Had a few goes at growing mushrooms over the past year, all just pre bought kits and I’ve had mixed results, first one came off pretty well despite me putting far too much spore solution in.
Then since that first I’ve had a few failures due to contamination, the most recent being the closest I’ve come since the first to actually having consumable shrooms but they too in the end fruited contaminated mushroom.
As can be seen, good enough yield but those caps should be brown not white.
So since then I’d looked more into doing things from scratch so to speak, youtube videos and books etc and decided with a straggling 1ml of spore solution left I’d saved to do some experimenting. I didn’t want to spend any extra cash so I resided to using what I had round the house to get it done. I used a 330ml straight edged jar as the vessel for my substrate and brown rice (cooked for about 8 mins), vermiculite and some organic bat guano enriched soil as my substrate mix at a ratio of about 50% rice, 40% verm and 10% compost, mixed it all up using some boiled water to moisten the vermiculite and packed it into the jar, sealed with some tin foil. I don’t have a pressure cooker so I sterilised the jar in a slow cooker on high, waiting until the water round the jar bubbled and giving it about 90 mins from then (about 4 hours in total). Once it cooled I innoclulated the jar with the solution through the foil with a syringe and covered again with more foil and placed it into the very simple homemade incubating chamber I made.
The fact that the solution had been in the fridge for over 2 months, I hadn’t used a pressure cooker to sterilise and very much improvised the substrate meant I didn’t have much hope for this coming off but to my suprise it’s taken better than any kit I’ve used so far!
Currently on with building a heated FC to fruit in with high hopes my little cake makes it though to fruiting uncontaminated so that I can repeat the process on a slightly larger scale next time.