I’ve lost track now of how long since I started on this, but I think it’s been 2-3 weeks since I transferred my original spawn to grain jars? All of the jars have been fully colonized except for one jar of pink oysters, which fought against some kind of contamination but seems to have gotten going again. It had some good looking growth though, so I decided to use that jar plus one jar of blue oysters (but grown on popcorn kernels) for my first attempt at fruiting. If it is too weak and fails, well if was worth a shot and I wouldn’t have gotten anything else from it anyway.
I’m using some 8" fruiting bags from ebay, and pasteurized chopped straw in a lime water bath overnight then let it drain today for about 2.5 hours. Each quart jar of spawn was split between two fruiting bags.
Now here comes the scary part… I didn’t have room inside to work on this, and knew working with the straw was going to be very messy, so I set up a table in the yard. I wiped everything down with 91% ISO as I went, but being outside has me worried about the chances of contam. Guess we’ll see?
So now I have four stuffed fruiting bags hanging out in the garage where it will be a little warmer than the basement. I had considered putting the bags in my garden but I’m worried about squirrels and such getting into them (especially when they start to fruit) so I figured the garage was safer. I’m expecting another 2-3 weeks of expansion before they’re ready to fruit, but it’s just a game of wait&see now. And assuming I get some mushrooms from this batch, I can bring it back full-circle and start a new batch of spawn (this time directly in the grain jars) from what grows.
One question I have for everyone… I have three more jars of spawn that are pretty well completely grown in (one popcorn and two rye berries). Should I put these in the refrigerator until I’m ready to transfer them to fruiting bags? I’m not sure how long they can survive at room temperature but I seem to recall they can hang out in the fridge for 3-4 months without any problem?
Alright. Both the jars and bags look, how I can tell from the pics, very healthy! :)
Some moisture collection is normal, since mushrooms create water my their metabolism.
Excessive moisture can lead to bacteria, but oysters are really good in fighting them off when they colonized the jar.
Do they look yellowish-brown at the bottom? This might be a sign of stress
No the bottoms seem ok, and all this extra moisture has only shown up in the last few days as the mycelium really packed the grain. There’s not a lot of moisture in the house, we just had a evening of rain and it’s still only 42% humidity here. I’ll check again tomorrow though.
So to answer your question about the bottom color… no, all three jars look pretty much the same on the bottom as they do around the sides. The only difference I’m seeing is in the jar of pink oysters with rye berries, there is some odd orangish coloration starting to show up? Not sure what that is because as you can see in the OP (the jar on the right) the mycelium is very fully colonized in there so I’m wondering if the extra moisture being put off by the mycelium is causing the rye berries to leech something? Seems like it would be too late in the game for contamination? It doesn’t really show up in the photo but I’ll have to keep an eye on it.
[Edit] Oh I guess I did give an answer to this yesterday as well.