After reading Anne's awesome info on the V-tek, I'm seriously wondering how I should continue with my awesomely colonizing BRF cakes...

As far as I understand, the V-tek's two core points are a highly nutritious substrate (straight grains) and plenty of water available to the mycelium (bottom watering).

Since I already have BRF cakes, the first is out for this batch, but given that people report 3-5x yields with the cake-to-tub tek (which only adds non-nutritious bulk substrate - ie. the only thing it improves is water retention), I'm assuming water is a major limiting factor in the PF tek...

My current hypothesis is that using the V-tek's invitro, bottom-watered approach and the potting soil casing on BRF cakes should improve water availability, and thus result in a better yield.

That said, there must be some reason that everyone from PF himself to Roadkill & co. are birthing these cakes. (And it's not like Roadkill doesn't know invitro, he recommended it specifically for shiitake in his educational vids.) Is the larger pinning area of a birthed cake a significant advantage? Has anyone compared birthed, dunked-and-rolled cakes and invitro fruiting by yields?

I have not found dunking to really do anything. I also dont suggest you use BRF next time, but rather just spawn agar to whole brown rice cakes, without verm. I no longer roll the cakes in verm either as a casing.

I leave the cakes in a thin layer of water in the tub..that's it. Fanning and misting are all I do.

I am planning on figuring out a tek to spawn WBR cakes to larger bulk WBR substrates without contam. That would be ideal for larger yields. The coir and straw produces weaker fruits consistently for myself, so I abandoned them.

Well, my golden teachers just finished their first flush, invitro with plastic twist top ziploc (mouth full there!). I am moderately experienced in mushroom cultivation and was impressed with the colonization and consolidation speed. I used BRF and a spore syringe and made 10 cakes.

My only issues with invitro is side pinning. For whatever reason a lot of them started out on the side, got smashed and aborted or grew to about 1-2inches and then popped the veil. This was not the case for all of them though. Some turned out just as well as if I birthed/dunked/rolled. However, for the second flush, I did birth, dunk, and roll all ten cakes and placed them into a shotgun FC(humidity 99% and temp ranges from 73-79 degrees F). The second flush is currently pinning on some of the cakes. They seem to like having the free space to roam. Bottom watering really comes in handy for large fruits, btw for invitro.

Anyway, the first flush is not fully dry but what is cracker dry weighs 27g. I would guess that there is at least another 10g that hasn't fully dried yet (picked the last of the first flush today and made spore prints). So in my case, invitro from 10 cakes will be about 37g or 3.7g dry per cake. Compared to previous grows where I birthed/dunked/rolled, this is a low to mid yield. I will compare the yields from first and second flush.

Did you cover the cakes with some kind of casing material?

Well when I look at traditional PF tek yield photos, what I seem to notice is that the cakes tend to pin sporadically and mostly around the bottom rim...

The "pf casing tek" I've read before (simply setting the cakes in a deep pan and filling the gaps up with casing material such as pasteurized soil+verm mix, giving them a centimeter deep cover on top) seemed to result in pinning comparable to bulk monotubs.

Instead of filling up a pan, simply covering the cakes in casing material in the jars should in theory give a similar pinning stimulus...

For the invitro portion I followed the PF tek so there was a light layer of dry vermiculite on top. I have read over at the shroomery board that Violet has experimented with casing cakes invitro. As I understand it, the mushrooms will nearly always side pin unless cased. The casing layer is the key to full pinning and proper flushes. I did not case my invitro cakes which is likely why mine had some trouble.

But now that they are out of the containers and have been dunked and rolled, they seem to be doing very well. Next time that I do this, I will be using whole grains and I will also be casing them invitro. Here is the link over to shroomery:

Invitro casing layers

I once forgot cakes in their jars - they ruited in vitro and produced really really tiny fruitbodies. But then, they were the most potent mushrooms i have ever ingested. Scarily potent. 0.7g as a lemon tea and paintings turned 3D, interlocking fractals on the ground...something i would expect from around 3g ...

This would argue for the theory that yield is not everything. Why take a lot of biomass if smaller mushrooms really are much more potent? An interesting experiment would be to grow out some isolate on the same ubstrate and compare fully grown fruits to pins.

But then, maybe this has been done before.

So I was a little optimistic...total weight of first flush was 33g cracker dry. Second flush has been 27g dry.

I guess this is to be expected of subsequent flushes, and I had way too many variables to know exactly what caused what...oh well, I'm just glad that I'll be able to eat some soon...

Well I am finally at the point when my Matias Romero crop is starting to fruit... It took a ridiculous amount of time getting to this point, apparently 350 ml jars are far too large for pf tek...

It took 4 and a half weeks to get to full colonization... After which I soaked the cakes, put them back in the jars and cased them with 60/40 verm and coconut coir. It took approximately one and a half weeks in a shotgun terrarium to start pinning.

It's kinda okay, but nowhere near the pin density I've seen in places from the verm/coco casing. I'm wondering what can be improved for next time (including not using pf tek)...

looks fine to me.

your a little water happy though.......

as always id consider violet teks.
but for what you have going , id declare success.

keep in mind strains do vary in their output.

Thanks, cool. I am considering the V-tek actually for my next crop, your photos in that thread are beautiful.

Too much water? What indicates that? The thick stems? How much water do you give the V-tek cakes?

Here are some close-ups... I wonder about the strain, the photos I've seen for "Matias Romero" look nothing like this - at this point these look positively PE-like. I got the spores from an unofficial place so I can only go on what I was told about it.

Compared to the control group that used regular PF dunk-and-roll, there is a world of difference. That set looks a lot more "well-mannered", nice thin stalks and shapely caps, but it's still nowhere near opening, just little 10-15mm long pins...

The cased and bottom watered group suddenly ripened yesterday. 5 out of 6 cakes were ready for harvest by the evening. I got almost 500 grams (raw weight) off five, that is 100g for one flush off a single cake.

Not bad, though I guess the water content may be high because of the over-watering Annie mentioned, so I'll see how dry weight will relate to this. I ate 20 grams raw yesterday, and it was a nice trip, with very mild visuals.

At cracker dry stage, approximately 5% of the raw mass remained, so it seems the water content of the shrooms was indeed extremely high. Approximately I got a total of 32g cracker dry from ~560g raw (from 6 cakes). The product is perfect though.

After harvesting the first flush, I let the cakes dry out a little over the course of 2 days, and added a few millimeters of new casing on top, to cover up damaged mycelium. On Tuesday I gave the cakes 4ml of water at the bottom of each, which was taken up almost immediately. Now after about a week from harvest, the next flush has already started to pin. This time the pins seem less distorted by water.

I recommend rye grains soaked for 24h, boiled, then microwaved or pressure cooked. I use this mix in jars and then spawn to bulk amounts of grain in a covered tray, monotob would work. I keep reading rye is more susceptible to contamination, and I can kinda understand why, there's often large amounts of ergot hidden in rye too I'll often catch sight of one or a piece, but this method does 'disable' the ergot and effectively kill endospores. IMO +2 minute microwave zap > pressure cooker all day.
I read often that cubensis doesn't benefit from casing layers of vermiculite however they seem rational to lock in humidity.
Will write a tek some time perhaps, no guide was used in the making of this ... so I will need to study it more 1st.

Also, 4.5 wks colonization time isn't long. It's just at avg. 'not a sport for the impatient' lol

There's this girl who keeps telling me that her Dutch King brf cakes always colonize in about one week. I'm starting to think she's either messing with me or she has a time machine.