It has been three months since I inoculated these jars with Pink oyster mycelium. Using a mushroom block I purchased from Amazon I broke it into small pieces and filled a few dozen jars with it along with wild bird seed to let the mushrooms feed on a new substrate. And now months later they are just about as good as they are going to get in the jars. And with these completely colonized jars I will add them to a larger 5 gallon bucket for their final stage of growth. From there they will grow throughout a hay substrate and fill out the buckets nicely. It will be my first time growing them in hay so I hope it goes well. But at least these jars really took off and I know I can go back to using this method of starting mushrooms to make more.
I started off this project using a still air box, cleaning chemicals and long rubber gloves. Having a completely clean environment is key to having a high success rate in growing mushrooms. Otherwise competing organisms will take over before these do.
Lol one of the containers did not have a lid. The mushroom noticed and started trying to grow around it.
Some jars look like snow balls now, others just have a light dusting throughout. Probably put more mycelium in some rather than others.
When I started to see a discoloration at the top, I knew the jars were near their end and the mycelium had to be moved once again. This coloration is caused by the mushroom drying out. If left bacteria will move in and start ruining the colony. So I have been moving all these jars into their hay substrate so they have all new food to feed on along with lots of moisture stored up in the buckets from the wet hay.
With many jars I can fill a few 5 gallon buckets, this was my plan all along so glad we are now at a point where I can move on.
When it comes time to start some new kinds of mushrooms I think I will use this technique again, it served me well. Maybe one addition would be adding some heating pads under them to help kick start the spawn run a little better, so it wont take 3 months again to colonize a full jar.
Kind of looks like cake in a jar, or some pink snow.. or maybe just a bunch of mushroom spawn.. haha
The fruiting bodies forming on the side of the jar is known as "pinning" and can tell me its ready to move on to bigger substrates.
The bottom of the jar is also fully colonized, a good sign the mushroom colony has formed throughout the jar.
Sometimes the fungi reaches for the tops of the jars, because of the gas exchange happening through the filters they want to get out that way. I double taped them so those worked well. The single taped lids seem to have some fungi escaping through the fabric.
After I scoop out the mycelium into my buckets, I can clean the jars and reuse them for another mushroom project. Great thing about mason jars they can be cleaned really well and reused many times again.
At this point I have already filled three buckets with this mycelium, and just have one more to do. Soon I will have four 5 gallon buckets filled with Pink oyster mushroom spawn. Once they colonize that and start pinning. It will be time to build them an enclosure and see about trapping co2 as planned.