Back to Basics

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After the first bucket failure I decided to go with a cycle of bags instead of buckets for my next round which included some antler reishi, lions mane, bears head tooth and honey mushrooms. I waited too long to transfer the honey so it didn’t have much success and the reishi took off immediately but when i cut open the bag, died. I should have left bag closed and done slights, stupid stupid stupid.

I’m getting an instant pot tomorrow and am considering using it to help sterilize some HWP and try buckets again. I have chestnut and turtle shell beech ready to colonize.

Final Buckets Removed

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Still wasn’t quite sure I could open the buckets and check how they are doing and the last few just don’t look too good. I’m trying to zero in on the mistakes I made and I believe it was either:

  • Contaminated bran
  • Too much heat (too close together?)
  • Should have left the holes uncovered (I used micropore tape over them)

I’m getting ready to try some drippy corn and give a second batch a go.

Booo! Contamination

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This site is called “logs” for a reason and that included documenting failures so that I can learn from them in future. My baby bucket recipe did not do well with the bran included. I was able to flash a light on the buckets and spotted trich in them (green). This was an unexpected advantage to using this particular brand of “clear” bucket! I buried them in hopes they are able to resurrect themselves. In the meantime, 2 lions mane, 1 turkey tail and 1 white enoki are still going strong!

Humidity Kink

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I noticed a drop in humidity despite not having changed anything in my setup. I ran into this one before, last summer. After running a bit, the hose running to the tent will become weighted down and collect water, clogging the humidity stream to the tent. If I lift up the hose, water drips out. The solution for now is I made the hose as tight and straight to the tent as I could, if that don’t work, I used to prop up the hose with metal hanger into a rainbow arc. We’ll see how it goes.

Automatic Timers

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Fighting with heat this past week I realized my smart plugs “circulate” function had stopped working on two of the timers, namely the fresh air exchange and humidifier. Finally got some new ones from Amazon and got it circulating. Fresh air 1 min every four hours and humidity 1 min every 20 min for now and it’s staying around 76F and 80% humidity.

Flow Hood (Fan Filter Unit) Complete!

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Finally got the components working together, added some wallpaper for style and a table to hold both the FFU and my humidifier and keep things tidy and compact.

More and More Heat

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Still an ongoing battle to see what I can do to lower the tent down a few degrees. I’m poking up to 81-82F and I’d like to keep it under 80F. I stopped the tent from leaking by taking down the “passive” exhaust hole I have from full 4″ opening to about 2″. I also improved the incoming fresh air by taking the thin filter I use on front end and moving it to back end, for some reason this fan performs better that way. I tried a make shift Styrofoam swamp cooler but the easiest solution right now is I put one of the ice packs I had on hand on the bottom shelf in the tent. I put the inside $ Walmart fan underneath that shelf and circulate air 5 min every 30 min. I usually put a fresh pack at 11am and that is enough to drop it from 80f to 74f-76f during the hottest part of the day. Will adjust as I go along.

Battling High Temperature

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It’s been a few days since I put the buckets in and I’m feeling the hit with degree change. I had the tent all dialed in prior to adding the buckets, but it’s a different ballgame with them in. I touched one bucket and can feel the warmth coming off of it, nuts!! I’m trying to increase the AFE but then, of course, the humidity drops. I also seem to be leaking too much humidity.. argh!

Bucket Day!

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Finally, all the math done, buckets prepped, today was the day to move my grain spawn into buckets (and a few shoeboxes)! In buckets, I put: Shittake, Lion’s Mane, Chestnut and Turkey Tail. In shoeboxes, I put: Golden Enoki, White Enoki and Turtle Shell Beech (not sure about this in a shoebox, might be better for a bucket, but we’ll see!). Overall, the recipe went well though i did seem to have more sawdust than needed. I think the baking of the bran (if there is no contamination) might be a new fave of mine and I’ve found a new source for bran.

DIY Flowhood

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I’m currently waiting to inject liquid culture in the jars I prepped last week and came up on some do-it-yourself flow hood videos. Taking inspiration, I’ve come up with a game plan of my own.

Formula Used for Fan

Basically, you want to ensure you have enough air to flow through filter, but not disrupt and so you have to look for a fan with the proper “CFM” (cubic feet per minute ) measurement, measuring airflow by the volume of cubic feet per minute the fan is able to move. For this, I found this formula used:

((width of filter x length of filter) / 144) x 100 = how many cfm’s your fan needs

example for my filter in picture above:

14 filter length x 10 filter width = 140
140 / 144 = .972
.972 x 100 = 97.2 minimum cfm

No more than 10%
97.2 x .10 = 9.72
97 + 9.72 = 106.7 max cfm

Final: Fan needs between 97 – 107 cfm

Filter Requirement

After some reading, I went with a HEPA filter that “effectively captures 99.97% of particles as small as 0.3 microns“, purchased on Amazon.

See Final DIY Flow Hood