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

Making the Lids

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This batch, I’m making some plastic lids for my jars with a syringe filter for air exchange and a rubber stopper as an injection port.

For the lid itself, I purchased the “regular size” lids, which as the description on Amazon says, fit both the half pint and pint jars I have. I came to find out jar lids are standardized to a 2.75″ regular size and wide mouth being being 3.375″, and so I chose regular.

I also decided to use a 13mm diameter syringe filter so it wouldn’t take up the entire lid, trying to keep a good space between the stopper and filter. This became helpful when drilling later.

For the holes, I used a Ryobi drill bit set. After some measuring, the hole I used for the syringe filter was 5/32 and the hole for the stopper was 5/16. The biggest problem was cracks, though and I had to be very careful and DO NOT PUSH DOWN HARD WHEN DRILLING. Let the drill bit do its work and have patience. Pressing too hard OR putting the two holes too close together will cause cracks, making the lid useless.

I tested size and drilling first on a piece of cardboard, making sure the stopper and filter fit nicely and then made a template for the lid, using it to drill my first lid and then used that lid and a pencil to mark the drill spots on all the rest.

Prepping Grain Spawn

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My last batch of grain spawn was in pints that I’ll be dividing in half for my baby buckets. As those are almost ready to go into buckets, I want to prep a new batch of true half pints to run my recipe with. Last time I was a bit short of grains using a 1 dry grain to get 3 wet ratio, so this time I’ll be trying 1 : 2*. My plans:

  • Soaking the grains overnight
  • Rinse, then cook for 15-20 min until al dente
  • Drain and letting steam dry it out
  • Loading into jars and pressure cooking for 90 minutes

I use rye berries from Azure Standard for my grain spawn.

*(Edit: 2024-07-21: with 1:2, I did 6 cups to yield 12 and instead got 20. 20/6 is back to the 1 dry to 3.3 wet ratio. Next time, for 12 wet: 12/3.3 = 3.6 cups dry)

Mushroom Baby Bucket Recipe (Ver 1 – FAILED)

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Edit (2024-08-19): Experienced heavy contamination. Likely the bran, hwp combo.

It’s bucket day! And it’s time to get down and dirty with bucket prep, planning the substrate mix quantities, prepping it and seeing what it yields. I have a 16qt pressure cooker and so 12 half pint jars fit perfect in it. This is my first go at this small setup, so I’m documenting to see what happens!

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Pressure Cooker Level Up

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Using a pressure cooker was outright scary for me the first time, but with the help of some friends and the reference to this awesome video, I got over my jitters. However, a year on, and it seems I’ve slipped up. I was watching a video on cordyceps and noticed he said he did not put the pressure regulator (cap that wiggles) on right away. He waited until a full steam got going, then did so. I went back to video for a refresher course and sure enough, do not put the regulator on right away. I also made note of the altitude comments he made, confirming that I should be reaching a pressure of 11 at my altitude.

Update: Colonization_2024.06.20-2024.07.17

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Bad News:

  • Reishi has a spot of green on top.   It’s not stopping the rest of the jar from colonization though, and so I’m going to let it continue.  It was suggested to me to bury it and see if it will grow outside.  I saw on iNaturalist that Golden Reishi is indeed found near me, and so I might give that a try.
  • Almond and Pioppino haven’t taken at all.  Shittake is slow going and I might attempt to drop the temperature to see if they’ll colonize better.

 

Fixing the Humidity Sensor

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In my previous set up, I had initially bought a monitor with a corded sensor.  Cord or not, the monitor itself I came to learn was horribly inaccurate.  It took purchasing a bunch of other monitors to compare and find this out and no doubt it contributed to some over humidified oysters I lost last year before I had to pack it all up because of the intense summer heat.  About the only thing it did correctly was sync to my phone app with alarms.

This time, with the new tent setup, I am determined to find a more accurate monitor.  After some research, I settled on the Govee monitor that has all the same wifi, app, alarm functions but is supposed to be highly more accurate.  I specifically was leaning toward a closed monitor as I’ve seen the humidity destroy others.  I left it in with the previous monitor and saw what a failure the previous monitor was.  The Govee so far has held up when I use other monitors to check it!