I've had great success with colonizing my BRF jars with mycelium. I made eight jars and have luckily no contamination. I made my first fruiting box today and put the three colonized jars in there.

I found out today that the jars I used were a bit to narrow in the opening and therefore had trouble getting those cakes out of the jar. One cake had to be squeezed much to get it out with trouble, one cake separated in half and the third more or less crumbled apart.

I am wondering now if that will cause much yield loss or any other trouble with fruiting those cakes.

Congrats on the successful colonization and making it this far! Do you have any pics?

I'm not sure if it will affect things too much. Mushrooms are pretty resilient, especially once the cake is fully colonized. I've never left a crumbled cake to see if it fruits on its own, although I had one break in half and I just stacked it on top of itself and it produced fruit just like the others that didn't break. So, I think they can still fruit in the right conditions.

With bulk grows, fully colonized grain "cakes" (spawn) are broken up, crumbled, and mixed with another substrate like coir and vermiculite. The mycelium from the spawn will then take over that substrate. When it is established it can be placed in fruiting conditions and it will fruit if everything goes well.

For the cake that was crumbled, you could try something like that, but a scaled down version (since a lot of the "teks" are written for bulk grows. For instance, I use this bulk spawning tek from shroomery ).

The one cake that broke in half will probably fruit the way it is, as long as your fruiting chamber has ideal conditions (fresh-air-exchange, high humidity, temp around 75 degrees F). And the one that was squeezed should be fine too, although it may show some blue bruising, which is normal. It will be an interesting experiment to see how all three compare to each other!

I'm not an expert by any means, just a hobbyist with a decent amount of grows under my belt so there may be others here that can chime in with more useful information than me.

I've had the same happen. I had to break the cakes into pieces to get them out. Once put in the FC and stacked, they re-consolidate, but rolling them in vermiculite is harder, and it takes time (and presumably nutrients) for that to happen.

So after fruiting half of my cakes, I broke up the other half and went to bulk.

how did you get on?

did everything recolonise and fruit ok?
any contams?

Peace <3