Start To Finish “PF Tek” For Growing Mushrooms At Home (Part 1)

so what's the easiest way to grow mushrooms at home now if you saw our previous video on how to grow mushrooms in a five-gallon bucket I would probably say that's actually one of the easiest ways to do it but there's another method called the PF tech and this is a super popular method for growing mushrooms on a small scale at home without requiring any kind of expensive equipment like a laminar flow hood or even a pressure cooker in fact basically everything you need to use the PF tech to grow mushrooms at home you can get at your local grocery store or your local hardware store the only exception being the actual liquid culture syringe of mushroom culture or of mycelium that you'll actually use to inoculate your substrate and grow your mushrooms now the basic PF tech involves basically mixing a substrate of brown rice flour and vermiculite then taking this substrate packing into little half-pint mason jars and sterilizing your substrate on the stove you're then going to take that once it cools down and inoculated with the mushroom mycelium or the liquid culture and allow it to colonize over the period of a week to ten days sometimes even up to two weeks and by that time mycelium will fully work its way through that substrate and it will be ready to birth then you can take the these cakes or these brown rice flower cakes essentially remove them from the jars and put them in a shotgun fruiting chamber for them into fruiting conditions and eventually grow mushrooms you shouldn't expect to grow massive amounts of mushrooms using the PF tech but it's something that you can pretty easily do from the comfort of your own home and it's just a really fun project overall and if you've never grown mushrooms before it's actually a pretty good place to start so this is gonna be done in two parts in this video we're gonna be mixing up a substrate sterilizing the substrate and inoculating it with our liquid culture and then in the next video we'll watch the mycelium kind of overtake that substrate birth the cakes and eventually fruit them in a shotgun fruiting chamber you can grow a variety of different mushrooms using this method but in this video we're going to be growing Elle oysters which are just a really nice species to grow they're super tasty and they grow nicely and the thing that's nice about Elle moistures is they don't require a ton of fresh air as much so as maybe blue oysters or some other mushrooms that you can grow so they're pretty good option she grow indoors or in a shotgun fruiting chamber all of the equipment and materials that you need to do this technique will be posted in the description below so if you want to follow along feel free to check that out and see everything that you need to do to actually follow this method and grow mushrooms at home so let's hop into the kitchen and get started mixing up our substrate alright so the first step is we're gonna mix up the substrate for these BRF cakes and BRF just means brown rice flour and what that substrate is is just a mixture of brown rice flour and vermiculite now brown rice flour is exactly what it sounds like it's brown rice flour you can probably find this at your local grocery store but if you can't you can always just take brown rice and mix it up in a coffee grinder to make brown rice flour vermiculite on the other hand is just a mineral that's typically used for soil conditioning so you can easily find it at garden centers and I think typically what's what vermiculite is for is for putting in like potting soil to kind of help with the aeration and the reason why we use it in the substrate mix it's kind of the same reason it kind of gives some space and allows you know room for the mycelium to grow throughout the brown rice flour the rice flour serving as the nutrition part of these cakes and then of course we're gonna have to add water because mushrooms do use a lot of water and it needs to be well hydrated so what we're gonna be doing is just mixing everything up into this bowl I'm adding the water until it's properly hydrated and then we're gonna be packing that substrate mix into these little half plain mason jars so these are 250 mil mason jars and I've gone ahead and drilled four holes each 90 degrees apart on the top of the lid right at the edge and the reason I've done that is because that is where we're gonna inject the liquid culture syringe to inoculate the substrate now if you don't want to drill these holes into the top of a lid you can also just get away with not using a lid at all and instead of a lid just using tinfoil but the lids do really work a lot better and it keeps everything nice and compact so if you if you have a drill I think this is like a 360 fourth bit that I use to drill these holes if you have that then that's a lot easier and if you don't want to do that you can also just use like a punch and put it on a piece of wood or something and punch a hole in with a hammer and a punch and punch a hole four holes in top of these lids so for every one of these half pint jars for every one of these cakes that we're gonna make you want to use about a half a cup of vermiculite about a sixth of a cup of the brown rice flour and about 60 milliliters of water so we're gonna be making six of these cakes so we're gonna want to use about three and a half cups of vermiculite about one full cup of brown rice flour and we're gonna use about 350 milliliters of water so first we're gonna add our vermiculite so I'll go ahead and measure out about three and a half cups so this is just straight-up dr vermiculite the amount doesn't have to be exact but it's good to get it close because you do want that right mixture of vermiculite and brown rice flour in the bowl so first we're gonna add our three and a half cups of vermiculite so now I'm gonna go ahead and add our 350 milliliters of water on top of the vermiculite and if you find that it's a little bit too wet or you added too much water you don't want to see any kind of water accumulating at the bottom of the bowl so you just want it nice and evenly mixed but you can always drain that out if you add too much because you just want to make sure that the vermiculite is thoroughly soaked but you don't want it to be you know overly wet or soupy so now we're gonna go ahead and add our one full cup of brown rice flour and again the brown rice flour is what serves as the nutrition for the mushroom mycelium and the mushrooms is it's going growing throughout the cake if you just use straight-up vermiculite without the brown rice flour the mushrooms really wouldn't have anything to feed off of and so you can kind of think of it like the brown rice flour as being the nutrition for the mushrooms to eat and the vermiculite just kind of serving as a structural part to form the cake so then go ahead and just mix that all in as evenly as possible you also want to make sure that you don't get any clumps of brown rice flour so it's nice and evenly distributed throughout the whole mixture okay so now that it's fully mixed up we can go ahead and put it into our jars now when you're filling your jar you don't want to fill it all the way up to the top you want to fill it and maybe leave about a half an inch below the top of the jar and the reason for that is because after we pack it with this substrate we're gonna put a thin layer of just straight drive vermiculite on the very top and again what that's gonna do is it's going to act as a filter preventing any kind of contaminants from coming from the air and falling into those holes and getting into your cake before the mushroom mycelium gets to fully colonize the substrate so we're gonna go ahead and pack these jars leave about a half inch at the top and then put a dry layer of vermiculite over top as a filter so when you're loading up your jars you don't want them to be totally cram packed you actually want them to be relatively loose and airy so once you fill it up just kind of give it a tap on the bottom but don't push in the substrate really tight [Music] so now that we have all our jars full of substrate we can go ahead and add that layer of vermiculite but before we do we just want to make sure we take a paper towel and wipe down the rim of the jar and the reason for this is because if you have that filter that layer of vermiculite but you have you know brown rice flour up there there's still a good chance that contaminants can kind of creep in along there so just go ahead take a piece of paper towel clean the top off and then you can fill it with your vermiculite so now we're going to go ahead and spoon on our vermiculite now keep in mind that this is just drive vermiculite right out of the bag and we're simply just going to go ahead and add it to the top and bring flush with the top of the jar [Music] and once that's done you can go ahead and add your lid and you can see how now that's a nice effective kind of filter that will protect the top of the brown rice cakes from any kind of contaminants now you might not be able to see it but that brown rice flour and vermiculite is currently totally contaminated right it's gonna have some other mold spores and bacteria and all sorts of stuff that once it gets wet it will start to kind of grow and out-compete that mycelium which is why we first need to sterilize this substrate before we can inject it with the liquid culture now if you have a pressure cooker that's definitely the best you can put them in a pressure cooker at 15 psi for about 45 minutes and that will basically sterilize this and make it ready for inoculating the liquid culture but you don't need a pressure cooker you can also just do this at atmospheric pressure on the stovetop you just have to do it for a little bit longer so we're gonna be putting these just on a stove top to show you that you can do it without a pressure cooker and basically you'll just keep it off the bottom so put something either jar lids or a rack or something at the bottom of a pot fill it with a couple inches of water and put a lid on it and steam it on the stove for about an hour and a half and that should do a pretty good job at sterilizing the substrate so one last step before we put these in the sterilizer is we're just gonna simply cover the lid with the thin sheet of tin foil and what that does is just kind of protects it from steam dripping off the lid of the pot and entering those holes and changing the water composition in here pooling the bottom with water so just take a small sheet of tin foil and put it over all the lids of your jars okay so now these are ready to put into a pot put them on the stove and get them sterilized so we're gonna elect that steam on the stove now for about an hour and a half now that's not an hour and a half from when you turn the stove on that's an hour and a half from when the water starts to boil and steam starts to work its way around those jars so if you find that over that hour and a half that the water starts to get too low just go ahead and simply add more yeah and just keep an eye on it and let that steam work its way around the jars for about 90 minutes and then of course once it's done just turn off the stove and let it cool down because you don't want to add your liquid culture to the to the substrate when it's too hot because it will kill the mycelium so it's best to kind of do this overnight basically let the steam for an hour and a half shut the stove off and then come back the next morning and inoculate with your mushroom culture and that's what we're gonna do so yeah go ahead and let this steam and we'll come back tomorrow and actually inoculate them so it's the next day now and our jars have been sterilized and now they've got a chance to cool down and they're ready to be inoculated with the liquid culture syringe but just keep in mind that everything we did before this point sterility wasn't that important because while we're gonna sterilize the jars but everything from now on it's important to make sure you stay as clean as possible and everything that you do is as clean as possible to minimize the chances that your substrate is going to get contaminated so we're gonna be doing that by using something called a steel air box and show you how to build one of those right away but keep in mind there's lots of different ways that you can do this and there's lots of different ways you can inoculate these jars whether that be doing it in still air box like I'll show you doing it in front of a laminar flow hood if you have one of those or even just doing it in a clean space like going into your bathroom for example shutting the door making sure it's as clean as possible anything that you do to try and mitigate the transfer of the contaminants that are just naturally in the air from getting into your substrate the better off you're gonna be so yeah again we're gonna do that with a steel air box and I'm gonna show you how to make those right away okay so here we have all this stuff that we're gonna need to inoculate our cakes and basically what we have here this is a still air box and it's simply just a clear tote that I've gone ahead and cut two holes here that we can stick our arms inside of and do any kind of sterile work we need to inside of there and the theory is you can clean the inside of the box and you can put stuff in there that's been cleaned and then you know everything that you put into there like your hands or the syringe will be clean as well and it will kind of minimize the contamination it's called a still air box because basically any kind of work that's done inside this box is away from any drafts or anything else in the air that might be possibly contaminating your cakes so yeah again these things work pretty well they're pretty much the next best thing to a laminar flow hood although it is kind of cumbersome to work inside of them you can do all sorts of good stuff with this so this is a still air box of course in paper towel and in here some isopropyl alcohol and that's just to kind of clean the inside of the box and clean anything that might be going into the box we have an alcohol lamp and the alcohol lamp is to sterilize the tip of the needle so you'll have a flame coming out here you'll sterilize the tip of the needle before you actually inoculate your jars if you don't have an alcohol lamp you can also just use a lighter the only problem with the lighter is that it leaves kind of a black residue on the tip of the needle but that's no big deal at all and we have some gloves some latex gloves you don't need gloves you can just wash your hands really well but I find gloves are kind of nice and of course you have your cakes so the process is pretty simple we're just gonna clean the inside of the box and then you know wipe these off with alcohol and put them inside the box as well and then we're gonna sterilize the tip of the needle and after you sterilize it you'll you don't have to wait for it to cool down because the first little bit of an ocular emit comes through this will cool down the needle anyway so just sterilize the needle and then inject through each one of these holes and make sure that your Rhys terrorizing this needle between every cake that you do not between every injection but between every every cake so yeah I'm gonna go ahead and show you how this process works and then once the easier and oculi that all we got to do is wait until they're fully colonized so here is the liquid culture syringe and you can see if you look really closely you can see little bits of mycelium kind of broken up and growing inside that syringe so it's basically just a liquid that has some nutrients for the mushrooms and the mushroom mycelium so it's pretty similar to you know a culture growing out on an agar dish the only difference is that it's in liquid and it comes in the syringe and you can inject it into your PF cakes or even if you wanted to use these to inject them into sterilized grain you could make your own grain spawn so this particular one is from the mycelium Emporium but there's lots of different places that you can get these liquid culture syringes and you can quite typically get them in all different species so they come with a needle and it's pretty easy to get the model through the process basically you just need to remove this tip and then screw in this part of it and these can be actually kind of a pain to remove so that's why the mycelium poor ium sends out these twist off tools so basically you just put it on there and counterclockwise and then you can go ahead and take your needle and screw it on [Music] [Music] [Music] so that's it now these are inoculated they should be relatively safe from contamination because of the vermiculite filter on top but either way still we're gonna put these somewhere kind out of the way in the dark and just allow them to colonize and then you know in a week or so they will be fully colonized and we'll be able to berth them to hydrate them and to actually fruit them but that's all going to be in the next video so yeah that's it for this video we've prepared the substrate we've knock you lated it and now we just need to wait for the mycelium to do its thing before we can actually put these in the fruiting conditions so yeah thanks so much for watching this video and I will see you in part two

Channel: FreshCap Mushrooms

Views: 720,265

Keywords: pf tek, grow mushrooms, grow mushrooms at home, easy way to grow mushrooms, brf cakes

Id: D4jUTIv0XfY

Length: 17min 16sec (1036 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 22 2020