Hello friends. Love you guys. I am preparing for my first pf tek grow. I've got spore syringes for GT and B+. These ball quilted crystal (regular mouth) jars are what I could find locally. Ten bucks at Freddys. Will they work for making cakes and will I be able to remove them from jars? Ive seen prepared jars for sale on Amazon that look similar.

YES Never had a problem getting the cakes out.
The wide mouth might colonize faster but the regular mouth do work.

What boogers said! The wide mouths are more convenient, but when you are filling them 3/4 full, and have room to shake to break up the mycelium anyway, the grains separate and fall out regardless of lid size. Just don't let it over-colonize because then you will find difficulty. You just have to be on top of it.

for pf tek it's recommended to use the shorter jars, but these work too. they will take longer to colonize and might stall, which increases the chances of contamination but if you follow the pf tek precisely it'll be fine. i had to use them since i couldn't find the shorter ones and had good success.

I assume you're inoculating BRF+vermiculite cakes? The narrow jars will work although getting the cakes out of the jars without breaking up the cakes can be difficult.

You can fruit the cakes directly as per pf tek, or spawn the cakes to a bulk substrate (coir or coir+vermiculite) using something simple like shoebox tek. Your yield should be noticeably higher and in my experience it's an easier, more reliable process than pf tek.

Thank you guys!!!

I wish you luck Tony! I have found an incredible enjoyment from learning mycology. It’s even starting to spread beyond magic mushrooms. Fungus is such a wonderful organism. I hope you enjoy it!

I second spawning to bulk.

Good luck with the grow Tony!

Just a heads up, my first (successful) grow was multispore direct onto WBS which then by accident fruited in the jars. I had made one PF jar to compare and the difference was staggering. Yields on the bird seed (a mix mostly consisting of wheat and millet, from which the sunflower seeds were painstakingly removed) were about 100 times better per volume of substrate.

This leads me to suggest your effort will be rewarded more greatly by choosing something a bit more nutrient dense than PF cakes. As ever, YMMV.

Best of luck in any case!

Agreed with DFZ that grain will result in better yields than BRF. And another consideration to keep in mind...

Over at the Shroomery, the general recommendation as of a few years ago is to inoculate BRF with syringes, but inoculating grain with syringes is discouraged. The reason being that syringes are not 100% clean and BRF is more resistant to contaminants. Using syringes to inoculate grain has a higher chance of failure because the grain is more nutritious and thus much more susceptible to contamination.

This jives with my own experience. I've had multiple failed grain batches inoculated from syringes, but BRF works great. Now I only inoculate grain from agar in front of a flow hood. The agar is inoculated from syringes (or a shroom I want to clone) followed by one or two transfers to new agar to ensure I've transferred clean mycelium away from contaminants.

With a recent African Transkei syringe, the agar inoculation grew bacterial contamination at the inoculation spot, but the mycelium outran the bacterial growth and I was able to transfer clean mycelium to new agar. I then used the clean mycelium to inoculate grain. I used that same (dirty) syringe to inoculate BRF and the mycelium is growing throughout the BRF with no sign of contamination.

I have a shaman friend who holds a lot of mushroom ceremonies and she needs to grow her own shrooms. Her process is syringes to BRF, then spawn to bulk (coir+vermiculite). She got started growing with pf tek, and she is now very happy with the yield spawning BRF jars to bulk (shoebox tek).

Good luck! Patience is definitely rewarded in this hobby.

Everyone has brought up some good points and advice.

I'd recommend sticking to the pftek. Simply because you already have all the materials needed. Also the pftek yields might surprise you. If you want to you can inoculate a bunch of jars and split them between bulk and a fruiting chamber or even invitro.

With brf to bulk you risk losing it all because you're putting all your eggs in one basket.
With the original Tek / invitro -you can isolate problem cakes and remove them if necessary.

Grains and agar require a pressure cooker. Worth getting if you're interested in larger yields or the hobby itself.

<<<Make a still air box if you haven't done so.>>>

Have fun!

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Not having a flow hood, the SAB has been an absolute game changer! Super cheap and if you have leftover monotub materials you may even have everything at the house already. I won't even inoculate without using one again.

I personally use those jars or the same ones with smooth sides. Both work well!

For the love of fungus.

Check Etsy if you dont trust yourself to make a glove box. I have a great one from there.

One Love

Good point. Go with several shoeboxes rather than combining all the BRF cakes into a single large monotub. You can use as little as two half-pint BRF jars per shoebox. Mix with one quart of bulk substrate and top with an optional 1/2 quart casing layer. Then put it on a bookshelf, mist every few days if the top looks dry, and in a few weeks you get shrooms. It's pretty easy.

A shoebox is basically a small set-it-and-forget-it monotub. With shoeboxes, it's easy to experiment with different ratios of spawn to substrate, coir/coir+vermiculite, casing/no-casing, mist a lot, mist a little, et cetera. Basically you're guaranteed of getting some combination correct. But in my experience any combination works with cubensis and gives good yield. It's just such a reliable tek.


I assume Tony6Strings must already have a pressure cooker to sterilize the BRF jars?

I have a pressure cooker, but I don't bother preparing my own jars anymore. I purchase pre-sterilized oat bags from Out-grow. Oats are quite cheap and high yielding. I'm surprised they don't get more discussion. Note that inoculating pre-sterilized grain bags with agar requires a flow hood or SAB and an impulse sealer. So I'm choosing to spend my time with agar, cloning, etc, rather than preparing grains.

I'm experimenting with Out-grow's BRF bags so I can potentially recommend them for newbie friends who want an easy, reliable mushroom grow tek. I think it's going to be Out-grow BRF bags, syringes, and spawn to shoeboxes with unpasteurized coir.

I believe brf cakes can be steam sterilized for 90 minutes. Just make sure you keep it boiling and steaming.

I'd feel better about using a pressure cooker if the OP has one.

Good call on the grain/contam thing. I guess I was pretty lucky back then with my grow - the grain jars did contamn after about the fourth flush in the end. The syringes were produced (by me) with utmost care from very good prints, however - and all procedures were carried out in a rather nice SAB.

Shroombee, a little while ago one forum member (Espurr? DansMaTete?) pointed out that headspace really helps with success in a bulk fruiting chamber. It was believably claimed that using a good, tall box improved fruiting. What are your thoughts or experiences with regard to this?

I just looked that up. Apparently it does work for BRF.


Many grows will contaminate by the fourth flush. As I understand it's due to the mycelium being exhausted and unable to fight off the contaminants. Sometimes I think even the third flush is not worth the effort due to the lower yield. And I'm not chasing yield since I already have more dried shrooms than I know what to do with.

To be clear, grains inoculated from syringes do work. It's just the contamination rate during colonization is higher than BRF. And I've read colonization can go okay but then the contaminants take hold after shaking the jars or spawning to bulk.


I don't have any experiences comparing a shallow box to a tall box during the bulk colonization, pinning, and initial fruiting stages. But it's easy to test with shoebox tek by doing a dubtub: flip a shoebox over and put it on top of another shoebox instead of the regular lid, thus creating a tall tub. If desired, fasten with a couple strips of tape.

I dubtub my shoeboxes towards the end of the flush when the shrooms start to push the lid off the shoebox. When that happens, the shoebox is too open so humidity can drop too much and the shroom caps can crack. At least I think that's what's happening as there are multiple reasons for cracked caps. Enclosing the environment by dubtub prevents the cracking.

I've also read that unlatching the lid once the flush gets going helps the flush. The theory being that the extra air exchange promotes growth. That would tie in with the tall tub recommendation - there's more fresh air available. So I unlatch my shoeboxes once the flush gains some momentum.

That all being said, there are experienced folks at the Shroomery who feel basic shoebox is the way to go and there's no need to over-think it with dubtub or other variations. But if you like to tinker, shoebox tek gives you many independent experiments. In my experience, everything pretty much works within reason and there are no hard patterns to what works better. It's difficult to get repeatable results due to variables such as colonization temperature, humidity, multi-spore inoculations, age of the mycelium (if cloning), etc.

BTW, these experiences are only with cubensis. I haven't grown other species which I understand are more particular about their growing conditions.

Some trusted cultivars recommend leaving the lids unlatched once you mix your spawn and bulk.


I have done this for several shoebox grows and never had any issues. Unfortunately, I can make no comparisons in terms of yields and time till harvest with any other method as this is all I have been using.

Woolmer, thanks for this. Bods Easy AF compilation on shroomery is where I've been doing some reading, I like his style, very straightforward and tek like.

Thanks again my friends for sharing knowledge with me..

Hi everyone!! Here are my jars, pre sterilization and inoculation. 2 parts verm, 1 part brf, 1 part water.

I have a large soup pot with lid but no pressure cooker. I read I can effectively steam sterilize with this. Any pointers?

Also. What is procedure for lids when sterilizing? Do I loosen lids and foil in order for steam to sterilize substrate?