About four weeks ago, I injected this grain bag from NorthSpore with Psilocybe cubensis mushroom spores. Well, the time has come to get the mycelium into the monotub and its growing medium.
As you can see, the whole grain bag has been taken over by the mycelium. Once it is a full white brick, that is when you are ready for the next step.
Since this is my first ever mushroom grow, I used this walkthrough to prepare my tub where the shrooms are going to grow. It is nice that there are so many different tools out there to teach you how to do this stuff because it can get a bit overwhelming, especially since the whole process can take a while.
I will be mixing the mycelium with two of these Boomr Bags from Northspore. It is a premium mixture of manure and other mushroom growing substrate. I have heard nothing but good stuff about these, so I am hoping that they work right.
One of the most important things about growing mushrooms is making sure that everything is as sterile as possible. Throughout this whole process, I sprayed everything with isopropyl alcohol to reduce the risk of contamination.
I started off by dumping some of the mycelium mixture in the tub.
Then I started to layer the substrate on top of the grain and pretty much just switched off between grain and substrate, like I was making a seven layer bean dip. Great, now I am hungry and want bean dip...
I just continued to layer the grain and the substrate until I they were gone.
Hopefully this all works because right now it is just a bunch of trial and error, but you can learn how to do pretty much anything from youtube.
Once I got it all in there, I had to make sure the substrate was the correct wetness. To do this, I just grabbed a small handful of it and squeezed. If it expelled a couple drops of water, then it was good. To achieve the proper wetness levels, I just sprayed water in the tub across the top of the substrate and squeezed until it was perfect.
So now that everything is in the tub, we wait. It should take about two weeks until the mycelium has spread through the substrate and it gets a nice white covering. Once that happens, then I will pour some coco coir on the top. Then the mushrooms will begin to grow on that. The coco coir is a perfect medium for growing mushrooms on.
One of the things that kind of sucks about growing mushrooms is the amount of waiting there is during each step. Hopefully nothing goes wrong between now and harvest time because it is a pretty long process for this whole thing. If this all works out like I hope it does, I am going to be starting another grow with a different strain of mushrooms. Until then, fingers crossed that I did this all correctly.
