Okay so I finally got around to attempting to grow some mushrooms after a ton of researching and pro and cons. I went with the PF Tek, felt starting off, easier to avoid ruining a whole batch as seems like is the normal starting off from sanitation issues.

I started with 4 golden teachers and 4 penis envy uncut.

2/4 GT, and 2/4 PE got fully colonized and gave them an extra week to week and a half.

They were sitting in a water bath of 75F degrees. Figured maybe temp slightly too low so bumped it up to 78F and 1 of the other PE's finally took shape and added to the others a couple weeks later. Other 3 were rejects, not one little bit of mycil as I crumbled them open to check.

So here was my process out of the jars.

I took them out carefully, put them in a ziploc bag with distilled water for 18hrs in the fridge.

Pulled them out, gave a quick roll in vermi and put them in the fruiting chambers. Setup bought which provides a small fan for FAE and humidity controller which I have set at 99% and LED light strip right above the cakes.

In a dark bathroom with the ambient temperature are 66F. A little low but felt compared to the fridge this should still be enough of a shock and read they grow in that temp range?

To ensure incase the setup wasnt running right, I would still open lid to air out and spray cakes with some distilled water.

A couple weeks go by and nothing. From me handling them and inexperience I got scared with the bruising and sprayed a little 12% Food Grade Hydrogen Peroxide to combat if it was an early Contam.

Did read that too much water soaking can be an issue, and with the 99% Humidity and nothing under the cakes, they were sitting on small pools of water buildup.

Decided to add a small "ground" of vermi for them to sit on top of.

1 of the 5 cakes developed a small pin finally after those 2 weeks.

I eventually also get fed up with my ambient temps so I go and get a small heater and set it up in the room, close the AC duct, and add a towel under the door to limit how much heat can escape.

Now it sits at almost perfectly 80F.

With the new temp and still no pins on the others, I decided to put them in a plastic bag no water and back into the fridge for 8-12hrs to reintroduce another cold shock.

So a week later after the 1 of the 5 that pinned, produced 1 monster at 23grams, and two micro mushrooms. Lost potency as the monster got fully matured and dropped spores before I could notice, and I took a spore print of all 3 for 24hrs hours prior to taking them. Its been over 10 years since last did mushrooms and jumped straight into enjoying all 3 of them fresh with the Lemon Tek, incredible experience.

Finding it strange still nothing after that week of re cold shock, I start to read up online and see people suggest to get a fork and break up the outer layer as it can harden and make it difficult for the pins to penetrate through. Figured also could be why the GT cake only produced 3 instead of like 12 simultaneously I've seen in countless pictures.

Not even a day later I see activity from all 5 of the cakes, growing fresh white outside "healing" itself, so I know they are all active and alive.

Its been almost a week now, still nothing from the other 4, and the GT is producing another 2 mushrooms atm and seem like will be a good size.

I'm pretty much dumbfounded, and no idea how to get them to stop being so reluctant to grow.

I was wondering what "issue pinning" was, thought it was maybe related to 'virtue signalling' somehow, or some social media controversy. Not to be a syntax cop, but shouldn't it be "pinning issue"?

Not a cultivator, so no real input otherwise, but it sounds like you may be too cold and too wet. PF teks have proven to be a lot of work and patience to payoff a lot of frustration and dissapointment for me. Grown the hell out of some botulism toxin, but no shrooms. Luckily there are a lot that grow around me naturally, so that's my go-to.

Whoa! I just flashed on a dream last night in which I found a few giant cyans anticipating this Fall.

well that was my understanding as well on the early issues, but not the case anymore

Everything is constantly evaporated, high humidity, constant airflow, and its 80-81F which is considered the "golden" spot.

So clueless on why they are refusing to yield anything.

Pics should be up now.

I'm thinking maybe to rescrape them with a fork, but this time also do a short 8hr dunk in the fridge as maybe been too long since initial dunk over a month ago?

So now got agitated, rehydrated, and cold shocked all at once?

Hi there

You seem to have quite an advanced setup, your pinning problems seem to be evaporation (FAE related) and humidity.

You are nearly there my friend

This is what I would do, increase your FAE so that your cakes and fruiting chamber dry out completely over a 12 hour period (not so your cakes go blue but so they have no noticeable moisture on them at all) then spray / mist / turn on your auto humidity system etc again until they are moist and there is condensation on the walls and lid, repeat this process until pins form.

Try to keep your fruiting temps about 75f (colder temps mean they grow slightly slower but it produces stronger mushrooms), give them light as you are doing and they should pin and produce at least 4g to 10g dry mushrooms per cakes without a problem.

If after a couple of weeks you have no pins and they continue to stall, dunk them in cold water (with a bit of peroxide in it) in the fridge for 8 - 12 hours and put them back in your chamber again, but this time let them dry out fully before you spray / mist / moisten them again, repeat this process and you will have success!

I once misted some cakes way to much and got nothing but arial mycelium growth (arial mycelium = Mycelium growing into the air looking for food) for about 3 weeks! I was baffled, I then reduced the misting and increased FAE and allowed them to dry out between mists and they fruited in abundance!

In the wild, they grow under the ground or in a dung pile / grass heap etc, where its close to 100% rh and the mycelium is in the dark and is moist and wet. When the mycelium grows to the top of the substrait the fresh air signals that they have reached the surface, constant wetting and drying out reaffirms that they have reached the surface and they can now fruit, so does the introduction of light, at this point they will make primordia and then pins which will turn into fruits / mushrooms.

The number one pinning factor is evaporation of water from the mycelium surface, then its light and everything else.

I hope this helps

Much love
inf <3

oh i forgot

with BRF cakes, it is advisable to leave them for at least another week after full colonisation for the mycelium to consolidate, this is specific to BRF cakes only.

So if you birthed them strait after they where colonised this could explain your delay.

hang in there, lots of FAE leading to evaporation of moisture and re-wetting, light and temps about 75f and they will fruit no problemo

peace <3

p.s. I learnt everything i know (which is not much !) from BOD from the shroomery, check out his numerious teks here Bods shroomery guides

Greatly helped. Thank you ao much.

While no one answered I actually was suspecting FAE couldve been my problem as well thanks to you see I messed up as I was constantly keeping them moist.

So instead of keeping the lid sealed closed, I was gonna leave it slightly cracked open.

One thing I decided to do since then though is get some coco coir.

Cakes have been scraped and dunked for almost 20hrs now, going to put in a substrate and try to grow em like that. Saw people were getting slightly better yields on shroomery after starting from jars to a substrate.

So already prepped the tub as well. Hopefully not too little for that approach.

I'll try dropping temp a little too like you suggested as well.

But nah, I kept them a week and half after full colonizing thats why I was so confused. Felt like was doing everything right.

I havnt read Bod but ty so much for the advice and direction going to check now!

Will keep updating this as progress continues.

That one cake had gave me 14grams. So experimented using Rhondiola Rosea and some DMSO. Was a VERY enjoyable lite trip.

My biggest concern atm is cakes look "weak" especially after the scraping. The mycelium doesn't look strong at all anymore and mightve died of nutrients during these few weeks with no pins?

I'm really hoping this redunk and substrate conversion will get them back to life.

Also need to be careful spreading it out into sections while setting it up as they are not all 5 the same. And don't remember which is what.

Hi there

I would advise against crumbling old cakes (Cakes that have been put into fruiting regardless if they fruited or not) into a bulk substrate, as it will more than likely contaminate.

I think this is what you mean but its hard to tell? do you mean let them sit on coir rather than verm? in that case then it could work and maybe it will grow into the coir a bit and help with fruiting but it is likely to make them more prone to contamination.

I would just leave your cakes in the chamber and spray them sparingly and let them dry out before rewetting and you should be good to go since they have been dunked several times, its probably best to just let them be and make them flush as much as possible

If you ever need to talk about mushrooms , feel free to pm me

Peace <3

Damn wish i caught this earlier.

I already had done it. I do appreciate it though, was more of a last minute hail Mary.

Let's see what happens. This was my first batch, so even though I'll hate it to be a waste, I'm already willing to let me go down as a learning experience.

By Wends I should have my setup ready to do a liquid colonization, and this time around just do 12 jars of simply the Golden Teachers. Not trying to do 3 different things at same time.

Anyways here was pics of the procedure that I did.

Pasteurized the Coco. Added about 20% vermi. Did a 2:1 ratio of cakes. Put them in lines since know if do have conflicting mycelium they just build a barrier between each other.

hi there

Well no turning back now! hehe, it may work, only time will tell

Next time if you are going to do something like this, you can crumble the cakes into a dilute bath / bowl of peroxide water, this will help kill any surface mold spores that have yet to germinate, then go to bulk.

Ref LC, why not! Feel free to try to make a LC, its a great procedure to master.

If I where starting out, I would try to master making syringes from spore prints and taking sterile prints, then knowing what I know now, I would try full rye or wbs cakes instead of BRF cakes. Then jars of rye / grain as spawn and doing g2g (grain to grain), then spawning to bulk, mono tubs, then agar, cloning, making isolates, lc's etc

But hey, nothing like learning by doing! The worst thing that can happen is it does not work and you have to start over again ...

I hope it all works out for you

Please keep us posted

<3

So please correct me, but this is where I landed on so far based on some of those you recommended.

1st of all monotub vs cakes. I feel like monotub has "ease" and rapid to setup. But you run into much higher probability of risk of contamination. Plus, material wise per dried gram of yield was almost 2x the cost.

Agar I'm still very much clueless on. But little I've seen seems like thats the route to go if your mass producing them. I still need to get experience and experimentation under me, but seems just doing LC is more than enough as setup im going for can prob inject 30 half pints. So agar seems to be overkill if just producing for myself?

Rye and wbf is something glancing into atm. I have brf im gonna use up so dont go to waste but them after for sure swapping if price per yield is worth the difference yet again. I havnt studied them at all yet. So idk if they grow faster, stronger, etc when on something other than BRF.

No clue whats grain to grain. as for cloning do you mean spore prints? Once get enough saved up I for sure want to try doing isolates.

Should be lots of fun overall. Seems like a very fulfilling hobby to say the least.

Also, seriously thank you btw. Greatly appreciate all the pass down of knowledge

Hi there, Yes compared to BRF cakes monotubs aka bulk substrates are much more prone to contaminations.

Regarding yield, I am a bit confused by what you mean by 2x more expensive, I mean you can use horse manure as your bulk substrate (which is free) and rye as your spawn, rye is about $45 for a 25kg sack, and 500 g is enough to do a large tote monotub yielding over 200g dry (over several flushes)… Verm and brown rice flower are equally priced at the same sizes for a much reduced yield, BRF cakes vs bulk substrate, BRF cakes are less that 1/4 the yield in my experience. Rye / WBS cakes on other hand rival monotubs in yeild in my opinion

Coir is about $2 a brick which is usually enough to make one large monotub, horse poo is free, hay and straw are super cheep also, so I am a bit confused why you would see doing bulk aka monotubs as more expensive?





If you just want a supply of shrooms for personal use (this is all we should want them for anyway… If other people want me to supply them I refuse and offer to show them how to grow their own passing on what I have learnt so they are empowered and can produce this beautiful sacrament themselves), and you are not interested in playing with isolates or cloning mushrooms and you are happy with using spore syringes, then you can skip agar all together.

Using agar is the best way to cultivate mushrooms (I like to use peroxide agar to reduce contaminates), You can ensure your mycelium is 100% sterile as any infection will is easy to spot on agar.

With agar you can take a sample from a big mushroom and grow it out on an agar plate, isolate a strain on that plate, transfer to several other plates and from that you can make many jars which could be used on many monotubs, all from one mushroom sample!

You can also start spores on agar and then select the best most rhizomorphic mycelium and clone that onto another plate, bods link above goes into this process in much more detail.

You can also keep isolates on plates in your fridge and keep a sterile stock of mycelium strains for extended periods, ready to use at any time.

It is the ultimate way to cultivate the beloved fungus.



It grows at the same rate really, growth rate mainly is dependant on ph, temp and water content. The substrate, as long as its something they like to eat, does not effect growth rate or strength of mushroom that much. Cooked coir vs raw coir shows a difference in growth rate, with cooked coir growing faster about 1.5x the speed of raw uncooked coir.

Rye and WBS (Wild bird seed) are just grains that mushrooms like to eat, they are used for spawn, they are not normally used for BRF cake style grows, but they can indeed be substituted for BRF, so you can just use pure rye or WBS instead of BRF, you will triple your yields! you just use grain rather than BRF and verm and do everything else the same, which I highly recommend that you do. I often do pure rye cakes, as they are a super quick and easy to do and produce large amounts of shrooms for their size.

check out a recent rye cake grow I did 100% rye cakes

Its super easy to do too. You just boil your rye / WBS first to saturate it to field capacity, usually for about 30 mins, make sure it gets aired so its almost dry to the touch and does not wet kitchen roll when touched, then make up your jars just like you would doing BRF cakes, put some dry verm on top, cover with foil or use lids with injection ports if you have them, then pressure cook for 90 mins at 15 psi, then inoculate when cool, wait till fully colonised then dunk / birth and put into fruiting conditions just like BRF.

Regarding price cost per gram yield, we are talking pennies per dose when doing bulk substrates or pure grain cakes… I mean 10kg of WBS / rye is usually about $20, you could make probably 300 or more BRF style jars with that amount, producing 5 – 15g dry weight per jar x 300 jars!... so if you average 10g per cake total over say 3 flushes x 300 jars, that’s 3000G or 3kg of mushrooms, 1000 lvl 3 doses for $20, so I do not factor in cost as its so cheep. I mean if you are on a really tight budget then yeah but we are talking $20 / 1000 lvl 3 doses for $0.02 per dose (not taking into consideration cost of equipment or electricity cost for your pressure cooker etc)

If you are doing a bulk substrate (a monotub) using like horse poo / coir / hey / straw for example, the spawn ratio is usually 1:5, 1 part spawn to 5 part bulk substrate so the costs become under $0.005 per dose. So I do not consider cost really

I usually only have about 5-10 cakes / 1 medium monotub going at any one time, that’s all I need for me and the gf



Grain to grain is just having one jar full of fully colonised grains called spawn, then breaking that up and putting a little of the spawn into other jars, so its a grain to grain transfer, this spawn will then colonise the new jar. You would usualy use 1/10th of the spawn jar for each new grain jar, so 10 jars of colonised rye can make 100 new jars or even 200 if you use a 1 / 20th of grain per jar ratio.

When I said cloning I mean you take a sample of a mushroom or mycelium and place it on agar and make a clone, a direct copy of a strain. Also if your mushroom is sterile (which is almost always not!) you can clone from a mushroom and insert it directly into a grain jar. This is usually only done if you have mushrooms that have fruited in vitro, meaning you have a jar of rye / WBS that grows mushrooms in the jar itself so its considered sterile and could be used as a clone to colonised new rye directly.

If you are using spores, then that would not be considered cloning.



You are more than welcome my friend. Check out bods link on a SAB (Still air box) or a glove box, as all work should be done in one of these and never out in the open. If you want to take things to the next level you could make a laminar flow hood but that is not needed, you can still get great results using a SAB or glove box.

I think it would be great for your "shroom game" hehe to learn how to make your own spore prints and how to make your own spore syringes. both processes are pretty easy to do, bods teks in my previous post cover both processes in great detail. when you can make your own spore prints and syringes you can make unlimited mushrooms for almost no extra cost.

I hope this helps feel free to ask any more questions, I will do my best to answer them

Peace <3

Wow. Simply wow.
You sir are a godsend.


So reason why I thought was more expensive to do mono tubs was the bulk substrate “premixes” found were so pricey, I figured what went into them just accumulated that much. As for yields, I tried looking at average yield of a ton of postings on shroomery and per material. Seems like monotubs were an equivalent of ~____ half pints, and the cost was almost double using the pricing I was looking at. So, felt back then like monotubs were just a time saver more than the optimized yield with a significant chance to infect and lose all the work instead of just 1 cake.

Yeah I see how stupid cheap coir is. Got a 20lb block and can tell would be good enough for an insane amount of cakes. Definitely will be using that from now on.

I’m still going to stick to doing spore print then go LC, simply because I still feel too intimidated with the Agar. I might be over thinking it and im sure within a week of reading I’ll feel confident to attempt next time around. Will be using the link you posted to read up on it. Was glancing a bit earlier today on all the links posted.


So for Rye, I get “Rye Berries” correct? Is it better than WBS? I might just go WBS since I pick that up anyways for the bird feeders on my property.

Just saw your thread of the pure Rye, will I be able to do pure WBS just the same?

To not let my BRF bag go to waste, think I could mix some in with the cooked Coir and verm mixture next time?


So based on all this im going to do a Liquid Culture of Golden Teacher tomorrow. make 12 WBS half pint cakes. Once colonized, dunk them 24hrs in fridge, then shred and layered into a Coco Coir mix.

Question I have now is how do I “cold shock” the colonized coco mix to start fruiting? How do you redunk them?


BTW the bulk is already showing mycelium growth on top on multiple spots! Looking promising from such a short time. I’ll take a pic in the morning.

Screw it, got excited and went and took a pic anyways lol

Hi there,

You are more than welcome

Thank you for elaborating on the cost issue, I understand your concerns...

Yes pre-sterilised and premixed substrates do cost a lot more, they are often aimed at the novice grower who may not own a pressure cooker or just wants to go to the next step without all the hassle of sterilisation and they make it very easy to do that, but at a cost...



Yes rye grain aka rye berries are the same thing just different names used in different parts of the world, in the UK they are called rye grain in the USA they are more called rye berries...

Rye's texture and structure is better than WBS for growing mushrooms, colonised rye breaks up easier and overall it is the spawn grain of choice for mushroom growers. WBS has the same or more nutrients than rye, but it often turns to mush after a good pressure cook and colonisation, so grain to grain transfers require the use of a fork where with rye just a good shake and you are good to go.

Yes you could do pure WBS, just like with rye, they can both be used exactly the same...

You could indeed mix it with cooked coir and use it to up the available nutrients in your substrate, it would work great too.



Awesome, that process is fine, you could just do full jars rather cakes, they are a lot bigger and you would get considerably more spawn from them, but that process is fine .... You do not need to dunk them for that long, 8 - 12 hours is more than enough



Erm a cold shock is the process of dunking cakes or a substrate in cold water for 8 - 12 hours, this makes the mycelium think its time to fruit. This process is normally only done with BRF style cakes.

Cold shocking should only be done once you birth cakes or in between flushes. if cakes are stalling then give them a few weeks before dunking them again, repeated dunking without fruiting kind of resets the fruiting process, and will delay you considerably, its best to just provide the right conditions for fruiting and not redunk and wait and give it time.

P.Cubensis want to fruit! given the correct conditions they will fruit in abundance.

If you are referring to making a nonotub mix of coir and wbs that you have now shredded your cakes into then that should not need any dunking or cold shocking at all, well unless you are in a really hot climate 90f +, then they may benefit from a cold shock.

You can just make the tub, let it colonise, expose it to fruiting conditions and it should start the fruiting process strait away. You can after the first flush dunk a monotub but it is not advisable as it can get messy and you are more likely to introduce contams into the tub, also there is a lot of water in a monotub from its inception and spraying alone is often enough to get 3 really decent flushes without a dunk or a cold shock, but it should not need a dunk really but you can give it one if you want or you think its a bit dry.

You could just put it in the fridge without any water, just to cold shock it without altering the water content.



They do look like healthy growth from that pic, but it is hard to tell. I hope you do not get any contaminates but if you do its ok, its all a learning process

Please keep us posted

Much love
Inf <3

hey, how did you tray turn out?

I have been routing for it to work but I secretively dreaded that it may contam / turn green?

I hope it survived?

Peace <3

Hey sorry took so long to reply. Had something come up.

But yes actually, it never contamed. What it is is still stubborn to grow. I'm starting to think its a genetic issues from a bad syringe.

I've adjusted significantly and learned A TON. Too much to get into right now, but will do a big update post and add new pics of the grow room.

I did finally learn about agar, and currently doing that to do strain isolation and then clone from out there. I didn't fully grasp your advice until I actually started digging deeper into it instead of my base assumptions.

Thank you so much for everything, definitely got me on the right path. Now to just get the experiments and heartaches under my belt. haha

Have my covered section hitting almost perfectly 80F. Then fruiting section is at 75F.

I have a UV-C light I run for 30min - 1hr minimum before work on agar or whatever to help sanitize the room.

Also adding pics of my current Lions Mane and Black Morel lc's. Getting ready to innocent them onto agar to isolate and have a clone clone once get the isolation perfected.

Oh ad I also have some Z Strain on the way. I believe I'm going to focus on those over the Golden Teachers or Penis Envys. I believe I FINALLY got my first and single penis envy growing..