I have a little more than a year's experience in growing mushrooms using the simple PF tek method (food/vermiculite/water), I've probably done roughly 8-10 waves of jars being sterilized for grows with contamination going from roughly half the jars when I first started to maybe 2 jars max that end up being contaminated now (7 jars at a time). I have thus far no PC for sterilizing (been boiling instead), and therefore have only been using organic brown rice as my primary food source (chopped into fresh flour/meal in a food processor before using), I've also been mixing in roughly a tablespoon of bee pollen for every 2 jars to up the nutrients. I try to make a new spore print every generation to use for the next grow.

Yields for me are good, but not great; currently I have been unable to grow due to the cold of winter making it difficult for me to control temperatures, but that will soon be a thing of the past as I plan on updating all of my equipment (new lids for all my jars, improved incubator, new shotgun growing chamber, hopefully a pressure cooker, etc.). I believe that with my experience my next move to up my yields would be to start using more than brown rice and bee pollen as food, and maybe start casing as well. Currently I have quite a lot of grain variety as I bake my own fresh bread as a hobby, and part of me wonders how some of the additives I use for breads will work in PF tek jars (assuming I get a PC to properly sterilize any endosperms). Some of these I have include: rye flour, barley flour, quinoa flour, buckwheat flour (technically not a grain), spelt flour, oat bran, wheat bran, whole rye berries, bulgur wheat, and toasted wheat germ. I was also considering adding used coffee grounds as well to improve nutrition seeing as I drink enough coffee to have a steady supply of it

Part of me wants to try using the oat and wheat brans as food additives simply because I have way more than I could ever use in my fresh breads before it expires, but I'm not sure if would be worth the effort to try, that and I'm not sure if I'd require a PC to sterilize my jars if I start using brans, or if bran has enough nutrition to be worth using as food for mushrooms... I've been wanting to improve my food source for a while now but I'm not sure where to go from here if I can't get a PC soon.

Any advice is appreciated The strain I grow is Treasure Coast if that helps anyone to give me advice

Hi there

I came to the same decision a while back, brf only have a limited amount of food.

We try to use pure rye berries for cakes, 24 hr soak and boiled till they split, then towel dried, topped with dry verm, then pressure cooked.. The yields are greatly improved over brf.

Thai rye cakes
Cambodian rye cake

But if you haven't got a pc you can do BRF cakes but when they area 100% colonized and ready to birth, you can use them as spawn instead, Just crumble them to a bulk substrate (thanks to Jamie)


Common bulk substrates are :

Horse poo
Coir
straw
hey

Ideally you could use pasteurized hpoo, but coir works well, as does straw and hey, you can mix and match, make sure you add some gypsum... So you prepare a tray, then crumble your cakes into it with your pasteurized substrate, mix well or layer, cover with plastic and make holes, keep at 82f ideally, then it will be ready to fruit in like 7 - 10 days.

I Do a similar thing with rye, but I don't do this using BRF, but this technique is one way to be able to do bulk grows without the need for a PC

Hope this helps

Peace

Thanks for the reply! It helps greatly