Shroombee, I owe u a debt of gratitude. Thanks for suggesting coir bulk and shoebox tek. Also mush thanks to everyone who gave advice thru this thread, I have read over it again recently, thanks my friends.

Over two ounces dry. Hell yeah. I am a happy psychonaut.

My PF jars consist of two parts vermiculite one part brown rice flour one part water. The colonized jars are shredded with cheese grater and mixed 1:1 with bucket tek coir.

You are so welcome! I'm glad this new hobby has worked out so well for you!

Are you using 2 half-pint jars per shoebox?

Four half pint jars. Wanted to see if doubling up would help me bulk up my yield. It worked.

I am trying something different. I've been reading a lot about growing with oats, oats and coir ala bods bulk tek and others. I can't do oats right now because I still have no pressure cooker... But here's what I did. I just made a round of jars with oat flour and vermiculite instead of brown rice flour. It was actually a carton of value brand rolled oats from the food bank that was in my cupboard, I powdered in my trusty Osterizer. I imagine it will work at least as well as brown rice flour and hopefully maybe even better!!

Sounds like a cool experiment! I hope it works out well. Congrats on the harvest above.

Once you got a pressure cooker you'll likely get completely sucked into this beautiful hobby. A pressure cooker opens many door to other teks. I got mine for about 10 bucks from a second hand shop. It was one of the best investments I've ever made.

Oat flour works. Wild Bird seed flour is even better. The problem with the cakes is they are already 2/3 substrate so 12 half pints os the equivalent to 1 quart grains and 2 quarts coir.

My oat flour pf jars were inoculated with golden teacher spores a week ago, first fluffy cottony signs of mycelium yesterday and now they are just taking off like gangbusters!!! I love this...

Today I was at WinCo. I bought some millet (main seed in wbs) and some wheat berries from bulk section. I am going to try both. Will continue steam sterilizing until I get a PC. I have read that for grains this means 8 hours. I am excited to work with grains, soon I will get a PC and start working with agar. Until then my method is working just fine, with just a little bit simple sterile tek. Seriously, if I can grow mushrooms with the materials available (cost me under $40 to get started) in my decidedly un-sterile apartment with my three crazy kids running around then almost ANYONE can do this. And should.

If you like mushrooms and want mushrooms in your medicine kit, start now. Let's grow em!

I am going to write a simple little tek for doing PF cakes to bulk coir, PC optional, including tips for making a sterile syringe (hint, if every one of your jars grows mold, your syringe tek needs work lol)...

oh yes. I will have you know I run my flowhood a mere 6 feet from a cage housing 3 adult male rats and have a 0% contamination rate when I do everything correctly. Even in a sterile clean room contaminates will make their way in but with a flowhood or SAB you are isolating the environment and then it's all about "sterile technique". I need to make a blueprint for my low cost low weight flowhood. Costs about $120, weighs 15 lbs. and looks like a tub with stuff not a piece of lab equipment.

Oat flour jars finishing up.

Downwards from zero, thank you for mentioning having success with spores to bird seed. My millet and wheat berries. Steam sterilized these in a regular pot just like everything else.

Hope that works out for you. I have never seen a single instance of steam pot sterilized whole grains that made it to fruiting. Spores will work directly on grains as well but the problem is almost all syringes have at least a little bacteria in them, yes even SW. I tested all my SW syringes and they all had bacteria in them as well as spores but all were viable. Only the PE made it to fruit straight from spore, 4 other varieties did not. Your jars look good in the pics at this point though. Maybe you'll get lucky. There was a guy in Afghanistan that was working on a steam pot sterilization method for millet, I don't know what the end result was but it looked promising. He was using longer cycles though, I don't remember if it was 3 or 6 hours but it was longer than the normal 1.5 hours recommended. (I do 2 hour PC cycles on jars and 3 hours on bag. I had a bad time running the standard 1.5 and 2 hour cycles)

My millet is almost fully colonized. Wheat is going a little slower but still coming along.

Not pictured are 4 additional half pints of millet, over halfway colonized. Also just the other day, I prepped and knocked up five half pints and a ragu quart jar of popcorn.

Those grain jars could do with a shake up to redistribute the mycelium

I always shake at 30% and 70%, helps colonise faster and helps to show any hidden contams

Thanks for the tip gamma! I tried shaking these but the only thing that came loose was the uncolonised grain. I even beat the things against bottom of a rubber shoesole.

The millet ought to be ready today or tomorrow based on how quickly it is growing. I am excited to make a shoetub.

i have had this problem. it will colonize but it will take longer.
the temptation to open the jar and stab at it with a butter knife was unbearable

Haha, today I beat the living shit out of that wheat jar against the sole of my shoe until the main clump broke in several pieces. Then I shook like crazy till they were buried in the middle.

I jumped the gun with this millet just a hair, the pint jar you can see had a little grain uncolonized still. I got impatient, wanted to make the tub this morning. My first grain spawn. From spore. Steam sterilized with pot and lid. Let's see if it fruits, shall we?

I don't want to discourage you but if you spawned uncolonized grain it will definitely result in trichoderma before fruiting. I tried this when I first started and has a quart with a handful of uncolonized grain and it failed, miserably. This is the reason it is suggested to wait a couple days after all visible grain is colonized before spawning so all the unseen grain in the middle is also colonized.

Yes thanks I know about not spawning uncolonized grain, how it will be a target for contamination. Poured off everything which wasn't stuck together.

Oat flour cakes tub. One of my better first flush pinsets.

That’s an impressive variety of grains and flours you’re succeeding with Tony! Could you possibly please show your lids and maybe a few specifics on them? Looks like you just punched some holes and stuffed them with polyfill?

Sure. My 1/2 pint jars are set up according to pf Tek, these are the same jars from the first post in this thread. Just some holes in the lids. Some have four, most have two. Mostly I've used these for making cakes. When used for grain, I've covered the lids with foil after inoculation. Or, like in this pic, place them all in their own sterilite.

The glass jars are from Ragu alfredo sauce. The other jar contained peanutbutter. I made holes, slightly bigger than what I did for the smaller jars. Stuffed them with polyfill. Lids are removed to inoculate.

Then I read a TCs thread about unmodded lids for grain jars, so I'm trying that now, seems working fine, I think this is the way I will go. Our favorite jam comes in quart glass jars with metal lids, going to put together a set of these and a set of the 16 oz Ragu. I love to reuse things I would have otherwise thrown away.

The corner of this tub, I didn't effectively mix up the shredded cake and coir, so this corner was a bubble of coir. I noticed after I had made the tub. It is now pinning like crazy.