How to SPAWN Grain to Coir Bulk Substrate | A Beginner's Guide to Mushroom Growing

foreign in this video I'm going to show you how to spawn colonized grain to a bulk substrate so what does that mean basically we're going to be taking our colonized grain and popcorn grain in this case we're going to be mixing it with pasteurized Coco choir blending it together putting it in one of these tubs and then putting a lid on it and what's going to happen is all of this colonized grain is going to expand under the Coco choir and grow more mycelium then we're going to have a big block of mycelium that our mushrooms are going to grow off of and it's this is one of my favorite parts of the mushroom cultivation process you get to actually open up your spawn you get to smell it you get to touch it so this part's a lot of fun for me and I hope it's fun for you all too so a couple things you need first first and foremost you need your Colonel colonized grain if you don't have this you can't uh you can't spawn any grain to bulk substrate because you don't have your grain if you need help on how to colonize grain spawn I have some great videos on how to inoculate grain spawn with a liquid culture specifically liquid cultures that I made using a Capri Sun so the really cool videos be sure to check those out but make sure you have colonized grain spawn next thing you need is your bulk substrate in this case we're using cocoa quar and you need to pasteurize your substrate sterilizing you can do that as well but it's a little Overkill you can kill a lot of the beneficial bacteria in your substrate so we're actually pasteurizing if you don't know how to do that I have a great video on how to do an easy bucket Tech method which is what I've done here where you pasteurize your Coco Choir in a five gallon bucket so be sure to check that out as well but a few things that you need here you need your grain spawn you need your pasteurized substrate Coco choir and then you need your tubs that these are going to go into your final destination so I have two of those but then I have an extra one that I'm going to be squeezing out this cocoa choir to Field capacity pardon the squeaks of my glove it is my glove I promise but we're going to be squeezing out any excess liquid in the Coco choir getting it to Field capacity before we mix it with our grain spawn so we're doing a one-to-one ratio here I'm going to go ahead and open this up this has been pasteurizing overnight so I added hot water last night let it cool overnight and now it's ready to use uh and I added boiling water not just hot water so make sure if you're doing this technique you're using boiling water but I did a one to one ratio so I'm using in each bin I'm going to use one jar of grain spawn one jar of Coco coir so it's a one to one ratio and then I'll sprinkle a layer on top to cover everything when I'm done so I'll be using that as my measurement this is still saturated with water so as you can see here I'll grab a handful and squeeze we need to get this this is way too wet this will create contamination it'll water log our uh at a water log our grain spawn cause wet rot so we need to get this to a point of what's called Field capacity which is basically you're squeezing out all the excess moisture to where you can't squeeze out anymore where it's still moist maybe if you squeezed your hardest you could drip out some more but when you give it a good squeeze you get a couple good drips like that but it's still wet you can hear that it's wet but it's not overly saturated that's Field capacity you got to play with this a little bit watch some more tutorials online about how to get to Field capacity it is a little bit of trial trial and error I personally I have a really strong grip so when I first started doing bucket Tech and squeezing out the quar trying to get to Field capacity I was squeezing way too much out just because I have a tight grip so I have to kind of regulate that a little bit normally I don't like squeezing the liquid back into the bucket because then as you get to the end there's just way too much liquid so I prefer to grab some grab a handful of car and then I squeeze it out in another tub just to collect the liquid elsewhere makes the process a little cleaner so out of this whole process that we're doing today squeezing the car quar getting at the Field capacity this is the worst part I do not like doing this takes a few minutes to get all your quad drained properly but it's a really important part you have to do it but this is the most tedious part of the whole process once it's done it's a lot of fun you'll see what I mean here in a minute so next we're going to be opening up our spawn jars and I love that it's exciting for me because you've been growing this and you want to make sure it smells like mycelium you want to make sure it smells it smells good and earthy and you can tell by just the smell if there is contamination uh if it smells bad if it smells sour if it smells rancid at all it's contaminated throw it out don't use it it should really be an earthy it doesn't smell like mushrooms it's just a it's hard to describe until you smelled mycelium but once you smell it you know what it is so you see how I'm squeezing this to where there's no more if I squeeze a little harder with both hands there's some excess but that's the point you want to get this to we're about halfway done here so anyways I love opening up the grain spawn and smelling it for the first time both of these grain spawns I'll tell you about what we're going to be expanding here I have one jar that's a golden teacher it was from a liquid culture that I made out of Capri Sun again like I mentioned before and expanded it onto popcorn grain spawn I'm going to be doing a video on popcorn Tech here before long so be on the be on the lookout for that if you're interested in how to mixed spawn with popcorn it's my favorite grain I've tried every other thing you can think of and have just had the most luck the most consistency with popcorn I know not everybody loves it but I've grown to really like it so we've got the golden teacher the other one is a PES Amazonian they both colonize relatively quickly this is we're going on it'll be six weeks this Tuesday so I know they're fully colonized I will say the PS Amazonian which is the one further on the left I I'm confident it's fully colonized but there are some grains on the top that are kind of dried out and that just won't colonize no matter how I shift the jar no matter what I do so I'm pretty sure it's fully colonized there's just some stubborn grain spawn on the top that's not wanting to colonize so I'm going to scrape that off and make sure I don't use any of that if you use any spawn that's not colonized you're opening yourself up to contamination because it might might just rot in your bin it might not contaminate or it might not colonize so don't use anything that's uncolonized if I open up that jar and it smells funky or if for some reason it doesn't look fully colonized I'm not going to use it but I'm pretty confident right now that I can use it safely so we're going to give her a try so we'll have one bin golden teachers one bin a PES amazonians and we're done with our choir so I'm going to move our bucket and we'll move on to the fun part I'm going to move our liquid as well clean my hands up and clean the table up a little bit you'll notice I'm wearing gloves I just don't like getting quarrel over my hands you don't have to wear gloves for that but I don't love it I don't love the feeler texture of quar when it's all wet so I prefer gloves and then when you work with your grain spawn it's always best to use gloves so you're not risking contamination but at this point it's fully colonized so it's pretty strong the mycelium growth is vigorous and as you can see um it's very thick in this golden teacher jar especially but it's pretty safe to even touch this with your bare hands if you wanted the chances of it contaminating are very low but nonetheless I wouldn't risk it so here's what I'm going to do I'm going to measure out a jar for each tub that I have here I might get another I might get a third tub just to even it out a little bit so because I will have excess here because I have to I'm going to do a casing layer on the top so I I really do want this to be like a one-to-one ratio so I'll get it to about the same height as the mushroom or as the the spawn and it's okay if you have a little bit more but we want kind of a one-to-one ratio so don't do too much more I'm going to do that in this bin and I wash these bins out before I use them today I used isopropyl alcohol and cleaned them out really well so they're good to go for this uh adding this uh spawn and substrate you'll hear it called spawn to bulk oftentimes you're taking your spawn you're putting it to a bulk substrate so that's going to be for my second tub there I'm gonna get another one to help me measure this out actually just to hold the excess so I in my bucket Tech video be sure to check that out but I explained why it's better to have too much quar at the end than not enough but you need some extra we're going to mix these together Pat it all down and then sprinkle a layer of choir on the top so you do need some extra choir so be sure to plan for that accordingly so this extra here is going to be used to make that casing layer and this one's going to go in here so we've got our one to one ratio so now we know I can put one jar to each of these then I just mix them together but first I need to make sure I know which one's which so I'm going to put a quick label on here always be sure to label your tubs label your grain jars label your tubs it's way too easy to lose track of what we're growing and I could easily mix these together and forget be like oh which one's my golden teachers and then I might not ever know because sometimes the mushrooms grow and they look identical a lot of times you can tell them apart but a lot of times you can't so don't risk it so I'm going to write what kind of mushroom this is ah my glove cooperates and then I'll also write the date it's 218. this is a golden teacher so let's do GT one slash 18. this is our PES Amazonian so I'll just do p e s one slash 18. this will let me know how long it's been colonizing for also let me know which is which I've got a PES amazonians golden teachers we've got our koir measured out so now we're ready to mix up our spawn this is the fun part for me anyways so let's see how it smells this is a PS Amazonian remember this is one that has some Grain on the top that I'm going to scrape off so let's get rid of that first let's give it a smell to make sure it smells okay smells like mycelium I think we're in luck so as you can see that popcorn just got really dried out on the top and didn't want to colonize so I'm going to scrape off that top layer I even get some around those kernels just in case you aren't fully colonized and I'm not going to use those I'm going to pour those into this empty jar a couple more in here so I don't recommend doing this but sometimes you have to the very first tub I ever grew with Uncle Ben's I was just anxious eager to get going and to grow my mushrooms so I used my bags and they're probably only three quarters of the way colonized I broke off all the uncolonized stuff not knowing if it would work but sure enough within a month of beginning the whole process I had mushrooms so I did very well my first time and I've done well since too so let's break this up I just take my knee and give her a crack I'll go ahead and do that with the PES Amazonian as well oh no this is my golden teacher over here before I do that I want to give it a smell let you look inside this one is really thick looks really good again smells earthy kind of like mushrooms oh there's a couple there are a couple grain spawns not fully colonized on here as well I'm going to knock those off real quick probably Overkill but don't take any risks when it comes to my ecology work that's one thing I've learned they don't usually pay off it's always better to play it on the safe side let's break up our golden teachers you want all these grains to be broken up if you're doing Uncle Ben's you want them to be broken up into rice-sized kernels or um I think they say pea-sized kernels maybe but these popcorn kernels break them up into individual kernels and space them out you don't want really big chunks I all these chunks that don't break up I break them up in the bin which you'll see here in a second so now we're just going to mix the two you want to mix them really really well you're going to see I'm going to spend a lot of time mixing these the jar smell there's that awesome deep mycelium smell that I love I wish you could smell it we got an empty jar which is good freeze up another jar so now I'm going to break up these popcorn kernels a little bit but then we're just going to mix the hell out of this we want every piece of Kernel to be covered in quar we want to be separate we want this to be distributed as equally as possible because that's going to help colonize all of this Quark quickly and evenly if you have even if I left it like this it might colonize but it's going to be splotchy it's going to take a lot longer you got big clumps of quar you need to break up that are probably not gonna colonize if you don't so get your hands in there break everything up it's kind of like making food I always feel like I'm prepping some kind of casserole or something when I do this part which maybe is why I like it so much I love cooking all right we're getting to a good point we mix this all together really well then I like to take my tub and there's always quar that gets stuck at the bottom so I'll just scrape it down like that make sure I mix it really well I'll flip it and do it the other way you can see how well see how everything's really getting spread out and Incorporated in here that's just what we want you can tell I did a good job with uh Field capacity is not dripping wet but it is moist I do have quite a few of these big clumps of choir and feel free to remove some of those if they're two out of hand um I'm gonna do that real quick all right now you just want to Pat this down really really kind of uh you want to give it a hard pat down I'm pushing everything down you want to create kind of like a Patty on the bottom and you want everything to be as flat and as evenly as possible go around the sides you can see how I'm pushing down around the edges you want to kind of crimp the edges down in so they're not sticking up and even playing field here means that you'll get a more even pin set the water will be more evenly distributed as you're misting if you need to mist hopefully we won't need to mist and then it'll colonize more evenly as well so you'll have a flatter more level uh cake that mushrooms will grow off of it should colonize quicker as well if you get it all pushed down really nicely so you can see there I've got this only goes about an inch because we're just doing one to one so it's not you know if you could do a two to two you could do a two to one you could use more grain spawn you'll probably have better luck you might have bigger mushrooms we're not going to get the huge monster mushrooms from this but we're going to get a nice flush for sure so now that this is done the next step would be to take this extra choir and we're going to just sprinkle a layer on top you don't want it to be too thick maybe a quarter of an inch a lot of times you see the kernels poking through and that's okay but you want to give it this is going to help hold in some humidity and some moisture as this is colonizing but it's also going to get eaten up by The Choir and again provide that nice playing field for our mushrooms so you don't want to be uneven here either we worked hard to get our first layer really flat and really even we're going to do the same thing here once you get that layer on there we're going to repress everything and give it a nice even layer so see how here you could leave it there's a big lump there it'll colonize probably but it's going to be a lot harder for a mushroom to grow on that spot so if we get it flattened out we're more likely to have mushrooms if you crimp down on the side I'm not using a liner I don't worry about side pins I get them sometimes but I think using a liner is more of a hassle leave me a comment if you disagree with me there if I should try liners but I find if you crimp down really well on the sides um you'll avoid side pins for the most part then when you're picking your bin up pick it up from the bottom when you pick it up from the side like this it separates that cake from the side and then it opens up moisture in there and you're more likely to get side pins from that so pick it up from the bottom when you're moving it after we finish this process all right that looks pretty good to me we got a nice flat cake sealed on all the edges we have some kernels showing but that's okay you can take a little car if it makes you uneasy and Pat it down on those ones but it's not going to hurt anything to have a couple showing more importantly just to have a nice even layer everything flattened out and distributed you're going to have these funny quir hairs hanging up everywhere that's okay they'll get colonized try to get everything down evenly though so the other way I kind of test Field capacity is I'll put a lid on this now and I'll let it go for a day or two and if I don't have condensation building up around the sides of the bin and on the top then I know I may have overdone it with my Field capacity and I'll take my my spray bottle and I'll actually miss the top just to give some extra moisture but I don't usually have to do that but that's one way I I kind of make sure we have enough moisture in there so this bin our PES Amazonian is ready to go heck yeah next step will be mushrooms so we're going to take this let this colonize I do 10 to 14 days which is longer than most people do before I open it up to fruiting conditions but 14 days I find two weeks really allows everything to fully colonize and we usually have a pin set by then if not some mushrooms growing so it all depends on that on when I really open it but leaving it in here longer saves me because I'm a constant Checker I want to open this up and look at it all the time see if I have mushrooms yet and all that does is release moisture release the humidity and you're hurting your your potential pin set each time you do that so by letting it go for 14 days I find that I have better luck getting an even pin set and getting more mushrooms that way so now we're going to do the same thing we did with the PS amazonians as we're going to do the same thing with the golden teachers now man it smells good we already have our core measured out one to one ratio so we have one jar of quar one jar of popcorn grain mix those together and see there's this big chunk here you don't want to leave that break it apart so the mycelium can distribute more evenly throughout the choir get this mixed up really well and see I've gotten pretty good at it because I've done this so many times but you'll get a you get a feel for it you'll be able to mix it up pretty quickly where you get everything evenly distributed and then again I do I always do this I don't know if it really helps but I think it helps get some of that excess core off the bottom mixed in all right we're almost done here that looks good now the important part next important part is getting this spread out evenly sometimes you'll be you'll have way more popcorn Grain on one side when you start to pat down you feel it's really uneven it's kind of happening to me here I have way more on this side yeah look at that so I might start over with padding and just make sure I scrape some more over here get it evened out a little bit more then start patting it down again but the one to one ratio is going to let your grain spawn colonize the substrate much quicker than if I had two jars of corn here to my one jar of corn popcorn it will probably colonize but it's going to take longer and which in in theory is going to risk more contamination because you're giving contamination more time to take over your bin so a one-to-one ratio is very popular if you're new to cultivating mushrooms magic mushrooms specifically which is what we're growing here so we're almost done here with the golden teachers that looks good we got a pretty even Cake Building there I'm gonna go around the edges one more time and crimp those a little more because remember crimping those edges down in is going to help prevent side pins so now take some more of this extra coir and sprinkle it along the top now we need to talk about where we're going to store these I have a little cubby and a hutch that I keep a heat pad in that keeps the temperature at about 75 degrees these should fit nicely in there you can keep it in a warm closet you can keep it up top in the cupboard in your kitchen don't open it keep it somewhere semi clean if you can secluded somewhere dark you don't want to give this light it'll grow well in darkness and then a nice warm humid spot if possible and then we're not going to take the lid off at all for two weeks at that point we'll move it into fooding conditions and then I just I don't even flip the lid typically I just leave the lid on without latching it because again this it tends to dry out too quickly for me so even flipping the lid I find um dries out my substrate too quickly so I'll show you all that in the next video about fruiting conditions this one's really just about spawning to bulk substrate which we've done successfully now on two bins now we let the waiting game take its course you can see it's not like a perfect line I don't have a level here that I'm working with but it's pretty darn even throughout so anyways now we're going to put the lid on this I'm going to take these to my warm cubby hole in my Hutch where these are going to colonize for 10 to 14 days we'll check up on them I'll make some videos about how they're doing and I'll show you along the way over the next two weeks and then when we get to the right time I'll show you how to move these into fruiting conditions and how to grow mushrooms off of these so thank you all so much for joining this was a video on how to spawn your your grain your colonized grain to a bulk substrate to Coco coir in particular we walked through how to do a quick bucket Tech about how to colonize your grain real quickly we talked about how to pasteurize your your Coco choir how to to squeeze your cocoa core to Field capacity how to mix it appropriately how to put a casing layer on how to seal it we talked about where these need to go where they need to be stored and for how long so you guys should be all set until we make our next video If you like this video be sure to give it a like give it a thumbs up if you've been enjoying my videos please do me a favor and subscribe to my channel if you have any questions or comments for me if you have any videos you'd like to see me make please leave me a comment I respond to my viewers really quickly and I'd love to hear from you all right thanks everybody for joining today

Channel: Time-For-Rain

Views: 68,489

Keywords: liquid culture, how to make liquid culture, mushroom, mycology, uncle bens tek, buckettek, coco coir, spawn, spawntobulk, spawning, growing mushrooms at home, spawn to bulk, bulk substrate, coir, Mushrooms, Mushroom cultivation, Fungi, Mycology, Edible mushrooms, Mushroom farming, Shiitake mushrooms, Oyster mushrooms, Mushroom spawn, Growing mushrooms at home, Mushroom growing kit, Mushroom harvest, Mushroom substrate, Mushroom propagation, Mushroom growing for beginners, timeforrain

Id: r4HVMpcQ43I

Length: 27min 59sec (1679 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 19 2023