me and a friend who is an experienced grower were talking and we ended up coming with this idea.

could one prepare, sterilize, and inoculate jars as you normally would a la pf tek (in this case i actually intend to use larger jars). with the exception of partially filling (5/6) the jars to leave room to shake the jars after injection to loosen the substrate and aiding the colonization. then once that is colonized, spread it out on sterilized substrate at the bottom of the tank?

so rather than have multiple patties sitting atop a bed of verm or what have you, have the bottom of the tank actually be the colonized substrate?


from what my friend was saying this would not only work, but it would work better than doing patties.

what do you guys think?

Sounds very much like a bulk tek, very common and definitely much better yields than PF cakes. A couple of things come to mind, first being that regular PF tek BRF mix probably isn't well suited for shaking, it tends to clump together in one big mass. WBS or popcorn work great for shaking, the individual pieces tend to stay more seperate so they tumble and mix easily.

Also when doing this kind of method, normally rather than putting your spawn straight on the bottom of the container, you'd mix it with a bulk substrate to provide the mycelia with enough moisture to sustain it through a few flushes. In PFtek the water needs are provided by the verm or perlite layer, to go bulk you need to give them water some other way, and extra nutrients beyond what they'd get from the cakes. Also keep in mind that when you break up your cakes, you're breaking up the mycelial network and making it vulerable to contams. You can think of a fully colonized cake as a single "plant", crumbling it up and spreading it out turns it into many individual little "plants" that don't have the resources to produce fruit on their own. It will need to re-establish itself into a new interconnected mass in order to produce fruit.

But you're definitely on the right track for improving your yields! There are tons of different substrate mixes, everyone has their favorite. Horse poo and straw work great. Some people swear by coco coir mixed with verm or something else. There's all kinds of possibilities. And of course any mix like this has to be pastureized first to kill off contams. Any mushroom cultivation supply company will carry pre-pastureized bags of different types of mix to save you the trouble and mess of collecting and boiling your own compost.

So basically you'd crumble up your cakes and mix them into your compost or other substrate, put them in a shallow tub and cover it with opaque plastic for a week or two. During this time the mycelium will spread through the substrate and basically turn it all into one huge cake. Once it's fully colonized you can remove the plastic and add a thin casing layer of vermiculite or something else that holds moisture but has no nutrients. This casing layer isn't 100% required but it will make the mycelium fruit like crazy!

I'm sure there's more info about these methods on here, I haven't actually looked so sorry if I'm being redundant. If not check out the shroomery, just look up bulk substrate and you'll find weeks worth of reading on different mixes and techniques.

i actually had very little luck with BRF, i switched to coarsely ground rice (on average they were half the size of a grain) and had better luck with colonization and thick, THICK shrooms, so i was thinking about trying out whole BR (my other friend had good results with whole BR for regular pf). would that work better?


is it necessary to do a bulk substrate? i kinda want to do it with the supplies i already have if possible, and if i didn't do a bulk substrate, would i still need supplemental nutrients? (not that i am overly concerned as i normally add either sucrose or glucose (or both) to the water i use to humidify the tank.)
basically i am thinking of treating it exactly as a pf (except with a verm casing either on top or bottom or both) just with the entire bottom being the one giant cake, instead of multiple small ones.

i figure all the water that precipitates in the tank will settle to the bottom, which would keep the fungus even more moist.

Sounds like it should be better than BRF for shaking at least, not sure how it would compare to WBS.



Well the thing is if you break your cakes up and just put them in a tub, it won't really be like one big cake, it will be like a thousand tiny ones. The bits of mycelium need a medium to grow through to reconnect to each other and form into a new cake. My bet would be that if you try to do it without a substrate, all the little pieces won't have the anti-bacterial properties that a fully formed cake has, and they'll very easily contam with trich or something else way before they have a chance to grow back together. As a network it's like one big organism with it's own immune system, but individually the little bits are very vulnerable. Without a medium to grow in, they can't join together. Kind of like you can't have an internet without a "medium" (telephone wires and fiberoptic cables) to connect the individual computers.



I think that's going to be a problem too. In bulk grows it's been found that the best way is to have a black garbage bag as a liner between the sub and the tub, so that the condensed water that drips down the sides ends up UNDER the liner, and not in contact with the myc. This is because a lot of the water won't be absorbed (myc isn't really very absorbent, it's already full of water), and standing water breeds contams. When you do the bulk sub without the liner, it's very common to get mold growing underneath, and fighting off the contam takes energy away from the fruiting process.

I'd say do some research on bulk teks and why they've developed the way they have, and you'll probably get a better idea of what's likely to go wrong. If you still want to try it ther's no reason not to, at worst it will just be a waste of time and spores. But if you think about it, why would anyone use substrates at all if the crumbled up myc could just reform into a new cake without it?

It's not practical to grow pf mycelium and then transfer it to bulk growing, because you end up with a clump of mycelium which is difficult to break apart well (and keep it sterile while you're doing it).

The cheap and easy solution is to get a monotub fill kit from out-grow dot com (I don't want to put a link, I think those are supposed to be used only in the suppliers section). It costs $39 and you get 3 1-lb bags of rye berries, 2 5-lb bags of horse manure substrate, and 1 1-lb bag of casing. All the bags are fully prepared/watered/sterilized/pastuerized (although I like to add a bit more water to the horse manure substrate). These will produce a TON of mushrooms via the simple and easy monotub method.

Yeah monotubs are awesome. Hard to go wrong with that. A "martha" type greenhouse is even better, that's what I'll be setting up for my next grow. But PF cakes actually do work well for colonizing substrate, you can shred them on a cheese grater without any problems. But most people use WBS for bulk spawn anyway, since you can shake it up during colonizing and skip that shredding step.

yes you can do this..it works very well to break up full colonized pf cakes and spawn them to a mix of coir and straw in my experience. The cakes really are quite easy to break up and I have not experienced any contam doing this. Just make sure you spray down your area first well, and sterilize your hands and arms etc..and pasturize the bulk sustrate well..

Just make sure you are completely sterile(as much as you ca be anyway), break the cakes up and mix them around with the pasturized substrate and then wait 7-14 days. It's really quite simple..Once you start do not touch anything else until you are finished.

Maybe some get contam I dunno..but I have not and the flushes this way are much larger than just fruiting those little pf cakes.

Sure that would work fine but see he wants to do it WITHOUT the coir and straw, just a tub of broken-up pieces of myc and no sub. As far as I can tell that's the big problem here. The form of the spawn doesn't really matter, AFAIK without something for it to colonize into it's just going to sit there until it's taken over by contams whether its BRF or WBS or whole grain rice. Right?

I mean if I'm wrong that's fine, I get to learn something new. I can't say I've actually tried it. But from everything I know about the mushrooms life cycle, this doesn't seem to make any sense. It's kind of like if I wanted to take a pot plant, cut off the green parts, spread out the roots in a tray, and expect it to sprout buds. I've never tried that either, but I'm still pretty much certain it wouldn't work.

After mucking around with cakes I'll never go back. It's just a lot of work for less product (although there are some vendors who sell ready-made and sterilized jars)--and the perlite, etc.

A monotub is so easy and straightforward I can't think of a good excuse to do it any differently. There's no better spawn than mycelium-covered seeds, either.

The next step up for me is cloning from particularly good-looking mushrooms, and cultivating and keeping mycelium that I know will grow especially nice mushrooms. A good mycelium culture will set up spawn a lot faster than spores will, too.

Yeah but you will get much higher PRODUCTION if you use the cakes as spawn for more substrate. Substrate is very cheap.

But I do agree with him: it seems pointless and goofy to have mushrooms growing out of cakes--why shouldn't they grow up from a flat bed, as they would in nature, or as anything else you would plant would grow.

EDIT: But yeah, there's no reason cakes wouldn't fruit if they were cut up and crumbled out into a bed. 1) You would make a REAL improvement adding just a LITTLE something--even coir and verm. 2) They may still want to grow out and spread some mycelium around. I've had a couple of cakes that grew quite substantial SHEETS of mycleium out over the aluminum foil pad, and out over perlite--for several inches! It was a weird thing to see. If you have mycelium, and it's ready to fruit, it will fruit--and it doesn't matter what the geometric shape of it is; although I do imagine a certain "colony size" of mycelium is required for fruiting. If you chopped up cakes into little pea-sized pieces of mycelium, they wouldn't fruit like that. But if you spread them out they would re-colonize, etc., and come into fruiting again. But, as others have said, you might as well give them something to colonize IN--and if it's something nutritive, like horse manure or straw, then you will get more mushrooms for your trouble.

Sure, PF tek was just developed as an easy way for beginners to start working with mushrooms, and for that it works great. It was never meant to be the most efficient way to produce large quantities, its just kind of hard to screw up if you follow the directions. Especially since the development of the SGFC. But it's a big leap forward from the first way I tried to do it, back in the early 90's with the old homestead kit using agar and petri dishes, and rice cakes in jars. Not a noob-friendly tek at ALL! The world of mushroom cultivation has come a LONG way since then.

Really tend to disagree that boken up myc could recolonize itself before being taken over by contams, pretty sure their "immune system" depends on having an intact network. But like I said I never actually tried it, I could be wrong.

^ Right. I was just reading an article about the guy who invented the PF tek (who just recently died. I think in January). He sold spores (and got arrested for his trouble), and he said that he sold so many spore because of the PF tek--it's what made mushroom growing for beginners possible.

EDIT: Billy McPherson

People have successfully started outdoor mushroom beds by doing just that--breaking up old cakes.

But in outdoor beds they've got soil to grow through, and to absorb/provide moisture. Just sitting in a plastic tub? I dunno.....

Either way, having a sub would definitely increase your yield. More myc mass = more fruit bodies.

By the way, I have given cakes that looked a little moldy a SERIOUS spray-soaking with 10% BLEACH--as it's sold in walmart as cleaner-disinfectant--followed by a dunk and roll, and plenty of fruiting in a week! Basically healthy mycelium can take quite a beating, and still fruit when it's ready.

[I've done the same with H2O2--but the bleach is a better disinfectant]

Certainly, if moisture levels are not right, you'll get few or no mushrooms. Actually, for me that's the biggest advantage of monotub/casing layer--you can maintain a decent substrate moisture level.

"Sure that would work fine but see he wants to do it WITHOUT the coir and straw, just a tub of broken-up pieces of myc and no sub. As far as I can tell that's the big problem here. The form of the spawn doesn't really matter, AFAIK without something for it to colonize into it's just going to sit there until it's taken over by contams whether its BRF or WBS or whole grain rice. Right?"

Ahh yes in that case it makes zero sense...if you dont have something else to spawn it to it is useless.

why can't i just have more sterilized brown rice/verm in the tank to spawn it to?

The reason why BRF is not used as a bulk substrate is because experience has shown that it does not colonize fast enough. But then, you can have this problem with say coir too, if it's too wet for example. Spawning cakes to coir has worked great for me. I guess some people also crumble and case cakes with verm, but you'd waste time because the mycelium would have to consolidate again...and im not really sure if there is an advantage in terms of increased surface area. But feel free to experiment. Mushroom growing does not have to be the rocket science people make it out to be. Especially not if you are just growing to get enough material for a couple of trips each year.

i think i got a plan figured out in my head to get this all working smoothly.

i'll hammer out the fine details and report back later with details(if i remember).