Should You Dunk? Fan? And How to Avoid Sidepins (NO Liner), and How to Harvest Shoeboxes! Mycology

what is up everybody this is Michael file Sage checking in here today I hope you guys are doing well in today's video I want to talk about three things first thing I want to talk about is side pens now I made a video before that but here I have an opportunity to illustrate to you exactly what I was talking about in the discussion on site pins and liners video that I posted a few weeks back now on the second part of this video I want to tell you guys about how you can Harvest side pins in shoe boxes in particular I want to give you some tips and things like that and in the last part of the video part three I want to tell you guys about how I like to go about rehydrating your substrate after a flush so that you could prepare for the next flush right um and I'm going to talk about a couple of different techniques and what's really important at the end of the day all right so let's get to this video now the first thing that as I said I wanted to show you guys is this substrate now this guy had one flush right and this guy had a most excellent flush Avery's albino it's flushed over 30 grams dry which is an excellent yield from one quarter spawn which is very very good that's what you want to aim for you know if you can get an ounce dry bad as you're doing something right in a flush so as you can see on the side um because it was such a big flush the substrate has shrank quite a bit right quite a bit and but the thing is I think you'll notice that there are barely any side pins at all side fruits side pens like but nothing on this side I think there's a bottom pen somewhere yeah there's a bottom pin there um and there's a pin there's a fruit right over there but other than that there is nothing this thing guys was just a forest canopy right a rainforest canopy and um and barely any side pens so what helped here okay so the first thing that helped was I used liquid culture for this I've already worked on genetics that's the first thing so good genetics is definitely going to help in the sense that you get your flush all at once because with multi-sport genetics you're going to have a lot more different strains fruiting and they're all going to be on different time schedules let's say you harvest a bunch but then you're gonna have a bunch of little pins coming on right so oftentimes it's multi-sport it's kind of hard to like set okay this is the end of the flush right there's no like clear demarcation Point oftentimes you're just sort of harvesting as you go and you know like misting and stuff sorry I'm like dunking and stuff sort of goes out the Wayside I talk about this in uh one of my videos I think about harvesting yeah I think it was harvesting talk I talk about how some genetics will put out you know fruits all at once and it's really easy to harvest and other times they're gonna put out a little bit here and there and those are the annoying ones so oftentimes when I get genetics like that nowadays all I I do is I would just Harvest them all at once just pins and all now you know when you're a beginner you're like oh but you know you if you let those other fruits over here mature a little bit then you're gonna have greater yield in the end right well believe me guys um if you're at the point where you can get fruits from from basically you can successfully fruit mushrooms then before you know it you're gonna be just completely swamped with fruits you you it's going to be a problem guys I'm serious mark my words you're gonna get to a point where you have so many fruits you just don't even care about yield much anymore like I am right like I don't know what to do with all the fruits but I just keep them and the collection keeps adding up so you know just harvesting pins and everything and now I just think okay well you know pins are also tastier than bigger fruits as well so you know it's it's nothing really goes to waste but anyways getting back to the side pens and stuff so you know as you've noticed there's there's no liner here but as you can see there's barely any pins right why is that it's because the surface conditions are really really optimal for the fruits to be coming now it looks like a war zone right now because the harvesting itself was not a very clean thing but uh you know I only go for like a flush or two so it doesn't even matter to me but basically what I did here was oftentimes I have problems with shoe boxes of the top drying out if I make like an unmodified shoebox like this right it would just like because I live in a place with low relative humidity and and often the top dries out so I don't get fruits you know on certain parts and I might get some side pins um now there's there's ways to ameliorate that you know you could put that put for example The Shoe Box inside a bigger uh like mono tub right and then it keeps the moisture in there or you could put it in a tent or something like that but the whole point the whole reason I use shoe boxes is for the side fact the size factor is so that I don't have to do all of that so I don't have to have a bunch of big things around in my house right I like this form factor of shoe boxes and that's why I stick with them but again the problem was the drawing out in my environment so what did I do to help that well I put a proper casing layer on um in this case Jiffy Mix right now Jiffy Mix is slightly nutritious at least nutritious enough for molds to grow so I pasteurize it for an hour and a half now if you want to know how I pasteurize my substrates and my casing layers check out my um check out my instant pot video right all about the instant pot or something like that I have one instant pot video so it's that video um and I go over how I pasteurize stuff there an hour and a half for casing layers so yeah basically the casing layer protects the mycelium from drying out I keep the casing layer very moist and it protects the my ceiling from drying out and thus we got an amazing flush and we got barely any side bends because the side fruits basically did not want a fruit on the side when it was so much happier food from the top I love seeing happy mushrooms like that guys so yeah that's basically the first part of this video I suppose so let's talk about the second part which is how should you go about harvesting now again this is a very very easy Harvest right because oftentimes you know you might have a bunch of mature side pens and then you might have a bunch of pins on top so it's like okay how are we going to harvest this right like I can't get to the side fruits unless I like destroy all the pins here so I could hold it or something of that sort it does get challenging and I'll be honest if you're if that's your situation then you might just want to harvest everything at once I know it sucks I know it sucks uh I usually don't do that or at least I find it hard to do that but uh well we'll talk about it when we get there so I'm going to set this camera up and I'll show you guys how I like to do it alright guys so I'm back so I'm going to show you guys how I like to harvest the side fruits now with the shoe box it's very very easy here we got fruit here we got a fruit there so you know it's not we don't have much at all we only have two measly little side and bottom fruits um but the technique that I'm going to show you is the same for if you have a high amount or a low amount now the easiest okay so remember I was just talking about what do you do if you have a lot of pins and stuff and you don't want them because you know here's here's the easiest way go like this take another shoe box flip it around go like this boom easy easy to Harvest Right nice little Nifty trick that I like to talk about on this channel but if you have a lot of fruits on top then it's kind of hard to do that right so I'll show you guys how I do it it's a little Balancing Act if you are in that situation to put it back as simple you just gotta go like this it's a little bit heavy okay there we go go like that voila right simple as simple as can be so what I do is instead of using the shoe box right pretend I got a bunch of pens I'm going to carefully position my fingers right I'm going to carefully position my fingers so that I damage as little as possible in other words I want you guys to imagine that there are a bunch of pins on the surface of the substrate that I'm carefully avoiding touching with my fingers so that I don't damage them and potentially abort them I mean you are probably gonna end up damaging some pins some hyphoon not some promotia it's it's it's a it's the cost of uh growing mushrooms don't worry there's going to be more coming out later so just try to be as careful as possible flip it around like this unfortunately I was not able to keep the substrate and view of the camera for the harvesting part but essentially what you want to do at this point is to pick the side and bottom pins be sure to stay aware of how the substrate is balancing on your hand as it is possible that the substrate May Crack in half if improperly balanced so now if you do end up cracking the substrate it's not the end of the world you could put it back together just try to be careful next time or um you know the best way to prevent the best way to not get side pins is prevention right so if you are getting side pins often then try to fix that because once you fix that then you won't even have to worry about it you know people say you got if you don't use a liner you're gonna get a bunch of side fruits it's BS the liners you know they they're really good the only reason I use liners right is to basically help Harvest monotubs because you can't do these little Nifty fun little cute little tricks with a monotone because it's just a bit it's just too big you can't balance it on one hand I suppose you can actually flip two monos depending on the kind of box it is but uh yeah I'm not a fan for example of floating that's a method that people like to use I'm not a fan of that it's messy and it's completely unnecessary just make a nice liner and just pull it out in my opinion that's that that will be that's ideal for me so yeah that's basically how you harvest a shoe box um now it's like another method that I used to do is again I just talked about floating the reason that I didn't bring up this method first is because I'm not a fan of it personally but what I used to do is I used to float the tubs right and once I float it then I'd carefully like sort of push it down get the pins that I can so it was just like a way of sort of uh not touching the pins or not harming the pins on the top and just sort of pushing it down and then just like with the other hand harvesting what I can it wasn't very fun especially when you have to do like modern Foods it's not very good for for bottom fruits so I don't really recommend that right um so you know as you do it as you get experience um hopefully well hey you don't get side pins so you deal with that right remember the main thing is to have good surface conditions and it also helps to pack down your substrate a bit and the other thing is to basically sort of just find out what works for you just try a couple and see what works for you I just presented some of my options and shared my experiences so take with it what you will so to sum things up my personal recommendation is as follows if you have a lot of side and bottom fruits that are mature but pins still on top then I would balance the substrate with my fingers whilst picking the side and bottom fruits or I may simply Harvest everything and call it a day now on the other hand if I had already harvested the top fruits but still have side and bottom fruits then I would simply flip the substrate onto the bottom of another shoe box and then Harvest them as I had shown earlier in this video so now we're going to talk about the last part of this video and that is rehydrating your shoebox so let's talk about rehydration this is an interesting topic you know the first thing the go-to of everybody or at least a lot of people the first go-to is to dunk right um is to basically dunk your substrate whether it's shoe box whether it's uh PF cakes whether it's mono tubs you know it doesn't matter whether it's bad grows it's just like dunk it right so basically what that means is just covering the whole thing in water or just covering like the whole sides and letting it float and then maybe weighing it down with something I've never been a fan of Duncan guys I've never been a fan of filling my tub it's just messy it's just unnecessary and I think it's like dunking has is one of those practices that I feel is going the way of the dodo you know same as you know Fanning your your uh mono tubs and stuff guys Fanning is completely outdated uh just in case you guys don't know you should not be Fanning it's completely unnecessary with shoe boxes and monotubs especially when they're like they're like shoe boxes are basically already dialed in out of the box you don't really have to worry about it I mean obviously you know everybody's environment's a little different but in terms of the FAE Department which Fanning is supposed to help with a shoe box you don't have to worry about it they get tons of Fae not enough moisture okay that's something that could work out that could need some work for example in my case I had to use a casing layer right but in terms of Fae you don't have to worry about it you don't have to worry about Fanning guys for example if you're doing an unmodified mono tub right and your fruits are getting you know or having uh fuzz on the bottom and up the top right your fruits are sort of getting skinny okay you got an Fae problem you got to fix that right um but when when that monotub is done right it doesn't have anything to do with you you don't have to Fan it you should be able to neglect it right um so you should be striving towards that point um so yeah it's uh dunking is going the same way it's just really unnecessary because at the end of the day all they need is water that's it right they just need water one way or the other now in nature they get it from rain and that's sort of the method that I'm doing it recently is to just heavy Mist just miss the crap out of it right um and before just you know maybe up until semi recently I used to bottom water but I avoid bottom watering because um because the side pins basically like it it encourages a better fruiting environment on the side because now the substrate has shrank right uh it's creating like perfect conditions for fruits to come right it's just too easy for fruits to come in there rather than come on the top so I'm sort of avoiding that now another method that you could use is you could take a clean syringe fill it up with water and just sort of inject inject your substrate all over right how how much you shoot in there it depends you know experiment a little just start off slowly but personally what I like to do now is just basically Mist because because if the substrate it wants water right it's going to literally absorb that water quicker than a substrate that doesn't want water like if you pay attention to what the mycelium is telling you what the substrate is telling you it's very easy you will be able to tell if it stops absorbing that water as much then lay off on the misting so basically after you get a flush just for a couple of like this now in this one I have a proper casing layer so you see that I'm misting fairly close right but if I didn't have a casing layer then obviously I missed a little further just to be careful but these guys can take it baby so we're just going to give it a nice good lifting and yeah as I said one of the benefits of this is that it encourages uh better fruiting conditions on the top rather than the side now once you get to this point where your substrate has shrank then it's normal to get more side pins right that's basically with quarter lovers especially that's just how it goes right I think we need to change the way we look at side pins because we think of it like oh it's the end of the world oh it's like something that's completely avoidable it's not completely avoidable in my experience after a certain point you are going to get some side pins at one point or another they're completely edible as long as they're not rotting as long as you don't leave them for too long or they don't smell funky or they're not too slimy they'll be fine guys so just moderate mixing moderate heavy misting and they will absolutely love it guys just pretend this is Heavy Rain not the game but like you know actual heavy rain as they face in nature right that tells them oh it's uh really soon we're going to be fruiting you know and then you can also stimulate Thunder okay I'm going a little too far though so that's basically um I guess the video for the day I'm sure as usual I missed something and later on I'm gonna be like I should have talked about this or whatever but um I guess that's that's sort of the video for now so now on top I've got some pooling water inside some of the craters here so if within the next hour or two if they're not mostly absorbed then I'm just gonna drain it out or something so here's an update 24 hours later they absorbed everything within three hours so I gave them another misting before going to bed when I woke up they had also absorbed that as well so I gave it another mistake now once they stop absorbing as much I will know that the substrate is sufficiently hydrated and thus I will lay off on the misting so that's the best of a great day or night microphile sage check it out for now [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Mycophilia

Views: 70,885

Keywords:

Id: MmVxBm6SxMQ

Length: 17min 8sec (1028 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 28 2023