The Complete Monotub Tek Cultivation Walk-through - The Easiest Way to Grow Mushrooms Indoors!

mono tubs they're simple highly effective ways to cultivate mushrooms indoors discreetly with minimal infrastructure and minimal cost in this video we'll take you through the full process of making a mono tub including cultivating and creating your own Master Grade spawn and optional upgrades for your mono tub to take your grow to the next level hey I'm Kevin I'm here with north spore and today we're gonna talk about mono tube cultivation which is a really simple at home cultivation method so how a lot of professional growers get their start and what we're gonna do is use a pasteurized manure substrate to grow oysters mushrooms today and you can grow a wide variety of mushrooms and different types of agaricus shaggy Mane's so on and so forth using this method and this substrate so let's go over some of the materials we're gonna need for this for monotube cultivation you're gonna start with a tub this is a clear 70 quart Sterilite container any similar plastic container will work we're gonna use black spray paint to spray paint the bottom half of this tub that'll keep your substrate dark if you use a dark one you're going to want to have a window or some sort of lighting system involved we're gonna use a two inch hole saw on a power drill we're gonna use this to drill holes into the side of the mono tub we're gonna stuff those holes with a polyfill we're going to secure that polyfill with duct tape we're gonna fill the mono tub with our bulk substrate in this case we're using boomer bags we're gonna have to spray bottles one with 70% isopropyl alcohol one with water we're gonna have our colonised bag of oyster mushroom grain spawn if you wanted to make your own grain spawn and we'll go into this more later you can purchase our sterilized grain bags with injection ports in that way you can inject your liquid culture whether it's spores or mycelial culture directly into the grain to make it grain spawn and of course you're gonna want rubber gloves and labels and a sharpie keep track of things and we're gonna case it all with coconut quarter all right so let's hop into our flow hood start the process of making our Green spawn with a four culture or liquid culture could be tissue could be sports so weird or fluid it's a hepa air filtered locally with positive pressure so it's gonna keep everything real clean when you unbox your green just make sure to check your bag for any rips or tears or holes there is anything like that let us know we'll take care of it for you spray your hands down with alcohol spray your forearms down with alcohol you want to just keep this place as sterile as possible you really can't use too much wipe your surfaces down wipe your hands down again and then we're gonna start sterilizing this bag by spring it was rubbing alcohol and getting some on our hands and kind of getting into little nooks and crannies again you can't be too sterile so just keep going if you're not sure so that's our injection port right there and that's where our liquid culture is gonna go so you want to take your liquid culture tilt it up and down a few times that's gonna disperse any spores or culture evenly throughout the liquid Brahe down a paper towel and wipe down your score syringe everything that you can this is all sterile technique so pay attention to the process here notice how we didn't touch the needle at all at any point and kept it into the packaging for as long as possible you're gonna want to flame sterilize the tip and now it's ready to go into the injection port clean it off before you put it in and then kind of angle it downward slightly that'll get your liquid culture into a moister area of the bag with a little more water in the grain and it's gonna spread a little faster that way these injection ports are self sealing so you don't have to worry about contamination coming in afterwards now you want to leave it and let it sit to start colonizing you get to a certain point you can take your bag and break it up break up all that mycelium and spread it around and disperse it more easily through your bag let it sit and let it slowly colonize now you're gonna get a more even colonization rate and the faster now we have our ready grain spawn it's all white it's cohesive it's kind of just like a brick it's ready to go so the first step is we're going to take our tub and we're going to spray paint it or spray paint the bottom half of it black and the reason why we do that is because though mushrooms are not photosynthetic they are photosensitive and so the light is gonna influence how they grow so if we didn't spray-paint this you'd have mushrooms fruiting down here they'd be fruiting on the bottom they'd be unharvested oh but they'd still be using your valuable substrate so we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna take this outside because we don't want to spray paint inside so we're outside of our facility we're in downtown Westbrook Maine right now so what we're gonna do is we're gonna start by using this tape to make some nice clean lines so we rent the paint from bleeding so now that its hub is tapes we're gonna start spray painting so make sure you give it a good shake we're ready to start [Music] [Music] so we just spray-painted our tote brought it back inside it's pretty dry now so we can start to remove the tape technically unnecessary but we're just hoping for a nice clean line and open that it looks good so I'm gonna start pulling this tape off right here sorry tub is painted the tape is off and we are ready for the next step which is drilling holes in the side so again we're using a two inch hole saw right here on a power drill and this part is one of the trickier parts it's really easy to crack the plastic so you need to have it going at a high speed without like any pressure on it you just want the teeth to do the work without any of your own pressure involved so we're gonna do two on each of these sides and one on each of these sides and we're doing this to allow air flow because we need ventilation because as the mushrooms start colonizing the substrate they're gonna be releasing carbon dioxide too much carbon dioxide is going to result in no fruiting or really deformed fruiting time to start drilling so again you're gonna be really really careful make sure your drill is in forward and not backwards [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so the edges they're a little rough so we're just going to trim these up as best we can with utility knife just to make it all a little more smooth just like that keep doing this to all the holes you just want to keep things looking good but also minimizes the space where there could be gaps for air that's not going through the polyfill come in so we got our holes drilled we cleaned them up now we're gonna put our polyfill in and this kind of axe is like a very simple air filter to help keep unwanted spores and whatnot out so we just stuff it in the hole you want a nice big handful like a big clump in there you can see it's kind of coming out that side too that's alright alright another one [Music] we've got our holes filled with the polyfill and now we're gonna tape around the edges of the polyfill and we do that primarily just to keep the polyfill from falling out unexpectedly come around the edge here kind of just doing a square if you look under the video you'll find some links for some of this stuff like the polyfill there's links for other resources too and we have a bunch of information on our website as well all right last little bit on this one doesn't look that pretty good thing the mushrooms don't care so your tubs all ready you're batting the polyfill is in the holes it's all covered up it's taped it looks secure so now comes one of the most important parts and that's sterilizing your container and that includes sterilizing the space that you're in and it includes sterilizing all of your materials that you're gonna attach from here on out if we weren't doing this video we'd probably be in a much smaller cleanroom this room is large it's really be really hard to clean and keep sterile but for the sake of making this video we're gonna make it work this is where everything can go wrong in this you've already put all this time into making your tub so let's make sure we do it right and how we do that is primarily with isopropyl alcohol plain old rubbing alcohol this is a 70% and I'm gonna put on gloves now this is the part where we want to be very clean and again if we were doing this at home our selves we would try to be in a much smaller room and a much cleaner room and if you had a room that you say wanted to vacuum to make cleaning that's great but if you're just vacuuming you're gonna spread a bunch of stuff in the air so you want to have some sort of ventilation system maybe like a HEPA filter there's varying degrees of low to high tech you can go with this a lot of people just really cleaning their bathroom and doing it in the bathroom and that works really well for a lot of reasons one because it's really small too because there's not a lot of porous surfaces in the bathroom three because it's easy to clean and keep clean let's just pretend we're in a bathroom right now isopropyl evaporates which is really convenient so I just like to spray everything down so we're gonna really get in there I'll hold this up for you kind of see we're just getting all in there these little crevices here you want to make sure those are all covered again that polyfill to spray in the bottom we're getting all in there we're smelling the rubbing alcohol we know it's there it's working so I usually like to just let this air dry as it evaporates it'll help disinfect everything around it I'll take the top of this spray that down just to be extra careful you can even do the outside of your container you might as well you're not gonna make anything too sterile ever you know we're on a tablecloth right now if you were doing this at home we'd want some sort of non-porous surface one that you can easily disinfect I would totally wipe this down too let's assume that we're just in a nice clean space right now so I'm gonna start doing my hands now going down my arms a bit really getting in there there spores on everything all of the time it's really easy to grow fungus you just want to make sure it's the fungus you want to grow now we're going to start putting our substrate into our tub we're gonna use three of these so we're gonna open up these boxes just one two best to keep these in the box for as long as you can helps keep unwanted stuff from getting on them some of these bags you might notice that they're a little firm a little like a brick and that's just normal from them condensing and being put in the Auto Club so what we're gonna do is in the bag break up the substrate it's much easier this way it's a lot less messy and you're gonna have hopefully no incidence of contamination by doing it this way whereas if you were doing it after the bag was open you'd be asking for trouble all right that one feels pretty good this one not quite as condensed looking good this one kind of in the middle so now we're gonna sterilize the outsides of these bags not being shy about the amount of isopropyl we use so our bags have been sprayed they're sterile spray the hands again make sure they're nice and clean we have our substrate ready to get put in let's take a look at our grain spawn so you can see here this is really nicely colonized this again is our oyster mushroom grain spawn as you saw earlier if you wanted to make your own grain spawn using the injection ports using some type of liquid culture you can definitely do that and that's what these are for but we're gonna be using this oyster mushroom spawn it's fully colonized you can tell because it it's all white and it looks great looks real happy and again with this super important that we spray it down but before we do that we want to break this up too and you want to break it up really as best as you can each one of these little pieces of grain is essentially a seed so the more broken up it is the more distributed in the substrate it's gonna be and the better rates of colonization you're gonna have to be real gentle with your grain spawn you don't want to puncture the bag you just gotta love it a little bit so I'm gonna gently squeeze in the sides squeeze that I'll put it down kind of massaged the bag break up all that grain getting out all those clumps so there's our green spawn all broken up it looks a lot different all of a sudden we're gonna definitely spray the outside of this bag too very important this is our utility knife we're gonna spray the outside of this open up the blade get in there and now we're ready to cut open some bags slowly and carefully and gently remove the lid off of our tub and so we want to layer the grain and the substrate and the grain and the substrate and the reason why we want to do that instead of maybe just mixing it all the others because we're gonna minimize the air contact it has we're gonna minimize the contact with our hands that it has and hopefully by doing that minimize overall any sort of contamination that we might experience we're gonna only gonna open one bag of substrate at a time we're gonna try to do this as quickly and effectively and cleanly as possible I'll start by opening up the grain spawn so we're gonna add a real thin layer of grain spawn to the bottom of our top so I'm gonna sterilize my hands again real quick cuz we're gonna talk about something called field capacity of your substrate so when I look at this substrate in here I'm gonna want to take a handful I'm just gonna want to squeeze it as hard as I can I should be able to get a drop or two of water out of there feeling a little bit coming between my fingers but not that much now we try to make everything as even as possible here but there's always gonna be variations in the relative moisture of your substrate this is a little dry so I'm going to take the water spritzer I'm just gonna do two three four maybe five or six sprays in there just add a little bit more moisture all right I'm gonna test it again give it another squeeze real hard a couple drops just like that perfect it's exactly what we wanted you don't want it to be too wet it's too wet there won't be enough oxygen and you'll grow a lovely batch of green mold I'm gonna spread this out very gently just to cover up kind of make a nice even layer on the bottom as best as I can you can kind of break up chunks but again you really want to minimize your contact and another layer of grain spawn on top of here you just want to maximize the surface area of the substrate in contact with the grain spawn off to the side for the moment and we'll sterilize that again for sure we're doing a nice layer in here spreading it out just a little bit all right we're gonna do our second bag of substrate now and again we're using three in this particular example and we're just gonna gently sprinkle this back on top adding that second layer of substrate so right now we have a layer of grain spawn on the bottom a layer of substrate a layer of grain spawn and now the second layer of substrate again spritz the hands real quick gently spread this around just covering it all back up do a quick check of the field capacity because it's a different bag give it a squeeze oh that one feels perfect so we're gonna just keep going with that one and now we can add our next layer of Spawn and the thing with grain spawn is once you open it unless you're in a really sterile space and you can really reseal it properly you're just gonna want to use all of it at once we're going to save this a little bit to throw on top quick sterilization of this bag again quick sterilization of the knife again come through opening up this third and final bag of substrate quick check feeling water maybe a little dry but not too bad just a few just to moisten the top up there now we haven't really been mixing the other layers but for the top we're gonna just gently mix it in just kind of get that grain spawn a little more in contact with the substrate minimize its contact with the air where it's not gonna be able to grow so we're just kind of gently gently going in here so all of our spawn is mixed in all of our substrate is in here everything's looking real good one final step I want to do is just spray down the edges the tops again with some alcohol all right so now we're gonna take our lid which I had off to the side I'm gonna spray it down again we're gonna take this lid we're gonna put it right back on the top and we're gonna close it shut one thing you're gonna be looking at here is a certain amount of humidity that's gonna come up and condense on the top that's gonna be a good indicator of the health of the colony and how your mushrooms are doing so you want to see some condensation inside of here that's how you know it's gonna be at the right moisture level you're also gonna really really really want to take this lid off like five times a day it's really important that used don't do that every time you open the lid you're introducing new contaminants new spores all sorts of stuff and you're altering the humidity as well so really the best way to do it is to try to peek in through the top or peek in through the sides doing your best to just or really not open it even though it's really exciting at this point we basically just wait it's been a couple weeks our tub is nicely colonized we even have some little baby pins on there already so it's time to start casing our substrate and I mentioned before we're gonna use this Coco car this is just the variety we use it's wash loose it's really easy to work with one of the great reasons to use it largely it just keeps moisture in the substrate that's colonized and it helps keep an ambient moisture higher for the fruiting mushroom so they don't dry out and stop growing there's some other reasons other types of mushrooms and tubs will enjoy a casing as well so as we're looking at our tub two weeks later we can see it's just a really nice white mat of mycelium here you can see how it's kind of hold the substrate away from the edges it's really just one brick right now it's fully colonized and you can start to see these little pins starting to form now so these are kind of conglomerates of mycelium that are gonna form the fruiting bodies which we ultimately harvest if you look over here you can see this exudate this is a sign of healthy metabolism inside the mycelium and you can also see how it's kind of hydrophobic that water right there that exudate it's not sinking in it's being held above it and so that is one of the other indicators for having a nice healthy culture and you can see by looking at this it's hydrophobic it's fully colonized this is going to be really good at resisting any type of contamination at this point in the process we're gonna put about one to two inches on top of here there's some small clumps there that's alright it's nothing serious just kind of gently putting it on now we're gonna smooth it out it's kind of a bigger chunk I'll break this up a bit so now we're just gonna smooth it out covering the substrate nice and gentle getting into the corners letting it fill in wherever it is you don't really want to see any mycelium at all at this point we've got a nice even layer of our casing the cocoa quar and now the next step is to just hydrate it and we're gonna use this spray bottle and you just it takes a little while you just keep going the idea is to saturate the casing to the point that its moist enough for the mycelium to break through and also that it maintains enough moisture for the mushrooms and mature mushrooms that we're trying to grow here I like to use a spray bottle because instead of just pouring water on top of it you're getting a nice even concentration across the surface that's gonna sink in if you just sprinkle water on it you might have parts where it just drips through the casing right into the mycelium and that's not ideal so this is a good way to do it so our casing is properly hydrated we spritzed it enough so now the time comes to put the lid back on top of it and leave it a little bit cracked the mushrooms themselves what we harvest they like to have a little bit more airflow a little bit more oxygen a little bit lower carbon dioxide so keeping the lid crack is gonna help us do that and we just want to make sure we spritz it once or twice a day just kind of maintain that humidity level in the casing and that's it keep an eye on it see how it's going and then you wait until you harvest so this is a really basic mono tub it's about as basic as it gets and that's why it's so good if you are interested we're gonna show you how to pimp your tub a little bit make it a little more exciting a little more automated we can have lights in here we can have humidity regulation we can do all of this stuff pretty easily and we'll show you how to do that too it's been a couple weeks since we cased our substrate you can see we've got some really nice mature oyster mushrooms in here pretty good flush for us to harvest it looks like they're a little bit past their prime a tiny bit the caps are kind of folding in they're still edible they're still perfectly good to eat so we've got a few tools with us we've got the harvest bin what ira freshly harvested clean mushrooms in two very important and then this opinel mushroom knife which is a really great night for a while foraging for mushroom cultivation whatever you're doing it's got a lock and you just twist it like that open it up lock it back up it's nice curved hook there and we've got this little boar hairbrush to brush off any dirt that might be on them so we're gonna pick these mushrooms by hand and we're gonna trim them with a knife you can see we've got some substrate some of the casing on here so we're just gonna kind of you know brush off what we can seeing this not really a marketable part we'll just cut that right off we'll put this in our harvest bin still got a little more on here this brush does a really good job of getting this stuff off so when you're pulling up the mushrooms it's kind of a firm but gentle force you'll feel them lift up the trick is to have it lift up from the base and not kind of break any of your stems on the mushrooms it's not what you want to do so we're going to take this just cut this bottom off like that perfect there you go so you may have noticed we're in a different spot right now we're in the front of the north's for fruiting rooms here this is our production facility this is where we grow clean do all those fun things with the mushrooms not upstairs today so if you were to for example want to dry your mushrooms immediately after harvesting there are a lot of good options for doing that there are several really good dehydrators out there you can get excalibur makes a really really high-quality dehydrator it's really customizable you can get a screen with a fan on it that works really well you could always use an oven on the lowest possible setting and just keep an eye on them kind of shake them around a bit so essentially we want our dried mushrooms to have the consistency of a cracker you want to be able to break it and have it be a nice clean break if it's too wet it's gonna be a little bendy if you have it too wet and you store it it's a really good way to grow mold obviously that's not something we want to do pull it out of the dehydrator or however you're dehydrating it try not to leave it out for too long because it can reabsorb atmospheric moisture alright so this is our first flush our first harvest this one took about four weeks from start to finish if you just keep taking care of your tub it'll continue producing flushes of mushrooms sometimes for a few months each progressive one after this is good be a little bit smaller and take a little bit longer the tub is really done when you decide that it's done when it's no longer worth your effort to maintain it keep it humid etc etc then you can dump it out start outdoor beds use them as a base for compost there's all sorts of really wonderful options that spend mushroom substrate has to offer we're excited to cook up some of these oyster mushrooms for dinner tonight if you stick around we're going to show you some of the optional upgrades you can give to your tub looking at these mushrooms they're a bit conical they're a bit tubular the caps aren't as open and wide as we would like for an oyster mushroom and that's indicative most likely of higher than maybe desired carbon dioxide levels in here and the carbon dioxide is a natural effect of mushroom respiration adding an airflow system which will show you how to do and a lighting system could really have made these a little better and we'll get into that in the next part of this video if you like this video be sure to give us a follow we've got more coming for you check out our Instagram at North spore mushrooms and be sure to check out our website which is north spore comm we've got a bunch of good content on there we got blog post we got pictures we've got a great store all sorts of good stuff for you to check out so we're back upstairs we've got this freshly cleaned out and we're gonna start doing some modification so you can really dial in your growth so there's four things we're gonna consider and we're talking about mushroom cultivation temperature humidity carbon dioxide and light temperature we're indoors we're not gonna really worry about that too much if you wanted to alter your temperature say it was a little too cold where you're growing a seed germination mat works really well you just throw that right underneath here humidity we want to make about an 80 to 90 percent humidity to ensure good mushroom pinning and growth and we're gonna do that with a reptile or terrarium tank fogger and for carbon dioxide we're not gonna just rely on these we're gonna actually add a small computer fan and that's gonna just purge the air and bring in fresh oxygen for light we're gonna add an LED strip onto the top it's a dimmable one it's really nice light isn't overly important but it helps ensure good growth and color on your mushrooms we're gonna start off with our air exchange system and this is how we're gonna regulate carbon dioxide in here so what we're gonna use for that is this really simple computer fan this one's great because it has a direct AC plug which is gonna make this really simple here's a vent cover for the back of the fan this is gonna be helpful to keep bugs and whatever from flying into our tub this is mounting hardware for it this is a cycle timer your fans gonna plug in right there and then this plugs into the wall and as you adjust these knobs it's gonna tell the fan when to turn on and how long and when to turn off and for how long if you want to you can use a carbon dioxide meter like we have here this is where the management kind of comes into play so you can take this and you can read your carbon dioxide levels in your tank and dial it in that way to your perfect conditions or you could just use trial and error based on how the mushrooms look and dial it in just by looking at it and then we have our drill with a four inch hole saw we're gonna use to drill a hole right here and mount our fan now I know I mentioned this earlier but because we're working with a hard rigid plastic you're gonna want to go really slow with this and not put a lot of pressure on it if you put pressure on it you're probably gonna crack your tub [Applause] [Music] [Music] the whole saw is a little bit bigger than that fan so we're gonna use some tape to just square it out [Music] we want to be pushing fresh air into this tub so that means we're gonna flip it around like this then we're gonna mount it on here like that put this on here is this gonna be pulling air in through here so we want to have this on prevent random things from flowing in there and messing up our fans rubber washers and some nuts so our fan is all hooked up it's mounted and now it's plugged into this cycle timer we'll plug this cycle timer right in so this top one here is gonna tell you how long in seconds or minutes the fan is gonna be on and the bottom one will tell you how long it stays off so we'll move this to on for say 50 seconds right about there and we'll have it turn off for just five or so seconds for this example and these are all gonna change depending on your needs which you'll have to dial in as you make your system so now it's on I can feel that it's on right here I'm feeling this fresh air coming in to the tub I can turn it down a little bit to so it just turned off right around thirty seconds so now it's gonna stay off for five or so seconds there it is back on just like that so obviously all of this is adjustable you could have it turn off for twenty minutes you could have a turn off for a whole hour or on for a whole hour it's up to you as you have the air going it's gonna have a tendency to dry out your mushrooms so you're gonna need to adjust the humidity in response to that so for that we have this reptile terrarium fogger it's got water in here and it's got this hose right here we're gonna put this hose into the tank and then to make it even better we have this humidity regulator so this has a probe right here we're gonna put this end of the probe into the tub this is gonna read our relative humidity inside the tub this plugs into the regulator and the reptile fogger is gonna get plugged right into here while this goes into the outlet so what this is gonna say is when it reaches a minimum humidity this is gonna turn on and when it reaches a maximum humidity this is gonna turn off well we're gonna start setting this up this part's really easy we're just gonna put this tube from the fogger kind of just through the polyfill on the side here you know take a look make sure it's not full of polyfill you can kind of stuff it back around that looks great it's inside so now we can take our fogger we can plug it into our humidity control and then we can plug our humidity controller into a power supply all right let's turn the fogger on so it knows to run so now we're gonna adjust this our relative humidity is 35% inside there right now to dry for mushrooms and I have the upper limit here by holding it down set to 90 the lower limit set to 75 so it's supposed to run between 90 anything above 90 percent humidity it's gonna turn off anything below 75% humidity it's good at so the third and final part to this today is the LED light strip our light control so mushrooms really don't need anything more than ambient light they're not photosynthetic but having enough light is going to help them grow in the right direction and it's gonna help make sure they develop colors and aren't translucent and white and albino this is a really simple little LED light bar it's got a little button here that turns on and off and it's dimmable which is a really nice feature now it's on and I can adjust the brightness by holding it down and then letting go and touching it again getting dimmer again mushrooms don't really need that much light this is a nice setup especially if you're doing this in a darker place where there is an ambient light so in a room like this we don't really need this but if you were doing this in a closet or a basement that was really dark or under your bed this can be a really good feature and you can attach it to a timer so it turns on and off whenever you want whether that's to match natural daylight cycles or to keep it as discrete as possible the choice is really yours and we're just going to attach this to our lid with these little sticky pads that are going to attach these metal disks that are attached to magnets let's mount our LED bar onto our lid there's our lid just do this so we have these little sticky double-sided things that we're gonna put on here to help attach it to our lid just like that [Music] just stick it right on put some pressure under here keep it firm turn it on and there is our really cool really high-tech motto job [Music]

Channel: North Spore

Views: 1,234,080

Rating: 4.9115887 out of 5

Keywords: mushrooms, edible, fungi, growing, cultivation, homesteading, spawn, foraging, oyster, grow, cultivate, north, spore, spores, laboratory, tub, mono, monotub, bulk, substrate, manure, based, injection, port, bag, how, to, use, make, syringe, spore syringe, culture syringe, using, mono-tub, tek, technique

Id: qjfpEW5IHp4

Length: 36min 30sec (2190 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 03 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Myco_HaZe]

Sure, but I would recommend watching Gordo’s Tek video on YouTube. It’s very informative.

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