I'm happy to announce that after weeks of waiting, I finally have pins growing in my first mushroom attempt!!

The method that I've chosen to use is your standard PF tek, using a shotgun chamber to fruit in. Only lost one jar to contamination halfway through colonization .

The experiment that I decided to do with 2 of the original 12 jars that I inoculated, was that I substituted half of the BRF with pistachio shells (just for the hell of it, to see what happens mostly ). To my surprise, during the entire growth cycle to date, they were some of the first to show signs of life, the first two jars to become fully colonized, and now they're in the first of 5 to pin, not to mention that the one pistachio shell cake has the most pins of all the rest that have pinned combined .

Has anyone else experimented with using pistachio shells as food instead of/in addition to BRF? I plan to experiment more with my next grow, making 1-2 jar(s) that have only pistachio shells (and using spores collected from the two experiment cakes' mushies to colonize).

Perhaps they've grown faster because the shells were coated with salt (they were from a bag of Wonderful Pistachios)? The one thing that I noticed when birthing the two cakes with the shells is that the mycelium didn't really grip onto the shells, as the shells that were pressed against the glass simply fell off the cakes, they were completely covered with mycelia, but they fell off anyway, almost as if the mycelia grew around the shells to eat the salt instead of the shell itself, this is all speculative really.

Anyway I also plan on keeping the mushrooms that grow from those cakes separate from the rest, to see if the potency was also effected.

Possibly harvest pics later on in the thread!