Mycology

Thought he was a peice of trash at first 😅

When I found a group of these growing in the grass I thought that they were St. George's Mushrooms. I then took a spore print and it was reddish brown rather than the expected white, so I then I thought I may have a toxic Inocybe instead, and lost all confidence in my ability of being able to recognize edible mushrooms... Looking through pictures, I was eventually able to figure out that it is actually an edible Agaricus campestris.

TL;DR: how would negative pressure and blowing out the air from the tent change my setup?

Right now, I use an old PC fan inside the tent, which continuously blows fresh air from the outside through a slit. It's constantly on, but pretty weak.

The FAE isn't optimal for my oysters, but sufficient. The stems are slightly prolonged, but still totally fine.

Right next to the fan is the tube of my terrarium fogger, and the fan disperses the fog inside the tent. The RH is always about 75-90%, which is fine for me. And the underside of it is opened, so the CO2 flows to the bottom and gets out of it.

The setup itself works fine, but I have one major problem: water consumption.

The room, where the tent is located, feels really humid, which isn't great in regards of molds, especially in the winter.

I need to use a lot of (destilled) water, which is also expensive. For my roundabout 2x1,50 m tent I consume about 5 liters a week, which is a lot!

Sometimes, it condensates on the outside and pools up at the bottom tray.

I thought about creating a suction tube at the bottom, which draws out the "used" air and blows it outside the window. So, basically, negative pressure instead of slight positive. I already have a fan for that lying around. It is a lot stronger, do I need to choke it a bit? What cycles of "on and off" would you recommend?

Is programming an arduino a good idea for that? What alternatives would you recommend instead?

How would that, all in all, change the things, especially the water consumption?

So my two bags of pink oysters, which haven't appeared to be doing much on anything, have suddenly pinned right behind the air vent on both bags. The first picture is a bunch of little guys like I expected it to start out as, but the second bag is one massive stem as wide as the cap! For reference, the air vent patch black clicks on these bags are about 1.25" wide.

Did I do something wrong in sealing the top of the bags, or is it common to see this happen right behind the vent? Maybe I put too much straw in the bags? It's hard to see in the pictures, but they seem pretty healthy, however there has been VERY little mycelial growth in these bags so far and it seems premature to start opening them up. Any suggestions?

I have some pink spawn which was being expanded out in jars of rye berries and popcorn kernels. There's been good growth and since a couple weeks ago the jar appeared to be completely colonized (at which time I left one jar sitting and moved another jar to a couple fruiting bags). It's been sitting on the basement floor since then, but I've noticed some pink coloration that seems to have gone throughout the jar, and there seems to be a bit of the pink also in the fruiting bags.

I prepared some jars of blue oyster spawn at the same time, using the same batch of rye and popcorn, and those jars are still snow white. This has me wondering, could I have possibly gotten contamination ONLY in the pink oyster jars while all of the blue oyster jars somehow escaped contamination? Or is this pink color natural for pink oysters? It just seems like an awful big coincidence that only the pink oysters would get contaminated when everything was prepped together in the still-air box and there was definitely cross-exposure between the jars.

Since this is my first batch of oysters I'm just not sure what I should be expecting.

Every summer in my neighborhood, this one tree will fruit a silky rosegill and we have standing permission from the homeowner to harvest it. This year, looks like there are two. I wish I'd passed by the tree earlier this week before the big one started to shrivel.

doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fbioe.2023.1229693

Teliospore 1000x Magnified in Phase Contrast

Yesterday evening I made this nice picture in phase contrast of a teliospore of Gymnosporangium clavariiforme I found and posted earlier. Measures roughly 85 x 14 µm. Quite proud of it, since this is one of the first usable images I got with the new microscope 😉

#microscopy #nature #mycology #fungi #biology #microscope #photography #mushroom #image #picture @mycology

MEA with yeast extract at 1g/500mL, 9 days of growth

Glad the fungal folks are finally migrating here from reddit :) Can't wait to have a thriving mycelial community round these parts 🍄

At the suggestion of another member I tried expanding my spawn on popcorn kernels. This involved boiling for about 20 minutes, drying, then pressure-canning for 90 minutes at 15psi. After cooling my spawn was divided between the jars, which were allowed to grow for a little over two weeks. On Monday I transferred the contents of a couple jars to fruiting bags with pasteurized straw and started seeing growth by the next day. I thought all was well.

On Wednesday, I started noticing some green stems. As I've been watching, this is actually growth from the popcorn kernels, and it's happening in all four bags! Now I'm quite frankly amazed that the cheapest generic popcorn from the store even has the capability to sprout, but after I put it through all that cooking I would have assumed it simply wasn't possible. I also wonder why it didn't start trying to grow in the original jar, and why it waited until it was in the bags?

So is there anything I should do about this? It will probably be at least another couple weeks before the mycelium is grown out enough to open some air holes for fruiting and I'm worried the corn will be trying to create its own holes before then, but maybe the bag is tougher than it looks. Anyway, any suggestions other than letting it go and waiting to see what happens?

tl;dr: Spawn grown on popcorn kernels, now popcorn is sprouting despite extensive cooking.

[Update] It's NOT the popcorn, there were other seeds in the straw!

TL;DR: both clusters are the same, but I will redo the test

Good morning, my fellow mushroom enthusiasts!

In my Original Post I examined the effects of additional nitrogen supplementation by using diesel exhaust fluid (urea) for growing mushrooms.

As written there, I had to update the post just a few hours after publishing it, since the buckets already formed pins after just 16 days!

Now, a few days later, I got my first harvest. 800 grams total, but (sadly) both buckets (sample and reference) looked the exact same. Even the mass was, almost by gram, the same.

What now?

At first, wait for further flushes. Maybe, the urea bucket will provide more than the reference.

Also, I will redo the test. This time, with WAY more urea. I've read somewhere, that many growers aim to have 1% nitrogen in their substrate by using husks.

In my case, this means 45 g AdBlue (15 g urea) per bucket. Also, I'll use less grain spawn next time for not altering the results.

... So, I've got some work to do! :D

I've lost track now of how long since I started on this, but I think it's been 2-3 weeks since I transferred my original spawn to grain jars? All of the jars have been fully colonized except for one jar of pink oysters, which fought against some kind of contamination but seems to have gotten going again. It had some good looking growth though, so I decided to use that jar plus one jar of blue oysters (but grown on popcorn kernels) for my first attempt at fruiting. If it is too weak and fails, well if was worth a shot and I wouldn't have gotten anything else from it anyway.

I'm using some 8" fruiting bags from ebay, and pasteurized chopped straw in a lime water bath overnight then let it drain today for about 2.5 hours. Each quart jar of spawn was split between two fruiting bags.

Now here comes the scary part... I didn't have room inside to work on this, and knew working with the straw was going to be very messy, so I set up a table in the yard. I wiped everything down with 91% ISO as I went, but being outside has me worried about the chances of contam. Guess we'll see?

So now I have four stuffed fruiting bags hanging out in the garage where it will be a little warmer than the basement. I had considered putting the bags in my garden but I'm worried about squirrels and such getting into them (especially when they start to fruit) so I figured the garage was safer. I'm expecting another 2-3 weeks of expansion before they're ready to fruit, but it's just a game of wait&see now. And assuming I get some mushrooms from this batch, I can bring it back full-circle and start a new batch of spawn (this time directly in the grain jars) from what grows.

One question I have for everyone... I have three more jars of spawn that are pretty well completely grown in (one popcorn and two rye berries). Should I put these in the refrigerator until I'm ready to transfer them to fruiting bags? I'm not sure how long they can survive at room temperature but I seem to recall they can hang out in the fridge for 3-4 months without any problem?

Last week I was checking on one of my compost bins and noticed that there was a group of these mushrooms growing on a clump of composting leaves. Given the heat, I'm surprised to see them growing in the bin. Any help identifying them is most appreciated.

Shot of under side

Saw this at the base of a 300 year old oak.