Shrooms are very easy. If you can cook, you can grow shrooms. The important part is keeping everything very very clean.
Buy a couple bags of bulk popcorn to use to grow on. Simmer in a pot with water for 2 hours. Then let it dry in a collander.
Put into quart mason jars, and modify the lids with a breathing hole and an injection port. Cover the breathing hole with a few layers of micropore tape. Cover the lids with some foil to keep them from getting soaked, and put the jars in a big pot and steam them for 2 hours to kill any bacteria. Or if you have a pressure cooker you can do that too.
Let them cool over night, then inject the spores, 1ml per jar is more than enough.
Let them sit for a month or so until the spores take over everything, and then do a break and shake, where you just shake each jar vigorously to break up the cake. Then let them sit again until the spores have taken back over everything again.
Make up some CVG. Cocoa Coir, Vermiculite and gympsum. I forget the exact ratios, you can look it up. Then you pour boiling water over it in a 5 gallon bucket, put the lid on, and wrap it in a blanket and let it sit overnight until its cooled down.
Get the 10 pack of plastic shoe boxes from walmart for $10. You want more small containers, because if you have a bacteria breakout, you don't lose a lot of your grow.
Mix your innoculated popcorn and the heat treated CVG together 50/50. One quart of each, to one shoe box. Put the lid on the shoe box, and wait about 2 to 4 weeks.
When the surface of the container looks like a snowy field, its time to start letting it breath. Take another shoe box and cut some 2" holes in the sides with a hole saw, and then cover them in micropore tape so it allows gas exchange. Take the lid off one of your shoeboxes with the stuff in it, flip the shoeboxes with the holes on top, and duct tape around the edges to hold them together. Now your shrooms can breath and will start growing fruits. Use a light source, 12/12, and they will grow towards the light. If you don't use light, you'll get weird shaped shrooms. In a week or two, you'll have fruits! Wait until right before they are about to drop their spores, open it up and use scissors to trim them away from the substrate cake.
After you get your shroom fruits off the cakes, fill the shoebox with distilled water and soak the cake for an hour and then drain the water back off. Put the other box back on top and tape back in place, put back on the shelf, and in another few weeks you'll have another flush of fruits.
Don't open the fucking containers until each step is ready. Don't get near them. Don't even f'n look at them funny, or you'll end up getting trichinosis infection and lose everything. Don't mist. Don't do any stupid crap you'll see people recommend. Don't touch them.
Clean everything with alcohol and then a torch. Wear disposable gloves. Wear a mask so you aren't breathing bacteria from your mouth on them. Lysol the entire room down before you open the containers, innoculate your jars with the spores, anything. Between each jar during innoculating with the spores you need to flame sterilize your needle.
Don't bother messing with Uncle Bens Tek. Just go buy some jars and popcorn, and order the micropore tape and injection ports on amazon. Its way less frustrating to do it right the first time. I tried Uncle Bens and lost more than half because the rice was too wet and would rot.
Awesome write up brother!
I would like to add a few points.
Not all MSS (Multi Spore Syringes) are clean, some maybe contaminated!
The best way is to inoculate some agar plates first, if a contam shows up, you just cut a tiny piece of mycellium and transfer upside down to a clean agar plate! Throw the contam plate away!
If you incoculate all your spawn bags with a contminated spore syring all you bags will be contaminated!
You also want to catch the contam early otherwise it may sporilate Drop spores if it is a fungal infection such as Tricaderma or a bacteria spreads to much.
Once you have clean spore cultures with nice rhizomorphic growth, you can then start to make liquid cultures for your grain jars/bags.
Once you have a clean agar plate or clean liquid culture you can just keep making more from it.
If using a spore print for your source of spores then it is best to start with water agar and then once they have soaked and started to grow, add them to LMEA (Light Malt Extract Agar) as this has food for the mycelium in the form of Light Malt Extract.
The water agar is moist and will help hydrate the spores before they are transferred to the LMEA
Uncle Ben's tek is ok if you can't sterilize spawn (no pressure cooker that reaches 15PSI) However it is very moist and prone to contams.
If you dod do Uncle bens Tek shake the MSS very vigorously, the spores like to clump together, this will disperse them!
In Uncle Bens Tek use small amounts of spore water 1ml 2ml at the most, you want to be adding as little water as you can due to the wetness of the rice.
The making coco/CVG in a bucket will often be enoughto kill of infections in the CVG but better still is to autoclave it/Pressure cook it for 1.5 hours at 15PSI.
Bucket coco/CVG method, will kill some bacteria and fungal spores but may leave a lot in there. It deppend on a number of factors, how long it has been open, how hygienically it was made, adding too much Gypsum may raise the pH which may cause contams.
Poo loving fungi will need more gypsum because of the acidic nature of poo substrates.
Canning it in a canner at 12PSI for 1.5 hours, will pasturize it, most nasty will have been killed but not all.
Pressure cooking it, in a Pressure Cooker (PC) or autoclave at 15PSI for 1.5 hours will sterilize the substrate ie kill everything (practically)!
Some comercial pressure cookers/autoclave can reach 18PSI and therefore will reduce the sterilization time and kill everything.
A 22 liter pressure cooker can be got for $200 from aliexpress, the same pressure cooker bought from a shop in the USA will be twice the price.
ppp
