How to grow mushrooms at home: Shoebox Tek

today we're prepping choir I'm going to spawn a shoe box so I don't know what brand of Coco you guys are using I like to use can ofand cocoa it's a very good quality stuff it has very fine fibers and absorbs a lot of water um as you can see these come in loes there's uh two to one of two loes to one of these bags and uh you just break them in half so break these in the Middle look at that an uneven brake so no surprise there uh in that case I just cleaned it up and put it over to the side that it belongs to now I'm going to put this back in the bag and just deal with this one here so let's see how much this weighs 861 G so I find that these things will fluctuate this side is going to be more than that one and you know one it could go anywhere between 800 and the heaviest one I saw was uh 1,00 G I believe so this is how I'm going to prep it um I'm going to use I have two different color buckets that I use this one is my measuring bucket usually my orange buckets that I have stacked over there are reserved for for grain uh this is the only exception I use this for measuring out uh all of my water and substrate now the reason why I color code is because you don't want to be prepping grains in the same buckets that you're putting your substrate in because you run the risk of having cross-contamination between starches Etc that once you have your uh stuff all spawned out you know you're going to wind up with trichoderma or something and uh you're not going to know where it came from So Pro tip don't mix your stuff together and don't cross contaminate now in this blue bucket I've already mixed together my sub I put my lobe of can in here and uh three full lers of vermiculite and 5 L of water now the reason why I use 5 L of water is because you want as much water available for your mushrooms as possible um the more water reserve the more you're going to be able to uh max out your Harvest cuz mushrooms are made Out of Water right only makes sense I use piping hot water out of my tap there's no need to boil it there's no need to pasteurize your substrate uh even though you're going to get sort of a semi sterilization semi pasteurization from uh the hot water I don't use it for that reason that's not my intention the reason is is cuz cold water isn't going to soften the fibers of your substrate um when you have the coarse uh choir fibers in there that have been hydrated with cold cold water they're just not going to absorb as much water so you're going to get more water reserved from using hot water uh the same goes with vermiculite you can run this stuff obviously on its own you don't need vermiculate but you're going to be able to hold more water in your substrate with verm and that's the whole point of having a substrate to begin with is to have a uh a water reserve for your mushrooms to draw from okay so hav gone through all that maybe after hearing it you're like no man I don't like that recipe that recipe bucket sucks so give me a good recipe the standard recipe 650 g of quir 3 l of irm 4 L of water boom there you go now if you don't like mine you can use that one even though uh you know if you have a lot of um experience using the standard recipe I recommend you'd make a switch and just see how much you like it or run a couple side by side I don't know but I'm telling you you're going to like it so now that we got everything all expanded overnight and cooled down everything like that uh when I measure out my uh port portions of chir you can see that I never like to cross-contaminate this one clearly it's for grain don't use that one just in case you know but uh this one here it's nice and clean it's only ever used for substrate so no risk whatsoever of cross-contamination next thing next got ourselves some nice clean spawn here noticed how with this spawn it's all evenly I mean I got a little bit of condensation there but my uh my room gets down uh pretty low in temperature at nighttime so you'll notice a little bit more condensation when the temperature fluctuates anyways unlike the bacterial spawn I showed you before this is uh all grown together nicely and um there's no grains that have refused to colonize so this is what I'm going to be using as my spawn for my shoe box shoe box is the purple latch 15q uh shoe box you can probably get it at Target Walmart Etc I'm in Canada so Canadian Tire it is so uh a note on side and bottom pins so you'll see a lot of people online whether they're selling these things or you know giving you tutorials on how to make them they're either spray painting the outside or wrapping them with tape or something like that that's uh asinine that's not going to do anything the reason why you get side pins is because your substrate once it's in there it's not uh it leaves little air pockets you know it's not perfectly sealed up against your plastic so what happens is those little moist air pockets are great areas for pins to form and uh you know the same goes for the bottom you're going to get pins the only way to prevent that is um to use a trash uh you know some sort of plastic bag the plastic bag especially when doing penis envy or something like that that takes a little bit longer to fruit and will drop a lot of water into the fruits themselves what's going to happen is is the substrate is going to pull away from the side leaving an air gap which is going to create side pins now the way to prevent that as mentioned a minute ago you put a plastic liner in there the plastic liner shrink wraps basically to the outside of your um substrate and shrinks with your substrate and it doesn't give you side pins uh having a light penetrate in here also not going to cause side pins you could easily use a clear plastic bag if you like light is not going to cause side pins so having said that let's get this thing spawned now you can see it's all been shaken up mixed together um when sat when sitting overnight to cool what's going to happen is obviously a lot of the water is going to sink to the bottom and some of the vermiculite is going to stick to the bottom as well and no matter how much you pick this up and shake it around there's still going to be a bed of vermiculate on the bottom so throw on some gloves you know so you don't get that under your fingernails dig in there mix it all up a little bit until you know you're good to go now let's get this shoe box sponded with healthy spawn Your Spawn should break up pretty easily shouldn't require too much smashing or you know too much of [Music] anything all right so for this shoe block got one p to spawn one two 3 four so I got four four full lers of substrate in this shoe box give it a good shake to uh mix it all up and give it a good compression making sure sure that the substrate is nice and level get in the corners there it's all down boom there you go got your level your level compressed sub now for the top layer oops one two another two for top layer compress it all down nice and neat so it's nice and level compressed around all sides and there you go your shoe box is full all the way to the top okay so this is what your shoe box is going to look like fully spawned as you can tell it's all the way to the top top now your average shoe box is only going to be spawned with about that much substrate in it it's going to allow some head space for uh pins to form Etc uh I find that you know that's a great method it works well for many people the drawbacks to that is that as mentioned earlier in the video with only this much substrate that's only that much water and honestly if you think about it the only reason you have this substrate in here at all literally the only reason is to provide a water sink a reservoir for your mushrooms to grow you can um fruit straight grains if you want to uh mushrooms will grow off them but it's not uh a great flush it doesn't perform well because there's just not enough water and so we uh remedy that situation by adding substrate and that's how you get mushrooms so if you think about it the more of this you can add the more substrate the more water within reason and I think this is within reason this is a one six spawn ratio one part spawn six parts substrate roughly I mean it it's not exactly that but you get what I'm saying just for ease of explanation uh then you put the lid on and allow to colonize now when this uh obviously you're not going to be able to get any mushrooms to pin in there so uh the way you work around that is to create a fuing chamber and uh I'll show you that in a second okay so you allow one spawned you allow this to sit on your shelf and col colonize as per usual I don't know if you can tell here but there's about this much substrate and the rest of it is about an inch an inch and a half of uh top layer now uh I failed to mention this before but for whatever reason penis envy uh is a mutant uh variety that likes to blob uh often times you need a casing layer whether it be Jiffy or some peep based casing layer uh I found that those are no longer necessary if you use a thick compressed top layer it will actually um prevent blobs for whatever reason I don't know what the mechanism is but it does work um so on to the fruiting chamber now I like to use these sweater boxes if you have a single solitary shoe box they fit perfectly in here as you can see the holes on the top or quarter in holes these are the Pasty easy dial uh monotub configuration just Google that uh you can find the instructions on the shroomery you can see just above the substrate level here that there if this was to be filled with substrate that is there is some uh holes here to allow for fresh air exchange now when it's time to fruit this fits perfectly in there if you only have one shoe box you're doing this for micro doing you know Etc this is great for one shoe box now you would take the the lid off obviously if this was fully colonized put the lid on here put back on your shelf and this is the container where it will fruit plenty of head space to get mushrooms now uh should you have more than one of these I recommend getting a large tote um larger than the 66q and you can line probably three or four of these in there I can't remember but you can line them side by side U by spawning into individual shoe boxes with uh individual of uh spawn you can ensure that you're not mixing compromis spawn together so if you're unsure of the quality of your spawn it's great to spawn into individual shoe boxes that way if one goes bad and the other three spawn jars that you had were good you don't risk contaminating the whole batch you can just run them individually and keep them uh separated that way now the next thing is you have all of this substrate left over should you have only enough spawn for one uh shoe box you're going to have all this left over uh it's not very often that you're only going to spawn one shoe box but if that's the case there's no problem whatsoever with just sticking this lid on and putting it away for however long you want so long as you do not introd introduce some sort of uh nutritional Source like a starch or you drop a grain in there or otherwise contaminate it it's not going to contaminate I've had this particular bucket sitting around for months and you can see it's still you know slightly hydrated there's no mold in here there's nothing going on unless you introduce a contaminant it's going to be fine you can let this sit around for however long you want and then you can rehydrate it and reuse it later there's no need to throw this out so don't worry if you're only going to make one shoe box making this uh big batch isn't going to cause you any problems just hold it aside keep it for a later date no problem

Channel: Stipe & Cap Mushroom CO

Views: 28,451

Keywords: how to grow mushrooms, mycology, home mycology, mushrooms, fungi, shroomery

Id: 6RJsKDVyfdY

Length: 13min 55sec (835 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 04 2023