drop right in the middle of it there bloop oh that was a splash well that's not gonna work very good but either way it'll be in the corner when it gets done going so that's the first one is from this uh syringe straight from the syringe the next one i'm gonna do is from the liquid over here with my uh inoculation this is an inoculation look basically it's a little loop you can get something on to wipe it basically straight on the agar plate however you want to do it let me get this out of the heat now and close it oops so i've got my inoculation loop here i need to flank sterilize that as well go until it's red hot i'm going to cool it down on the water over here this probably isn't the best way to do it that's what's happening i'm going to go scrape some of these little spores off here a couple little spores in the water try and scrape a couple of them on the actual loop here just make sure i got something to work with to put on the agar so now this loop has some of this on it take my nice dish here and do a little swirling kind of z pattern through here and that is the second dish inoculated our second agar plate to this and the third one i'm gonna go straight from a spore print so this is what you'll get from a buddy or somebody's grown your uh your uh grown your strain of mushroom before that's a spore print this is a little weird one my buddy did this is the deer caps sport print and one for more i'm gonna flame sterilize this thing until it's all the way hot which it is all the way hot i'm gonna take it i'm gonna cool it off in the egg actually there now that's cooled off i'm just going to take some of this spores directly off here and scrape it straight onto the i got a plate and there they are so you can see the spores going there there don't have to be a lot this has to be some okay there's that that's pulled it back up that's over here here's the air plate that i just put those spores print spores you can see on there you don't need anything basically that's a ton of spores there and just a little you know specs you can see that i put on there so i'm closing that last one up and that is as easy as is to inoculate things from spore generally i've had really good luck with just inoculating straight from the syringes into the grain jars but the guys who are really serious about this uh mycology they almost always go to agar and here in the next section i'm going to show you why basically agar is it's a really useful tool medium to use to clean up your your spores basically from when you come from spores it's usually a lot of contamination involved or so one of the highest chances of contamination just because it's you know it's just spores it's been around it's it's not just completely sterilized it's uh it's had the most chances of contamination so the hardcore guys usually they take the sport and they go to agar so they can clean up the agar plates as they go and i'm going to be back in a second when i'm next next portion this is going to be agar plates basically make an agar and uh pressure chicken sterilizing everything and then doing transfers and showing how you clean up your plates and uh kind of get yourself your best shot at the real strong growth that you know basically can carry on in your the rest of your grow to your um fruiting chambers either way back in a second with the uh agar section okay i'm back and it is time to do well it's time to make some agar so i guess a lot of people don't like to make their own agar even though it's super simple to do this is the this is a pretty common formula here for agar this is a 321 formula so it's to make this kind of air which is like i said it's simple there's a there's multi-extraction this one's a potato base but it's uh three grams of these mashed potato flakes to two grams of agar agar to one gram of corn syrup to a half a cup of water so those are the ratios and you can just add up and make make it a bigger batch or you know whatever but i'm going to make three times out of them so i'm going to do 9 grams of potatoes 6 grams of the ar and three grams of the corn strip with a cup and a half of water and that's going to make my my agar solution here before i go forward and pressure cook but you'll notice my hands don't have anything on them there's no gloves here i haven't sanitized any of this stuff the sanitization doesn't matter at this point because everything i'm doing here is going to go in the pressure cooker here in a second and that's where the sterilization is going to take place so something like this where it comes to preparing agar preparing grain jars or anything like that that's going to go on the pressure cooker this is the one part of mycology where it doesn't matter if you're sterile at all because you're about to dump all the stuff in the sterile you know in the uh in the pressure cooker and it's going to clean it all up for you but anyway so agar it's basically the the one of the most versatile tools of mycology just because you can you know what i said like basically you start the mycelium and get it going you can get it going on agar but also agar use agar to clean it up so you can take a dirty a dirty uh agar culture and kind of cut out the clean parts and put them on a new agar plate and then grow all clean from there or you find the best gross the best the best rhizomorphic growth pattern on your agar plate you cut that off and you transfer it to a bunch of other air plates so you only have that real nice strong fast rhizomorphic growth and you kind of propagate that before you go to grain jars and so you get the the best possible mycelium before you go any further that's what you can use agar for as well as you can use them for culture slants and this is a culture slant right here which is a way to store your uh store your myself store your culture for a lot longer period of time than just on a regular agar plate anyway let's go ahead and start making this like i said is three to two to one i'm gonna make it nine to six to three to a cup and a half of water so start by tearing my scale here to my beaker that's gonna be on point tear so that's zero now let's go ahead and get my spoon and i'm putting in nine grams of potato flakes joint one cup is about two and a half grams or one spoonful excuse me it's only about three and a half oops made a mess all right so maybe about maybe four ah make it a mess so that's nine point that's 9.3 grams of potato flakes there now i just tear it again and i put in six grams of agar or just over six grams somewhere in there oh i hope i have 60 grams left in this package i might not oh i'm almost there almost oops one over okay 6.7 so these these things don't have to be perfectly precise i put in 9.3 of the potato flakes i planted 6.7 of the agar and now i'm going to put in around three of the corn syrup so i like to get the corn syrup in the middle so it doesn't stick on the sides of this jar before i pour it in somewhere so i tear it again like i said so now back to zero i'm putting in three grams of corn syrup oink there's one there's two and there's three point four that's pretty close that wasn't bad so now i've got my my uh stuff mixed up here i'm gonna pour my cup and a half of water i use distilled water for all this stuff i don't know if it's necessary but i try and start with as clean as stuff as i can see i have my uh my corn syrup in there but i like to shake it around so the corn syrup gets coated with the other stuff so that there's not a problem as far as sticking on my my beaker when i pour it out just where i have a clean beef when i'm done here so that's done oh here's the other thing i have uh some liquid food coloring which is not necessary but i like it just because it makes the egg our dishes look nice and cleaner like this see this nice blue that's basically make these so i got that i'm gonna basically just bring it to a boil there it's all in the solution i'm gonna stir it and bring it to a boil while i'm stirring stir it while i'm bringing to a boil that is rinse off my beaker real quick because i'm going to use this to pour the uh to pour the egg back into and pressure cook it in this beaker actually so now it's boiling or it's getting boiled where'd my spoon go where did i put my spoon that's unfortunately oh here it is okay so i got my spoon i got my agar recipe going now on the sink here turn this a little closer to where i'm looking here and basically with this uh boiling it you basically just go until it starts boiling you just want it hot enough where everything is mixed together well it all kind of sticks together as far as these three ingredients the potato flakes those are basically this starch is basically straight carbohydrates for the for the mix here the agar agar powder is a gelatin it's a thickening agent so that's what makes it kind of gel the agar itself is a it's a polysaccharide uh they basically extraction from a uh red algae cell walls is what agrir is and and i pronounce it agar some people call it auger i'm from the south so agar sounds better to me if you really want to know how it's pronounced go to i guess go to malaysia and ask somebody in melee how they say jelly because that's where the word agar agar comes from is uh the malaysian word for jelly so like i said the agar powder is the gelling agent and in the corn syrup is just straight food for the mycelium or bacteria whatever you're trying to grow so those are the three components as far as the water goes like i said you do three two one to a half a cup of water if you want to air high or low you want to air on the low side so if you put in too much water you have like little water and stuff running like you know you'll see water just dripping up and down your culture slants or your agar plates it's better to air on the low side or just be right on the money then uh end up with too much water in there this thing is getting pretty close to boiling here so won't be long until i have it and then be able to pour it into my beaker here and then it'll be time to get everything ready for the pressure cooker the pressure cooker right now i've got it heating up already on the stove here because this stove i guess it's not strong enough for this brush but it takes forever to get this pressure cooker up to temperature i think maybe i put in too much water that's very that's also very it's also a very strong possibility that i put in too much water in the pressure cooker so that's why it takes mine so long to get the boiling and up to the right pressure but that's all right i'd rather have too much water in there and have it run out of water in the process and tear things up so we're almost there i'm far seeing this uh heating my are up here but it's definitely coming together real nice since i'm heating it up a little slower than usual hopefully it's not going to stick on the bottom of the pan when i have it like hot right away when i put it hot water uh or when i put the mix into hot water it kind of gels up a little faster on the bottom it sticks a little more actually it's starting to stick now but either way we're getting going it's about to start boiling and as soon as it starts boiling basically i can pour it in there and get on with this this uh situation here but uh here it goes i'm going to let the foam come all the way up and that was poured out and we'll be done with this here comes here it comes there it comes okay we'll turn that off keep stirring here let it boil up a little smidge more good enough all right so that is boiled egg our boil's real foamy that's for sure so either way there's that i'll pour it straight in my beaker because the beaker is one be using for the pressurization process other people use uh little jars with lids i like beaker with a uh a beaker with uh just some aluminum foil on top where it's really good for me so i'm gonna keep stirring this fork is too concealed up here so here's my little uh food coloring that i was talking about using it's just it's not necessary but it makes the place like neat oh no okay i've fixed that uh now i just dropped a little little uh little ring off my food coloring just fell on the egg that was unfortunate let me get that out before i mix it up okay so that's going in the sink all right mix it up there we go there's the color my agar plates are going to be which i like that the blue color is awesome some people don't like the colors they like to be able to look all the way through the egg and see through the plates and whatever but i like blue and the other neat thing about a colored agar plate is if you've had mycelium on the ar for a long time it actually eats the color out too so my ceiling will make the color back to back to like a clear or just a milky color again rather than leaving the blue in there so anyway this right here is made agar it is ready to go in the pressure cooker but before i put in the pressure cooker i'm going to go ahead and prepare some culture slants because i need some of those um i prepare the culture slants before they go on the um before it goes in the pressure because i pressure cook the colder science as they are uh i pour the egg our plates after the uh pressure cooker so i'm pouring them into the plastic ketchup cups but thus far i've had no problems with contamination from those plastic casual cups they've been working really good so either way let me go ahead and fill up some of these culture slants these are uh centrifugal uh slants uh i'm not sure what the exact term is for these but they're uh these little uh kind of test tubes that scientists put in this uh these little center fuel spinners but either way they work great for culture slants and there's like a 50 these are what this is a 50 milliliter one this is a 15 milliliter one and they're both you know i don't know that's that's just what they are so let me go ahead and get these ready here i'm going to use this little uh plunger here to fill these up all right those are all done get this we'll see how much goes in here what the right amount is i forget how much i'm supposed to put in these i i did it once before but either way let me go and fill it up see how much we need here actually looks like it needs a bunch let's see many more that's about a good amount right there okay that'll work so that's about the right amount for culture slant people live on that one so i was talking for about what color science is good for culture slants are awesome because they uh they will preserve your culture a lot longer than a agar plate mainly because it's got a lot more um there's a lot more nutrients inside the culture slant for the um my ceiling to be able to feed off of whereas a a petri dish or a agar plate is real uh shallow all the way across the culture site like this has this little reservoir of nutrients down underneath here so the the uh my ceiling will be able to feed off this for a very long time almost almost indefinitely especially if you put in the refrigerator they'll be able to feel this a long time so either way i'm i'm filling these up the right amount here and i'm loosening the lid before i put them in the pressure cooker so that the obviously the steam can get inside there and uh you know pressure cook it or sterilize it that is it's always a little tricky trying to figure out how much to put in these slants especially the small ones it's real hard to tell how full they are that's about right and this agar is starting to cool down so it is getting a little trickier even but let me get the last one done here that'll work just right all right so there we go there's all my culture slants i'm just making four of those because i don't really need a whole lot i really don't need more than one or two for a strain but i like to just look i always make a little extra when i make things but anyway that's that's basically the whole things to make the egg and now i'm gonna put everything in the pressure cooker so i took this syringe apart still got egg on it whatever i'm gonna go ahead and sterilize this in there as well while i'm fresh cooking everything else you know if you want to sterilize other things besides the agar and grain whatever just kind of throw it in some foil and wrap it up and that's it good to go i'm gonna dump that in there before i that's hot dump that on the pressure cooker before i deal with the other stuff now i'm gonna go ahead and put the lid on this and like i said the culture slants are all loosened the uh the lid on each one of these cultures like oh i forgot to put water so it's better to have water at least some water in the bottom of any glass jar you have a pressure cooker because allegedly they can crack if you don't have something on there and also help for the steam here on the uh um cooking these culture slants but someone said i don't know if i trust or not but they said that uh if you don't have water in your jars they can they can crack if you happen and they're just empty anyway there's that and now i just have to put the lid or sorry the uh foil on my agar here that is mixed up and i'm throwing it in here in the pressure cooker as well the pressure could be heating up it's still going to take a while for this pressure cooker is all the way ready well you know what actually that's not bad that's a decent steam going so it won't take too long for this heat up now i've had it going pretty good but um the other thing people use kind of like agar to basically make my ceiling grow real fast and be able to spread it whatever they use liquid culture which it's kind of similar to egg rx if you're it's is 3d instead of 2d so in the liquid culture that the missile can spread out any direction like all the directions through the liquid rather than across the top of a of a agar plate so it spreads a lot faster and you can see through it it's a little hard to figure out what's contaminated what's not and also it's not as like versatile as far as just like being able to isolate and spread things um to different agar plates but it is easier to keep sterile because you can just use an injection port on top of a lid on a jar and just use a sterile syringe to get liquid culture you know out of there and transfer wherever so liquid culture is kind of like ar except it's it colonizes a lot faster and um it's it's easier to use for those like huge operations if you want a lot of my cilia culture to be able to spread to other things and also it keeps it sterile but i don't mess with lip culture if you wanted to do liquid culture you basically just do five percent of corn syrup or honey or whatever to water and then you pressure cook it just like the agar you're pressure cooking here for 30 minutes at 15 psi it's basically the same thing it's done at that point so now i'm just waiting for this thing to heat up um what else i'm going to talk about about agar oh let me look as long as i'm getting my dirty hands i'm going to be back in a second i forget i'm pouring these um pouring these uh egg our plates or once it's done pressure cooking i'm going to come back and pour something in place but just showing you one of the edgar plates this is one that's this is one that didn't work out right so this is this is how easy contaminant or contaminated uh culture is the spot on agar you see this is just gray nasty garbage on this agar plate which is this is going in the trash i don't even like there's no there's no good stuff at all on this edgar plate but when you start messing with agar say hi say i'd colonize this plate and one side of it was clean and white and nice rhizomorphic growth and one side had a little this this gray blotch of mold on it so the beauty of agar is you can take that say we're just we're going to imagine this this little blotch is just on one side and the other side of this whole thing is colonized nice white growth so the beauty of agar is i can just take another clean plate or a couple more clean plates and just cut the forward edge of the the clean growth off and put it on the new plate and preserve my culture without just tossing the whole thing once it gets contaminated so that's that's one of the uh the upsides of this stuff but there it is this is like it like i said it's basically a jelly and here's here's what it is when it's you know done this is going to trash right now so i figured i'd just take it out and show you what and this is a really thick air plate too i guess i'll pour that one kind of deep but point is this is what it looks like when it gets ruined that's what contamination look like contamination coming basically uh not even on the screen yeah contamination can come in basically any color like green green and gray are probably the the most common colors in contamination there's pink yellow orange you know rust color anything else but uh green usually called trike but you know green and gray you're going to see the most when it comes to contamination but if you maintain most your practices right then you shouldn't have too much contamination but even if you do if you use agar it should be easy to not worry about and just make another plate and take the good stuff and continue the good parts of the culture and make it really strong air plates and then you'll be a lot better off when you get to uh transferring grain jars with the good stuff and then those grain jars onto the uh the your mono tubs but anyway i got a long time i get like i said i'm going to cook this for 30 minutes in the pressure cooker at 30 psi i'll be back in a second when i'm done with the pressure cooking of it okay now we're back and this ar has been pressure cooked in the pressure cooker i think i said 30 psi at the end of the last video i meant at 15 psi for 30 minutes i took the culture slants out and they're still liquid right now very runny liquid at this point because they're still hot so basically just prop those up on something that makes it where you got a slant there so you got the reservoir you got the huge surface area for the slant basically swarms an angle something like that so either way got those on their slant those are cooling down now and obviously i tightened up the lid before i did that but now it's time to start working on the rest of this stuff pouring the agar plates so to pour the egg our plates i got these this is the one thing is not sterile here is the ketchup dishes you want to wait till basically your agar is down below 140 and it is just getting below that right now it's at 140 right now so below 140 it gets comfortable to touch not too crazy to touch anymore so you can do it i'm using the oven tick so now now that we've got this uh now we've got everything pressure you know sterilized it has i have to keep everything clean now so i've got to put alcohol on my hands wearing gloves and wipe everything down i already wiped everything down but i'm going to go ahead and do my hands again before i start here but uh so once it comes out of the pressure cooker everything needs to be very sterile as sterile as you can keep it so we got our hands washed down i've got my oven tech going here the oven's at 250. now i open this up and heat comes out the air from the oven is basically sterilized sanitary at least so the air is coming out hot it's got a flow coming up through the grate here i'm working on so it keeps the bad contaminants from falling down these plates that i'm working on and that is how the oven tech works and the oven tech is my only thing i use i don't use a steel air box or a laminar flow hood because i just don't i mean i can make a steel airbox pretty easy with a tub but i don't i'm just not going to ever as long as i have this oven tuck it's hot it's definitely hot to sit here and work with this you know 250 degree air blowing in your face but it's worth it so that guy's ready kind of swirl around make sure it's not you know settling out down the bottom different there's different little layers if you let cell down it kind of sells out a little different but it's pretty mixed up now well so here we go i'm gonna go ahead and start pouring some of these cups it is actually pretty hot in the hands but whatever you know if you've ever grilled a barbecued ring like that you probably got some a little bit of hand you know toughness built up so basically this fillies up trying to keep them a little bit not super deep like that one i had contaminated i showed earlier was really a deep pour but these are oops these are all pretty shallow cups i'm trying to pour here i'm probably end up with about 10 of them let's basically just pour those in and one of the tricks to making sure you do get to get these lids on here is keep the lids off to the side the lids get hot then the lids are really hard to pop on the top here so if you keep the lids cool while you're doing this kind of keep the lids out of the oven tech area if the lids are in the oven tech area that i'm using it's working on then they get kind of uh so this is giving me problems like that it gets kind of tricky clicking them on there so right now this whole thing is really the first one clicked on so easy second one is giving me a lot of trouble okay i'm gonna come back to that one it's definitely too uh i guess the the cup got a little too soft so when the cup gets bendy it's hard to click them on one of the other gets too tough and it's hard to click it on there so same thing with this one it might be too tough as well unless i do that get out there oh my goodness okay that one went on all right let's see if i can get the rest without too much trouble here at first we clicked on squeezing the second one third one tough this one was easy by the way that's basically all i'm doing to put these agar to make these agar plates is just pour it and oops that's not right there oh is it on there it's on there so pour it and just throw the the lids on and that's it so once these cool down these will be ready to transfer do whatever kind of transfers you want to do to them and here in a second i'm going to show you kind of a couple examples of how agar is used but uh how versatile is and basically it's uh any any source of mycelium you can find you basically throw it on your the middle of your your oh throw on the miller agar plate here and just kind of propagate it oh man somebody get lucky and some just are so hard all right let me set that aside too try to get the last one here okay last one more uneasy so somebody's going really hard and someone going really easy apparently obviously but there we go three more cups here this thing's cooling down uh i'm sure i mentioned it but yeah 140 degrees is kind of want to get under that before you start pouring these out because you can melt these little plastic cups if it's a higher temperature than that that's you know what let's see which one's doing that's kind of thin let me go ahead and just call that wrap and just pour the rest of this out here that's how easy it is to make these uh agar plates i'm going to keep twirling and try and get these lids on here actually i'm a couple lids short but uh keep trying these lids on here and i'll be back in a second when i've got all the lids up oh that's there now cooled off a little bit when they cool off a little bit it gets a little more rigid and it's easier for the lids on so so i set those aside there we go the the tough ones got on there finally but i gotta go let me get lit for these two anyway i'll be back in a second i'm doing all these and then i'll show you examples of how to use these agar plates transferring things to grain transferring grain back to agar transfer from agar agar basically expanding your culture expanding your culture agar is a great way to do that so i'll be back in a second and show you what else these things do okay it took me a second but i got all those lids on the containers one thing i didn't mention when i was making these is it a lot of times there's this condensation on the top of the lid which makes it hard to see into but one way basically the way to deal with that is to stack these up and somehow i guess the heat or whatever it is from the hot ones it makes it where the condensation doesn't form on the the lids underneath there so the top one has condensation on it but the rest of them lit the conversation doesn't form there the other thing you can do i think which a lot of people do is just flip these things upside down once they're cooled off enough to gel but uh that's good enough for me i'm okay with a little bit of uh obscured lids on a couple of them there anyway here's a here are some examples of what you can do with agar over here i i've got a here's one set of agar cups and here's the original right here i got the the open steel so i can go but here's the original and you can see where i took to see the rhizomorphic the more most rising more morphic gropes over here on the side you can see a little thread like stuff on the bottom here and i cut all my little my little uh transfers out of those areas where the rhizome growth it's already growing back over it but out of this cup with these five transfers this is how you can spread it i took this one cup i spread it each little chunk to a different oops to a different cup here so this one's growing out that one's growing up and they're all grown out really good rhizomorphic growth here looks like this one's hard to see the same thing here's a really clean one a really solid i mean if i if i really wanted to purify this uh you know a bunch of agar cups i would just take this one but all these right here are going to go to green jars they're pretty similar pretty homogenous as far as the sample but that's these all came from this one dish right here expand it out to five dishes so that's basically how you can like spread your fire when it comes to the mycelium was talking about with a you know manipulating myself there's there's one use of the agar is basically just to expand your culture and and here's here's the other way i used it i took the grain jar i inoculated i basically ended up with only one grain jar which is not enough to put the bulk so rather than trying to go grain grain or anything like that i took grains out of that grain jar and i just threw them back in the middle of these these agar plates just threw a little grain a inoculated grain of mycelium good growth threw a little piece of grain in each one of these dishes and now i've got that same strain growing back on agar so you can take your mycelium and the beauty of agar is you can you don't you never you can always go back you know when you're in agar and you know anytime you have mycelium you can always take it off anything and go back same thing with uh even once you're done growing out the culture and making mushrooms with it you can cut in the inside of a mushroom to cut a little chunk of the tissue off the mushroom and you drop it in the middle of an agar plate like this and it'll do the same thing it'll grow out that exact mycelium from the inside of the tissue of the mushroom it'll grow that out on the agar plate you drop it on basically just drop it on the middle basically any kind of any source of mycelium culture you just drop it on the middle of your agar plate and it'll start growing sooner or later as long as your agar is right and your contaminate your uh your mycelium culture isn't contaminated it's gonna do good so either way like i said i took that one jar the grains out of it put them back in here and boom now i got i'm probably gonna make six jars from these once these get colonized all the way chop them up have six grain jars to throw them in so that's the another way to use agar plates but that's just expanding them like i mentioned before the way that people really like to use them is to take their their culture and make sure it's not contaminated and get the strongest growth out of it so taking the plate and like i said showed you the uh the the branching looking mycelial growth that's what people try and do the real serious hardcore guys they make sure it's not contaminated and they get their strongest growth and they isolate their strongest growth cut a little patch transfer into it you know a few other ones and basically go for the the strongest mycelial growth and that's all they want to put to bulk so yeah or that's all they want to put to their grain jars they don't want to take any chances of just some like random like healthy growth they want they want the best the best bet so these guys spend a lot of time going in circles with their with their agar little iterations of t1 t2 whatever getting to their their best growth and their strongest most you know homogeneous great aggressive rhizomorphic growth is what they're what they're looking for so that's what you use agar for also so either way that is agar in a nutshell and uh it's super easy to do i guess a lot of people are intimidated as agar but uh point is once you do it once it's something you're just gonna i mean this took me not even an hour for the whole process which the majority of that was just waiting for this pressure cooker to do the 30 minute you know heat up and do the 30 minutes of 15 psi but either way um i'll be back once those the five plates up there that i got that have the good my sealer growth on once i've got those all the way colonized those are my deer caps by the way once i got those all the way colonized i will be coming back to make my grain jars build my mono tub and then i will be doing the uh making cbg bulk so choir very light and gypsum for the bulk substrate and i'll be then basically uh putting in my bin and and growing it out so either way i'll be back in a sec well it'll be a while for me because i stuff the weight i'm going to wait till those plates for the transfer the grain those deer cap plates get um super you know all the way out to the edges before i go ahead and put them to grain so it'll be a while for me but for you it's coming up right now okay i'm back and it feels like it's been forever but it's only been a couple weeks but it's been long enough for these uh mycelium plates that made the from the single transfer there to finally get out to the edges and fully calm down this one you can see the my ceiling go up the sides there so yeah they're definitely all about ready to go transfer grain now so in order to transfer them to grain i need to make some grain jars these are what i'm going to use for the for the jars these are one pint jars mason jars it is and here's this is wild bird seed so i'm going to use wild birchy for the grain um this is the grain that i choose because it is tiny little pieces of grain obviously there's some sunflower seeds in here these are all going to come out but either way so i got the uh water heating up here and dumped my grain in here and i'm gonna use i'm plan on making five jars five of these grain jars so while i'm measuring it out i'm measuring out about two and a half jars worth of grain actually a little bit over that but the point is this stuff about doubles when you're when you are boiling it it basically about doubles so i put about just over two and a half jars of gray in there because i'm planning on making five grain jars and now while this is getting ready to boil while it's boiling i'm basically just going to go in here and get rid of these sunflower seeds which i don't think is necessary to get rid of sunflower seeds but i'm going to do it just to uh get them cleaned out of there and make it you know a little more homogeneous of a blend here but uh or basically just get the sunflowers you know sunflower seeds don't really work as a uh it's not fuel for the for the mycelium it's not something they can eat so leave the grain in there which is their food and take out the sunflower seeds but um i chose bird seed because it is the uh it's the smallest grain size of it of all my options so you can you can use all kinds of stuff like popcorn popcorn oats uh wallbursting obviously millet is one of the things in wild bird seed but uh either way there's a ton of different kinds of grain you can use but i use this one because it's the smallest grain size and the reason i want the smallest grain size is because where'd that guy come from i want the smallest grain size because it's uh it will knock the it'll have the the most inoculation points for the same volume of of uh grain so say i take a jar of huge grain sizes and i dump them into bulk it'll have a lot less inoculation points so it'll take a lot longer to colonize fully the the monotube and the smaller the grain is the more inoculation points there are so the quicker it colonizes the bulk substrate from the smaller the grain is so either way that's a i describe that poorly or explain that poorly but that's why i like the birdseed because it's a small grain size and i'm getting out all the trying to take out the uh the sunflower seeds here and leave everything else but uh i'm not doing a great job but i got about all the stuff while she's out here um so right now i'm boiling this i'm going to bring it to a boil and let it boil for 30 minutes and so what we're doing here is there you can also just soak it overnight there's guys who soak it overnight and do whatever other methods but this is the uh the boiling method gets the the moisture inside the grains the fastest and that's the whole point of this right now is we're trying to get the moisture inside this grain to the right amount so once once these grains have boiled for about 30 minutes they'll have the correct amount of moisture water content in them to work for the uh for the in the grain jars for for the uh my son to have everything need as far as water and uh food anyway that's pretty cleaned out as far as the sunflower seeds go here's what i got is a jar of bird wild bird seed and i'm basically going to let this boil for 30 minutes and once it's done boiling for 30 minutes i'm gonna come back and do the rest but like i said the whole purpose of this boiling or dealing with the the birds either grain or whatever before it goes to jars the whole point of this is you get the correct amount of moisture in the grains so i'll be back in about 30 minutes or however long i take the bliss and i'll show you what i do next okay i took these grains out of the uh sorry i after i got them boiling about 30 minutes i strained the grains i put them on these drying pans here they've been sitting here for about an hour and the whole point is just to leave them out in the air so they dry out on the outside of the grain obviously the moisture is already in the inside of the grain the outside of the grain is what we're trying to get to the right moisture level so the way to test if it's right moisture level this is from philly golden teacher's channel but basically just take some grain dump it on a little brownish paper towel makes it easier to see but come on there and dump it back and that's about what you want to see no like pulled up water but just a little little kind of specks of water on there is just about right so either way this stuff is dried out to the right amount so now that it's dried out to the right amount i'm going to take these jars the pint mason jars i have and i'm going to use them like this we're going to flip around the tops well obviously i'm going to fill up the jars first but the top is going to be flipped around so there's going to be air be able to come in there when i'm pressure cooking but here's how full we want to get this one get it not all the way full we get probably like uh five six full something like that one a little bit of room in the top so you can shake up your grains once uh once you get it a little bit colonized like uh well actually i'm inoculating these grain jars with agar so i'll have to shake them up when i first put the agar in there and i'll shake them up again when i put well sorry when they're about a third of the way colonized i'll shake them up again calling as fast that's about how full i want these so there's a decent amount of space to shake around the uh the grains like i said i'm using the unmodified lid tech so just upside down turn the lid upside down don't tighten it up all the way i'm gonna leave it like that i'm gonna put a piece of foil over the top like this i'm going to do this on all these grain jars and like i said make sure make sure the lid is loose not closed all the way make sure it's loose like this so there's air able to go in there once you think steam or sorry that steam was getting pressure sterilized and that's it so all i have to do is load up my other four jars here and once i get these all loaded up i'm gonna put them in the pressure cooker for 90 minutes at 15 psi as well pressure cook these four once that 90 minutes is over i will turn off the pressure cooker and i'll just basically let it cool down and let it sit overnight inside the pressure cooker and then tomorrow i will be taking and inoculating all these jars with the agar plates that are fully colonized up there so that's what's happening that's basically making these grain jars in a nutshell and uh yeah like i said i'm gonna pressure cooking for 90 minutes 50 and i'll be back tomorrow when everything's ready and we'll go ahead and inoculate these jars at that point and get underway with the rest of this deal okay i'm back and it feels like it's been forever but it is finally time to go ahead and take these colonized agar plates we got i got six i'm only use five of these colonized agar plates to inoculate these grain jars i just made yesterday i just opened up this pressure cooker for the first time since i put it in there like i said i did a hour and a half um at 15 psi and then when the hour and half was up i basically just turned off the stove and left it sitting there under pressure and let it cool down overnight this is the next day about 24 hours later probably but now all i'm going to do is take by the way i just got done wiping down everything here i got my got my oven tech going here so the heat's coming up now there's the hot air hopefully sterile hot air coming up out of there actually let me go ahead and put this out here to work in this area here take my first agar cup here and what i'm going to do is basically just open this up and cut up the agar and dump it in before i do that i need to sterilize the my little blade here so i can cut the uh agar up in a bunch of little chunks and dump it in there so i'll go ahead and start doing that now yeah i'll do one at a time so again my jar here i'll go ahead and take the lid off i'll take i'll stick that off for now because i'm about to have to cut this up first so take my flame sterilize my blade there you go it's nice and red now the problem is i don't want to leave it too hot here because it'll cut straight through the the little cup here it's kept the plastic so if i press any kind of uh strength i'll cut right through the bottom of this so i kind of want to touch it in the agar cool it off first which there we go that probably pulled it off and just take this and we're going to slice up a little grid here and once i get my little grid sliced up and get it on a little checkerboard pattern i can go ahead and just dump it in the other i've dumped in the jar here that i'm getting ready for it this stuff is thicker than i thought it would be but yes fairly thick ooh try not to cut through the bottom of this cup this cup is not flat on the bottom so it's kind of jerky going across the ridges on the bottom but either way that's that it's cut up and you can see you can just kind of pop it up and get the little pieces coming out of here getting ready dump in there there so now it should pour there just fine all right so that's that put that back down while i take the lid off over here i'm trying to take off the lid as little as possible well i didn't get off there as good as i thought i would yeah some of this stuck together i didn't wasn't able to cut all the way all right there we go there's all the pieces let me go and put my lid back on then and this piece right here and tighten the lid for a second and then shake it all up here so i'm trying to get the agar pieces the chunks of agar that are colonized and mix them up as much as i can in the jar here which is not that easy they're all sitting up top there kind of shake oh there we go now i've got them that's pretty good distribution there we go so i got my agar in there distributed through the jar and now that is one jar inoculated you see the the blue uh i got pieces all the way through there so that's the jar inoculated and you can do the exact same thing with the rest of these jars and put them back up in the cabinet but either way that's that's this entire process i'm gonna do one jar at a time i thought i'd do the rest of them but you can see it spread out through there the little the little agar pieces so i need to restart my hands re-flame sterilize the razor blade and then do all this four more times and i'll have a whole set of deer cap inoculated grain jars with the agar so there you go i'll be back uh probably it'll be about it's probably gonna be about a week or two i'm basically gonna wait till these to the grain jars are about 30 percent colonized and then i shake them up so i'll come back when those about 30 colonized and i'll show you what i got and i'll shake them up by the way i'm leaving the the lid on the jar you don't keep it tight you keep it loose so there's a little bit of air so there's a little bit of air being able to get in and out of there but uh only a little bit so don't keep it tight you keep the lid on but loose so anyway i'll be back when these things are about 30 colonized i'm gonna go ahead and do the rest of these you only need to see one so we back on about thirty percent colonize and do the shake up and show you how that works and then uh continue from there okay i'm back and it's not even been a week in my deer cap jars here these are the ones i just got done well i said it's been almost a week now probably but this is the agar that i put in the uh you see a couple little specks of agar but the uh the color the blue color is gone now completely from the agar by the way these things are at least 30 colonized i can't see if i've got this on the camera or not so yeah these are at least 30 colonized and now is the time so i just tighten the lid back up and then shake it around so what i want to do is just get these grains that have been got something growing on them and get them shaken up and spread out through the jar again that way it'll get to complete colonization and ready for uh putting it to bulk sooner that way so there it is all broken up that my ceiling's broken up and you can't even see any white in here anymore but it's in there it's just more spread out so it should get to the rest of it faster and be completely colonized faster so i loosened it to shake sorry i tighten it up to shake it all up now just loosen it back up to get that little just a little bit of air exchanged for these jars and then that's it put them back in here until they're all look anything nice clean jars and then you see some blue there it looks like from the uh a little bit of the um agar still got the blue color but for the most part mycelium's eating all the blue out of the agar it's a little bit left either way i'm going to do all five jars shake them up good get all my ceiling broken up and then loosen the jar back up and stick them back in there for it to finish completely colonizing the jar so like i said it's been about not even not even an entire week i don't think it took to get at least like it almost half probably colonized but at least 30 percent like i said loosen them up after i shake them back up and put them back in the bin to wait for the last i don't know a week or so of colonizing now that they're all broken up and and spread throughout the rest of the uncommon experience so either way that's just a little step here this isn't even uh necessary really but if you know if you're impatient and you want to go faster this is one of the things you can do to make go faster is to break it up and spread out all the inoculation points throughout the drain jar here and just basically speed up the process either way i'll be back once these things are all the way colonized and it'll be time for me to transfer these this grain spawn to the bulk substrate i'm gonna make in the mono tub that i'm gonna make so that's right either way i'll be back probably be about another week or so and this stuff's growing pretty fast so yeah probably about not too much more in a week if that to get these things all the way colonized and all the way white in the jars right now they're looking good i'm happy with the progress and how fast this is an aggressive deer caps apparently aggressive mycelium growth so either way i'll be back when it's time to put these to bulk i didn't think i was gonna have to make this part of the video but i have a jar here that is begging for me to make this part of the video and it is the contaminated chart this is the same bird seed uh wild bird seed mix and it's got some mycelium in there but it just went real real real bad so this part turned black almost the color of soil this part turned green some other little stuff down here this is just that's got some green in it too it just looks really really really bad that's green there but the black is the part that's interesting to me but either way this is just nasty and gnarly and not good but that's all right that's why i make a lot of jars instead of just one okay this one is this is the worst jar i've ever i've come across but anyway just showing you what a terrible contaminated jar looks like and i'll be back in a second when i'm about to get the bulk substrate ready okay i'm back and it's been barely any time since i shook these jars up not even a week i don't think maybe six five six days by the way these are completely colonized now which means it is time to put these grain jars to bulk substrate so i got five grain dry or five pint jars i'm gonna make bulk substrate and i'm gonna make a mono tub out of this a modified mono tub out of this so the recipe for both substrate is you can find this on pgt philly golden teachers recipes basically i use which is a 650 grams of coconut coir to eight cups of vermiculite to one cup of gypsum to 18 cups of water so you basically mix up all those dry ingredients or you don't miss them you just basically dump them in a bucket here so i'm going to put those dry ingredients in the bucket to whatever to those same ratios i'm actually going to do less because i already have some made in the bucket so i'm going to do a 550 gram brick of a coca-cola and then whatever that comes out to in a vermiculite will be like maybe seven or six and a half cups of marinulites maybe a three-quarter cup of gypsum and then like maybe 15 cups of water so i'll put all the dry ingredients in the bucket and then i'm basically just going to boil up the cups of water until it starts boiling dump the water boiling into the bucket that basically pasteurizes your bulk substrate and also gets it to the right fill capacity which is the right uh um basically gets it all the way saturated with water without being too much it gives it the perfect level of moisture which is basically fully saturated but not you know over saturated so once i get this stuff and that's going to be sitting overnight after i get on doing that right now this will be sitting overnight in this bucket basically cooling off pasteurizing whatever and after i get done getting that ready tonight i'm going to build my mono tub so i'm using this it's a sterilite 75 liter monitor whatever it doesn't really matter the size as long as it's you know as big as you want to be i chose this one because it has a a flat bottom on the inside there's no real ridges in here and also because the the top is clear and it has these nice little handles to close the top so to make this model tub first i'm going to do is take out this um gasket here i'll take it out when i get when i start doing but i need to take out this rubber gasket so it's not airtight i need a little bit of gasket change all the time through the uh through the lid even before i put it into fruiting before i put it in fruiting i'm gonna have basically everything closed lid closed and everything else but i just want a little bit of gas exchange so the mycelium can fully colonize the bulk substrate so that needs to come out for the entire process and then over here in this tub i'm basically going to drill two holes on each long side which are basically right above the substrate here and here and then one hole in each end up at the top and so basically the way the monotone supposed to work is you have about anywhere from between two and four inches of substrate and then above that you have the holes right above the bottom so when when uh mushrooms grow they breathe oxygen and they exhale co2 just like people do so the monotone is designed to have air come in basically and flow up and push the other air out of the higher hole there so you get good air exchange it's called fresh fae fresh air exchange and that's what you want a lot of once you get to fruiting when you're in just the colonization of the bulk substrate phase you want basically all these holes to be closed and covered but then once it's time to fruit you want to cover these with this micropore tape so there's uh a lot of fresh air exchange and that way the mushrooms can fruit either way i'll come back tomorrow morning when i have the bulk substrate made and this monotube holes cut and ready to go and then we'll get into uh the liner so i'm gonna put a black liner in here it's basically a garbage bag that goes around the bottom uh part of the tub and we'll talk about that while i'm doing it so anyway be back tomorrow morning when all this is going on okay i'm back i just got done making the mono tub instead of cutting this liner so what i did to cut this liner is uh i basically just put a trash bag on top of here and i cut it to 50 a model tub maybe a couple inches wider and longer than the mono tub and basically that was and before i did this i sterilized the bottom monotone with alcohol so now sterilized i've got my liner i'm going to put in here inside the mouth tub and i'll talk about the molotov and i'll talk about what the liner for so basically put the liner down in the mono tub make it all even make it where it comes up every side a few inches so it'll basically hold all the substrate in here without you know blending the substitute escape aligner it basically it's a little oh well anyway that's how you get the line in there just like that nice and easy i'll talk about the liner in a second here's the here's the molotov i finished i just put like a little clear packaging tape over the holes to block the air flow so while it's in the colonizing phase the air needs to be blocked out of here where there's not too much airflow and then once the substrate is completely colonized i'll take off these um packaging tapes and put on this microphone tape which will allow airflow or gas to change that way you can get the air it needs to to fruit better so either way there's the holes one on each end and two on each bottom down near the substrate and one thing i didn't mention or one thing i did mention actually and i still screwed it up was i cracked this sparky yellow i cracked i drawn cutting holes with a hole saw on a bin like this is thin plastic it's real easy to crack it so i ended up cracking this thing i had to put a had to put tape on there but anyway it's fine now just uh another reminder you want to go really slow when you're cutting thin plastic with a hole saw people use like a metal can and heat it up with a little lighter and they just melt the sides but i use pole sauce either way here is my bulk substrate it's about to go in the bin here and i should have gloves on but i don't so it's not that big of a deal at this point actually it is a bigger deal i'm going to turn off the camera and go get some gloves and i'll get back going here in a second all right so i don't actually need um this isn't a sterile part of this situation once the grain jars are completely colonized uh sterilization sanitization isn't as big of a factor so i could do this with my bare hands like i was messing with this double rainbow with hands i wiped out with alcohol but still it's not that big of a deal at this point how much contamination or well contamination is a bigger deal let's put that one anyway this is the bulk substrate after i dump the water in it and let it sit overnight and fill capacity optimal fill capacity is basically this thing holds as much water as it can hold without dripping so to find out optimal fill capacity what everybody does they grab a little handful they squeeze it and you squeeze it real hard then some drops come out right there like that a couple drops come out but it doesn't just doesn't just you know leak on its own it's basically holding the water and it's got a lot of water in it but not so much it's dripping but when you squeeze it hard a couple drips will come out and that means here you're basically an optimal field testing so at this point i'm just going to start dumping this stuff into my bin and what i'm shooting for is somewhere between two and four inches a bit a tall substrate here so just keep putting it except go fill up the corners a little bit so it'll hold the the liner in place what i really need to do this liner is still just kind of sitting there i don't tape it down or do anything stupid with it so i need to make sure it's not going to move on bills there we go got around the perimeter i got a big uh for this this is a 70 this is a 75 liter ah i just built it all over the place this is a 75 liter um container here i've got five pint grain jars with a mix in here and for the the cbg the coconut coir vermiculite and gypsum uh ratio i went with the uh about about around 800 grams of cocoa core and then mixed up the rest of it kind of proportionately to that and that's what i got for my uh how much i'm gonna need for the 75 liter bin here either way so that's enough right there to get started uh that's enough right there to get started uh mixing in the grain jars now let's take my grain jars and dump them all in here and i'll be able to show you what fully colonized grain jar slash vermiculite all right sorry fully fully colored lines green jars the macelium looks like so let me go ahead and open up a couple of these there we go all right here's the grain jar here it is oops here it is fully colonized fully colonized and clean so that's what it looks like it's just cottony puffy at the top and it smells kind of sweet it's just it's obviously a vermiculite or it's not yeah i keep saying vermiculite it's obviously a mycelium smell it's uh i mean if you never smell what my my ceiling smells like it's like um i mean it's my ceiling that's like if you're out in the woods and you see a decaying log and you see some fuzzy stuff on it some fuzzy white growth on a log it's almost 100 mycelium and it's going to smell like this a little sweet earthy smell and if your grain jars are anything other than sweet and earthy then they're probably contaminated if there's any like sour or weird type smells or bad smells it's probably contaminated but these smell just like perfect mycelium it's really good there's one green jar so i gotta do four more of these and then i can mix them all up so that's here's another one nice and tasty the stuff was trying to jump out of the bin here so nice like cotton candy cotton candy kind of texture when the stuff is not attached to the green oops all right i'm trying to keep it all inside my liner here um so yeah i'm just going to dump on all these jars and then once we get all the doors dumped out i'm going to mix it all in with this bulk substrate what i was saying earlier in the video when i was talking about why i chose birds sorry wild birdseed is because it's small grains these are really small grains millet or whatever is in there whatever other little grains in there it's really small grains so these really small grains if you have this many grains they're spread out more in the uh the bulk substrate so there's less distance between each grain which means this bold substrate should cause faster than if i'm using a big a large uh grain size like popcorn or something like that there'll be less space between each um each grain so good so there's sorry there'd be more space between these grains if i was using popcorn something like that so it would take longer to fill in those spaces between the mycelium inoculation points but i'm almost there one more jar and i can start breaking it up in here this is a lot of mycelium here it all looks good and healthy every dryer smells good and looks super white and super colonized okay last one all right there's the last nice fluffy fantastic jar such a huge difference between this jar and the uh that's super uh contaminated one i didn't bother opening the contaminated jar to smell it smell like but i can guarantee it didn't smell good it definitely didn't smell like this it's a fluffy mycelium earthy sweet smell there we go all right here's all my jars dumped in now i just have to have to mix them up as evenly as i can and put a casing layer so the reason you use a liner there's a couple reasons but the two main reasons you use a liner is because one it kind of um it kind of holds to the sides of the cake this whole thing i'm making here with the bulge substrate and the in the um the inoculated grain spa this is called a cake and the liner it kind of sticks to the side of the cake and holds tight to it and that helps in a couple ways the first way is it doesn't let any light hit the sides of the cake so no people always talk about side pins side pins means the uh the mushrooms kind of grow out the side of the cake and stick against the side of the bin and people don't want that because it's a real pain to harvest them so the major thing that one of the major things the the liner does is prevent side pants because it doesn't let light hit the side of the cake it doesn't let air or anything else to the side of the cake the side of the cake is basically substrate like underneath the you know the the top so now i get it all broken up it's time to mix it up and this is tricky to mix it up without making a mess around the sides of the uh the liner but so basically getting it all mixed in here as well as i can okay okay okay once it's all completely mixed up then i'm going to start working on flattening it out and evening it out and um and i'll pat it down and get ready but the other reason the the other reason the liner is good is because it's it shrinks with the cake so if i left just the cake in here by itself once the mushrooms start growing out of it they suck all the water on this out of this uh substrate so the substrate shrinks so the cake is going to shrink off the walls of this of this mono tub as the mushrooms suck the water out and grow mushrooms are like 90 water so basically all this the whole point of the substrate is keeping enough water in here for these mushrooms to grow and that's why you have to rehydrate your your uh cake between flushes anyway this is about mixed up looks like all your local blazing points are real nice and spread out so hopefully i'll have a real even um even colonization of this cake here so now it's all evenly spread out i'm going to go ahead and pat it down kind of even it out here i want the same level all the way across the same depth that is and then also try and get a little bit not just super loose not really super fluffy kind of get a little packed down basically the same density as like a cake you know like a like if you're baking a cake when it comes out it comes out kind of dense kind of fluffy this is going to be kind of gently patted down all the way around to make sure the density is something like a cake so there's that and i've got a pad all the way down and the last step after you get it all sorted out and pat it down oops okay i'm trying to go out of my way here to make sure everything's level all right there we go it looks still pretty pretty nice and even all the way through here everything's padded down even the corners and the edges are padded down to even levels now i got all patted down the inoculated grain spawn bolt subject mixture it's all padded on even now the last step is to take some more uh of the bulk substrate and put it on top and make a casing layer so i'm gonna take this last chunk of this i'm gonna try and make maybe a about a quarter inch thick casing layer which means basically just across the top everywhere so i'm going to take this casing layer and try and spread it as evenly as i can which is a little tricky to make it super even but the point is i'm going to try and get this casing layer to completely cover the top i don't want any of the inoculated grain seeing the light of day at this point i want it all covered with a casing layer which like i said between the 20 quarter inch and a half inch deep for a casing layer it's good the point is just you want to kind of cover up all the grain completely make sure none of the grain is seeing the top yet so it looks like it's covering mentioning some more still so now it's all the way completely covered this is a little thick of a casing where it looks like so many spots is pretty thick um probably more than a half inch but we'll see i'm gonna try and just try and do it as well as i can but it's hard to judge while you're doing it exactly how much you have covered you so i just want to make sure i get all that all the inoculated muscle straight here all the way covered and get my top case in there make sure it's covering everything so anyway there we go now the casing layer is on between a quarter inch and an inch or sorry somewhere around a quarter inch a half inch thick this casing layer is in there now it's completely covering everything all the way to the edges and this is kind of like it's it's once extra moisture obviously but the other thing is it's um it lets the mycelium kind of gives it extra time to colonize everything fully before it makes the surface and then once the surface is completely colonized then everything is completely colonized and it's ready to fruit at that point but this this makes sure that everything is completely colonized before it's uh fruits kind of so either way that's that liner's in there the monotone is ready everything is done and at this point all i'm doing is taking my lid actually clamp this junk i get some accidentally got some of the gold substrate in here let's be messy i'll clean up the floor later but i don't want to tote this loose bulk substrate around anywhere else in my house so there we go so i'm gonna go ahead and put the lid on and like i said before you take make sure you take the uh take the line the um that gasket that's on this lid make sure you're taking it off so there's at least a little bit of air exchange coming in here because this mycelium does need a little bit of fresh air exchange to colonize everything the bulk substrate same thing with rain jars you leave the grain jars slightly open when you're colonizing grain jars so i'm trying to clean stuff with dirty hands it's not the best way to do it i guess anyway so there we go gonna put this lid on now i don't even need to click these latches let's go ahead and leave those off and this mono tub is ready to go now so now we're in the colonization phase of the monotube getting the bulk substrate completely colonized and this is going to take a while maybe a week or two or three i'm not even sure it'll take a while to get all the colonized and it kind of depends on how much grain spawn per bulk substrate you use and whatever but now this part is done so um now we'll basically just be waiting for this to colonize one thing i haven't talked about yet is the temperatures all these phases um basically the inoculation and the colonizing period it can all be done between 60 and 75 degrees pretty much the entire grow from from inoculating agar grain whatever all the way through fruiting can be done between the temperatures of 60 and 75 degrees earlier in the thing earlier in the colonization lower temperatures are slightly better because contamination will happen at higher temperatures so i would say just a rough ballpark figure for all the colonization type stuff you want to go between 60 and 70 and then for fruiting you can bump it up between 70 and 75 but you never really want to go too much above 70 or you know too much above 75 because then contamination is a lot higher of a risk anyway there's your your temperature profiles but anyway this thing's ready and i'll be back now as soon as this thing i'll come back you know sporadically through this things colonization process to show you once the mycelium starts hitting the the the surface of the cake there a little bit of white will show and then it'll be more and more until it's all the way white and then i'll change the fruiting conditions and show that so i'll be back sporadically as this goes along okay i'm back i just got done putting those uh those uh grains sorry yeah i just got done putting the uh the deer cap uh grains to bulk substrate in the mono tub that was like a couple days ago but since i was starting to make this video series i got really interested in the rest of the you know mushroom kingdom or whatever the best range of mushrooms and basically i went online that ordered a bunch of liquid cultures of medicinal and gourmet mushrooms i'm pretty excited to check these out these are um i end up i ordered five of them and they sent me an extra one so that's cool this is uh premiumspores.com but the ones i ordered are well the reason i order these is because they're all kind of a neat little they all have a neat purpose so i've always liked like the idea of different medicinal medicinal you know alternative medicine type herbal remedies things like that and that's what these are these mushrooms work in a lot of different ways so this one is turkey tail it's a real common mushroom that grows off trees out in the woods but this is uh used in treating cancer like extracts from this are used in treating cancer and also you know immune system type things that's the first one i ordered second one is lion's mane and this is the one that i was most uh interested in this is a kind of a cognitive function type uh mushroom so the extraction this uh basically rebuilds neural pathways in the brain for especially for things like dementia patients alzheimer's disease things like that this stuff has kind of been shown to uh rebuild you know neural pathways that you know kind of break down as the brain ages but this is a real neat one it's supposed to taste good too so i'm really excited to grow this one also it looks really neat when it floats when it uh when it um fruits the all these medicinal mushrooms they're all slightly different their own way this one has a little teeth instead of gills underneath the the cap it's got little teeth that is where the spores come from the uh the turkey tail and the the reishi mushrooms those both have like kind of a multi-pore surface or like a weird porous surface and that's where those spores come out of but uh but either way these are all neat lion's mane like i said this is the uh the cognitive function type mushroom and it's supposed to taste good as well and it fruits really interesting uh the other one i got let's see what else i got here i also got uh cordyceps this is coarsest militarist there's another one called corsets starts with s i forget what it was but that's the type that grows out of insects like the cordyceps the one that starts with the s is different um kind of close but slightly different it uh it takes over ants basically it takes over their body and their brain and they climb up a tree and they kind of die attached to a leaf the bottom side of a leaf and they um and mushrooms will grow out of their brain so this is a real interesting one but this one's used for this is like a a stamina like a like a fitness uh health stamina type energy type mushroom you can make a extraction with this for like i said that like kind of a pre-workout uh herbal remedy type deal this one is the one they threw in for free king stropharia i think it's just a i think this is just a um gourmet type mushroom i don't know i haven't looked it up i need to look it up a little bit and check it out i'll put that aside i don't really care about that one and the other few other reishi mushrooms these are um immune system these are all about building up the immune system there's two different kinds of racial mushrooms i got here but um like i said these are all they're really interesting these are all the mushrooms that were really interesting to me is the ones i ordered i don't so much care about the string king stropharia whatever that is but all the reishi the turkey tail lion's mane and the cordyceps really interested in all those because they're just pretty fascinating but anyway these are all liquid cultures so i'm going to go ahead and inoculate a couple of grain jars here with some of these liquid cultures and uh see how that goes but either way it's real simple process and basically it's gonna take these open and basically gonna just pop the um the little top off there i'm not gonna put a syringe on there i'm just gonna open it up and put a little bitty drop on the middle of my agar plates and that's it for collins and hopefully hopefully these things didn't get burned up in the sun these things were seeing my mailbox it was probably 110 degrees in the mailbox earlier but uh hopefully they made it out there i should have taken this out before i get my hands up clean but hopefully they made it through that heat and are still viable spore syringes are supposed to be able to handle heat a lot better than the um a lot better than um uh liquid culture but we'll see either way let me go ahead and start out with let's just start with this yeah i'll leave that one let's start out with antler rishi we'll do this one so i'm going to do is take this little let me open my over my oven tech here and get hot get the air blowing all i'm going to do is take off this little cap here oops i'm just going to up my cup i just get a little drop out of here hopefully just a little bit i'm trying to not to make it squirt out like i did before i gotta just hang in there and if i go let me let just touch it down there we go one little drop and i put my little lid back on there let's add the rishi and with the turkey tail next put the lid back on here label it hey all are i'm sure my hands are not super um sterilized for this but i think it's actually gonna be okay we'll see i put a lot of faith in this uh oven tech there we go now we get a little target here this one definitely you can see the mycelium in this syringe i'm not sure let's see if i can get a good picture of it here close up of it in the camera here but there's you can see the mycelium in the syringe floating around there hopefully there's no contamination we'll see either way let me go ahead and spread this sucker out there try to get one little drop on here the tricky part of this is just not overdoing with the drops i don't want to accidentally squirt like i did before okay there we go one little drop of that one the turkey tail anyway you get the point these are just inoculating eggar dishes from a liquid culture syringe and i'll come back hopefully before the end of this video and show you how these are all colonizing but the point is i wanted to get them out of these syringes as soon as i could because they spent some time with some serious heat today in my mailbox my box metal mailbox and it was probably 105 or 100 it was it was hot as crap today so i'm not sure how long they were in the mailbox but i know they were out there longer than i would have liked them to be so anyway i'll be back when i get all these colonized and we'll see how they colonized or if they didn't or how it worked out for me but uh anyway i'll be back when that happens or i'll be back actually probably when something happens with a bin i'll be showing how the uh bin is colonizing then i'll come in here and check these out while i'm at it so i'll see you then okay i'm back and here's where i got the uh deer caps in here after i put the uh grain spawn to bulk they've been in there for they've been has been for four days and you see through the lid there's plenty of uh humidity in here basically 97 humidity uh condensation all the walls and the lit red lid but here's the in about four days the grain is almost colonized the sucker up it's getting too up to the top here it's gotten through the casing layer that is you see the rhizomorphic growth up the top there there's mycelium everywhere so now i'm just waiting for it to all fill it actually looks like there's some primordia for you over here already but uh there shouldn't be or you know hopefully those will just chill for a little bit and wait for this uh the uh service completely colonized and be uh all the way white so i want the mycelium to cover the entire uh the entire surface of this before i switch to fruiting conditions like right now i'm just in the colonization conditions where i've got these sealed all the holes are sealed the tops shut and i'm not letting any air in i'm not turning a light so here as soon as i top i'll come back as soon as the uh the top layer is all the way colonized and i'll show you what i do to switch to fruiting conditions and then that'll be it but these are these stay in the dark in here it's somewhere around 70 degrees in here maybe 69 but these are sitting here for the conversation and then they'll be in the same temperature for the uh for the fruiting as well but uh this is where they're going to stay for the whole grow but keeping it dark no lights nice and cool and just letting it colonize okay i'm back and it has been about um nine or ten days about how long it takes for this thing to colonize a lot of people let this let their bulk substrate get colonized a lot uh more dense than this like get get it super white like it's you know all the way covered white but this is all the way what i want is just basically my ceiling cover and the entire area here kind of you know well well evenly spread i don't really care if it's super white or super super uh cottony i just want to get it all spread or you can see primordial forming either way so let's so the point is now is all the way um colonized in my monotube it's time for me to switch to um fruiting conditions so fruiting conditions what i'm going to do is basically just take these these little plastic or sorry take all these pieces of tape and put on micropore tape in its place so there's more uh fresh air exchange going throughout the tub so take those off take that off and then i'm going to spray the top of this uh top of the substrate with these misting sprayers which will make a lot of fine little little pieces of fine little water bubbles all over the uh the top here and those are basically you put those there so that they can evaporate and when they evaporate that's what forms primordia like see you can see already some priority here promote these little bunched up pieces of mycelium here so these little primordial form little bunches of mycelium and those turn into pins that turn into the fruiting bodies eventually but that's how they start is by forming primordial which is like basically a bunched up mycelium and then the pins or the fruit start there the base of the pinheads start where the primordial are forming so like i said take these old covers off the holes put micropore tape on everything and i'm gonna go get this in the closet and i'll spray it down with some of these misters and show you my light setup and how i've got everything for fruiting but this is basically i'll do the fruiting is replace these tape with micropore tape and spray it down once and then uh get my light bulb in there so i'll be back in this oh actually before i go back here's the uh here's the cordyceps i tried to inoculate with a liquid culture these are real slow quarter steps i'm not seeing anything lion's mane i had to i had inoculated a second time it's barely got that little bitty tiny dot there on lion's mane going um the other mines mains got a little bitty dot there as well but almost can't even see that one the rishi is same thing a very little bitty tiny speck there in the middle the antler ratio has a little bit on there you can see a little bit and then the uh the turkey tail is blowing everything else out of the water it's just almost all the way colonized to the edge of this agar plate so that's how these things are all kind of colonizing for my liquid cultures i got the other day uh if you guys want me to want to see me grow any of these these are all kind of wood loving type mushrooms i'm really excited to grow the lion's mane and the uh but uh if you guys want me to grow any of these and uh make a video about it let me know in the comments but i'm probably gonna do a video growing the lion's mane and since the turkey tail is taking off first mayor let's do that first but uh definitely i want to grow lions man because it's uh one of the neatest ones out of them but anyway yeah if you want to see any of those particular strains growing out the animal ratio i'm not sure about that because that's supposed to take a very long time but uh probably under the lines man but either way let me know what you guys think in the comments and i'll be back in a second while i've got this uh these pieces of tape taken off the micropore tape covering it and i'm in my closet with a little setup there in my lighting setup so back in a second hey decided for these things like just same way as i was leaving for my for the colonization refer to here in my closet i've got the micropore tape on all the holes now so it's getting good fresh air exchange fae is something they talk about a lot stands for fresh air exchange and that's what the mushrooms need because they they uh breathe oxygen they exhale co2 basically so they need constant oxygen coming in and they need the co2 going out so i think actually it flows where it comes out of it comes in the ends and flows out by the bottom because the co2 is heavier so i'm assuming that's how the flow of this monotube works but anyway here's the setup the monotube in here and i've got this little light just sticking on a pole hanging off my closet uh you know basically pull the stick in there so the light isn't 100 necessary to have a light for fruiting uh mushrooms but i use it i have it on 12 hours each day is what i'm going to do and basically i'm using because it gives the mushrooms a direction to grow so if there's no there's no light the mushrooms are kind of all over the place if there's a light they kind of grow towards the light so this will have mushrooms growing up instead of just all over the place you know free-for-all but like a lot of people always insist uh lights aren't 100 necessary what is necessary is fresh air exchange and moisture there should be enough moisture in here for the first flush but i'm gonna go ahead and spray it down more just get a little more uh a little more of these little water water particles all over the uh all over the top of the substrate here so it has some else to uh evaporate basically when the water evaporates off the mycelium is when these primordia and the fruiting bodies form so i use these this is a great little sprayer for misting this is a it's a fine mist sprayer and it's actually out of water i'm going to grab the other one so you just find mist sprayers off amazon and they missed really well you can i guess you can't see the mist but it's it's coming out and it's super fine and now it's all over all this mycelium starting to get that real misty white covered in the water particle look so take a little close up of this so there you go you can see this is a million particles of water all over the mycelium and that's what i want to um start evaporating so at this point you know a lot of people leave their mono tubs untouched especially when it's a modified mono tub like this with the air but i don't do that when i i want i go ahead and i missed it and found it all the time so when those when all that um when all that uh water gets off the top there i'll come and mist it again or if i don't see you know a lot of water on the lid here i'll come and miss it again but basically misting and fanning is what helps these things along so i'll be coming in two or three times a day just come in here and fan it i'm basically just fanning with the lid here pumping it about 60 times or so and then uh that's it so this is a just a once these things go to fruiting this is the thing you need to do over and over again you come in every day basically every time you're bored and you want to go look at your mushrooms or my ceiling or whatever you come in every day three four however many times a day you want and you come in and you fan it you're causing extra air exchange and you are helping to evaporate the water off the top of my ceiling there so this is basically the best way to to ensure a good um turnout on your on your uh your your fruiting so anyway this is what i'll be doing for the next however many days i'll come back as soon as we get some little pins growing in here i'll tell you how far how long it took to get to that point i said it was nine days from going to bulk substrate to changing over to fruiting conditions and i'm assuming it'll be within about 10 days we'll start seeing some pens probably way before that but we'll see but either way that's where we're at and like i said this uh this deer calf is definitely a pretty aggressive colonizer so i i expect some some pinning happening very soon especially like i said the primordia already started forming over there you can see primordia a couple little chunks here and there primordia for me so i think there'll be pins in here before we know it anyway i'll be back when the pins start and we'll see how quickly these suckers will grow okay i'm about five or six days in the fruiting conditions here and i just noticed my first pins starting to form so let's take a look at those see what those look like i just gotta spray it down again i spray this way more than i probably should but it's fine i'm sprayed and missed it the spray it missed it but either way here's the pins for me here's the biggest one that's formed so far this little thing here whoop a little pin there there's a couple more you can see forming here little babies there's let's see they're really hard to see but there's a few forming here all over the place one there a couple there a few there either way that is the very first formation of it it is as let's just say six days into fruiting conditions and they are all over the place little little pins pinning little mushrooms pinning starting to form finally so we'll say it's about six days into fruiting conditions and we will keep monitoring this i'll just be back probably once they start growing because once they start pinning they really start growing pretty fast actually so it won't be long hopefully we'll get a good pinch that'll be nice full bin here but either way that's what it looks like when they very first start is just little pinheads all over the place starting to form the russian bodies so there you go back in a few days probably shouldn't take more than three or four to get the full flush out here and see what they look like and be able to finish this video up okay i'm back it is two days after the first little pins showed up and here's what happens basically 40 yeah it's probably about 48 hours after those first little bitty tiny pins so now we got mushrooms popping up everywhere there's a little blank patch over there for most part they're everywhere at this point i'm not really missing anymore all i'm doing is kind of failing every once in a while let me have to do that really but uh kind of just coming in and looking at them all the time is what i do so these are coming up and now they're really gonna come up fast like so this is two days from since those first little baby pins formed and they're getting real actual fruity bodies all over the place so we'll see how long it is until we get these things big enough and their veils are breaking and i'm basically going to let these grow up wrap until their bells break and that's why i take them before their spores are going to dump out all over the substrate so yep we'll see i'll come back when the bells are breaking on these and see how long it is from now what lights has been two days since they first fruited it's been uh eight days since i put them in fruiting conditions so they're moving right along i should have fruits ready to harvest here in about uh i would say three days ish maybe more i'm not sure anyway i'll be back when it's time to harvest some of these okay i just took a look in the bin and i saw something that i think is slight mistake but it's mainly i'm thinking because of where i'm fruiting these either way these are 10 days into fruiting conditions you can see that the uh mushrooms haven't opened up yet none of them opened up yet but they're fitting pretty well but what i noticed on them that i don't like is at the bottoms of them you can see a little fuzziness so a little fuzziness around the bottoms of these mushrooms it isn't bad obviously they can be a lot fuzzier than that at the bottom but it's called uh fuzzy feet and it's caused by co2 levels being high at the bottom there and i think if these things have a problem here they stall everything else happens bad i think the main reason would be is because of the co2 level in here even though i have been failing and i've got the modded tub uh with fresh air exchanged and whatnot the problem i'm i think i have here which if i do subsequent grows i'll change that but the problem i think i didn't think about is that i'm i'm fruiting in this small little closet here i have the door shut so it's very little uh area very little um volume of air in this closet so if this thing does make co2 it all settles in the bottom of the closet here and there's nowhere for it to go so i think ideally if i do this again i would have it up on a stand where the escaping co2 would fall down the floor a few feet below where it is so it's all fresh air coming in rather than having it sit down and pulled co2 inside the closet which that's just a theory but i think if i have fuzzy feet or a uh inadequate fresh air exchange it's because of that it's sitting down here on the floor where the co2 is pulling naturally in the closet because the co2 is heavier than air so i'm going gonna ride this grow out like this but in the future i think if i do this it'll be up on a stand where the co2 can fall away from the bin rather than the bin be sitting and pulled up co2 on the air but either way that was just something i thought i would mention that sometimes growing mushrooms will get fuzzy feet where it looks fuzzy at the bottom there and that's caused by basically not good enough fresh air exchange and co2 kind of pulling uh on the substrate there where they're sitting in so either way like i said we're about uh 10 days since i started fruiting conditions and these things are getting relatively close to being harvested um some people talk about uh the i don't actually never mind so either way um the one thing i'm trying to avoid when harvesting is i want to get them harvested once the veil opens once it once the veil kind of separates but before the spores drop that'll be basically the biggest size i can get here without having a spore mess on my substrate which i'm trying to avoid the spore mess on my substrate some people say that once the spores come out the more more uh developed the mushrooms are they have a lot worse taste so we'll see how that goes i'm not gonna i'm gonna try and get them all before any spores drop i'm also gonna stor spore prints for them so i definitely want to get them right before the sports drop and then make some sport prints later in this video as well but the point is i'm going to try and try and harvest these as their bells break when they're nice and biggest size i can get without dumping spores on the substrate so either way i'll be back probably i would think a few of these tops are going to pop open tonight maybe some bells break by tomorrow i'm not sure but i'll be in here very often finding out when it is time to pull them and now pull them on this time back in a second okay i am back and it is time to harvest some of these suckers they have gotten uh sorry the uh the caps have opened up on these so the castle opened up the veils have broken off and if i don't harvest them now they're in danger of dropping spores on my substrate or on the rest of mushrooms underneath them and i don't want them to do that so i'm going to be pulling out the ones that have the open caps on pink and the like i said the separated veils you can see them there there there i might just pull out the whole chunk that's associated with the ones with the busted belts maybe this big chunk here maybe this big cluster here but the point is i need to get those out of there before they dump spores so i'm gonna do a little demonstration of how to pull these out of there the whole purpose or the whole goal when you're harvesting these is to get the mushroom out intact while leaving your substrate as intact as you can leave it so here's one with a separated um veil there so basically just come in here you grab it and you twist and pull at the same time this one's hooked up to another mushroom so it's a little tricky but basically twist and pull maybe rock it back and forth a little bit but there twist and pull and you feel a little pop and it basically comes out there so right there you can see the little patch that's missing there of substrate but i did a pretty good job i got barely any i got whatever was basically attached to the mushroom there and got it out there without any damage to the mushroom and minimal damage to the substrate so that's basically how that was picked on the larger clumps it's not so easy like that so this like crumb right here is just going to take up a whole patch of mushrooms it's obviously going to take all the substrate underneath it so this is going to get a little trickier pulling out the whole patch but same same concept where you just basically kind of pop the whole patch off twist and try and get it to lift off the substrate without pulling the substrate with it in the case that it pulls off substrate with it if it's a piece you can just like pull pull off there and pat back down that's fine too but uh you know like i said we're trying to leave this substrate as as uh undisturbed as we can while we're ripping stuff off the top of it so if a couple things rip off the top with it then you just kind of if they're still sitting there you can pat down whatever substrates kind of lift it up or whatever but the point is uh that's that's your whole purpose is trying to get the mushrooms out without ruining your substrate because you want to use the substrate for as many additional flushes as you can get after this first one so this isn't even this is basically the first flush but i'm going to go step by step pulling out you know the ones that need to go before they dump and leaving the smaller ones in here to keep going so uh anyway that's that's harvesting in a nutshell and i'll be back in a second because i'm going to take these and go make some spore prints and do a clone make a clone with makes sorry clone one of these with a tissue culture so back in a second for the sport prints okay i just got done harvesting the first chunk of uh these deer caps and for this video we're gonna do a little demonstration on how to make spore prints and this is a real simple thing this is a lot simpler than the rest of these processes but basically just gonna you can sometimes you can pop off the the cap without breaking it but i'm gonna use scissors so you sterilize your scissors obviously and then you basically just cut them off right near the cap so you can lay it down flat on this foil here ooh i'm not doing a very good job cutting there you go so cut it off there and i'll get in my full here where i want to put it there we go so you use foil basically foil is pretty uh foil is pretty uh clean as it comes out off the roll pretty much sterilized anyway so i'm putting on this foil i've made this shape so i can just fold it over the top and do a little square when i'm done all you do like i said is just cut off the cap stick it on there i got a little bit of water over here on the side and a lot of people use a dropper but i'm too lazy to go get a dropper and do that so i just get a little piece of a little drop of water on my finger blink touch a little bit of water on top of each of these helps them drop their spores a little easier and uh basically all i do now ever get the little dot of water put on each of them is close up this little bin and leave them on their foil there for about 24 to 48 hours and they will dump black spores all over the place well not all replaced in their little their little uh shape of their mushroom head they're gonna drop black spores all over this um foil hopefully so either way i'll be back in about 24 to 48 hours and we'll check out these spore prints all right i just got done popping off the uh the top of this deer cap to make a spore print with so now in the spirit of preserving the genetics even though i don't think this is that great of mushrooms deer calves but anyway in the spirit of preserving genetics i'm going to take this one and i'm going to make a clone out of it using a tissue culture from the inside this stem so basically just take this like i said i already have my blade sterilized i have my oven tech going i'm just going to take this stock here split it in two toss the other half i'm going to take this little white tissue area here and chop it up and chop a little chunk out boom boom this is not the easiest stuff to cut and i think my i think this razor blade has been used up is pretty dull i think actually or it would have already cut through this but there we go there's a little chunk of tissue right there i'm gonna take this and drop it on my agar plate okay there we go and that is come on okay it came off finally sheesh all right there is cloning 101 just cut a little chunk of tissue out of the middle dropped it on my agar plate and this is basically going to turn back in mycelium and colonize the plate so that's how easy it is to clone right there super simple it's a little tricky to cut with a dull razor blade but but um other than that it's pretty easy to do so that's calling a nutshell that thing is going to take off just like any other colonized plate except for it's jumping around anyway that's going to take off like any other colonized plate uh just my ceiling i'm going to go across it i may have to clean it up or not but we'll see either way that's going to preserve the exact genetics of that mushroom that i took this little cut off of so that's the neat the upside of cloning is you're going to get the exact genetics so you can isolate genetics as far as bigger better clusters you know stronger taller faster growing fruits whatever you can isolate those genetics through cloning by cloning the ones with the characteristics you want to propagate so either way that's calling in a nutshell and i'll be back when i have my spore prints ready and we'll take a look at those and that'll basically be a wrap on this video of home mycology mushroom cultivation see you in a second okay i said it was going to be between 24 and 48 hours for these sport prints to to uh be done but it's actually only been it's only been about 20 hours maybe since yesterday but uh i looked in here and i could see it they already dropped them on there so there's a sport print right there basically just the uh the spores drop out of the gills there and gives you an exact uh kind of picture how was there was it was split there was facing that way that's exactly what it looks like there so basically this all these gills just start dumping their spores until they form up on there and that's it i know i'm not using gloves right now but generally sport prints are kind of a they usually end up being slightly dirty anyway and i'll just clean it up later if i ever put on edgar if i ever grow these again but i apologize for not playing those so basically these sport prints i'm going to do is basically flip it over and then fold it up and that's a wrap there you go there's that that and that and this sport print is done i'm going to leave them in this bin for a little bit longer just to kind of dry out a little bit just make sure they're not moisture on them um because once i store them i don't want there to be moisture there's a couple little spotty spots i don't want them to be moisture on these um when i'm storing them to grow other mold or whatever have something to compete with these spores but as they these are good sport prints and um i can basically take these once i fold them up here and i can put them in this little plastic ziploc baggie or a sandwich bag or anything like that what i'm going to do is actually uh honestly i don't even like these deer caps but what i would do if i did like them i'll probably just trust it in the trash but uh what i would do if i did like them is vacuum seal a little little vacuum sealer i have and a little little pouch and just keep them forever that way but uh that's basically it from spore to spore where these uh mushrooms i got here um it was a long process things i didn't talk about are sometimes people want to save the mushrooms for long-term storage and one way to do that is to well basically the only way to do that is to dry them out and some people talk about like drying out by sitting out somewhere dry and wind you know air flowing through whatever but just use a dehumidifier you dry them out with a dehumidifier at about 130 degrees for the dehumidifier for about 12 hours you want to dry them out so they're all the way dry and cracker like crispy that way no mold can get on them after they've been dried but yeah that's how you dry them like i said about one about 130 degrees on your dehydrator for about 12 hours and they'll be crispy cracker like cracker like that's what that's the word people use all the time the cracker-like consistency crispy cracker-like and they'll be dry at that point and at that point you can store them in a glass jar with some silica packets are the best way to keep them dry usually other things i didn't talk about are how to prepare them so uh usually mushrooms you get you can usually eat them when they're fresh grown or whatever but if you want them to actually taste good you want to break down some of the chitin things like that you want to make them more edible and tastier a lot of people saute them and uh oil or butter things like that beyond that that's about it for the beginners you know cliff's notes to home mushroom cultivation if you guys watch this far i appreciate you if you haven't yet please like comment subscribe and like i said in the first video let me know which one of those strains you want me to grow for the wood loving mushrooms between lion's mane um turkey tail and the two different kinds of reishi's i did um i don't think the cordyceps that might be out of my my skill level at this point but uh i might come back to that later in the future if i can figure it out but either way appreciate you guys watching as far and i'll see you guys on the next video peace

Channel: The Well-Rounded Novice

Views: 141,495

Keywords: mycology, mushroom, mycelium, bulk, substrate, agar, agar-agar, spawn, grain, birdseed, tech, innoculation, culture slants, colonization, monotub, mono, tub, modified, unmodified, mushies, lionsmane, reishi, sterilization, still air box, airflow hood, laminar, sanitization, mss, spore, spore print

Id: u9YiFX5Czg8

Length: 140min 24sec (8424 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 21 2022