I’ve had a couple of these #$@% black oysters in bags for over three weeks now, and they seem to have pretty much colonized the straw, but no pinning:

They’ve been in the grow chamber (70 degrees approximately) and black oysters apparently need a cooler (60 or so) spell to pin, so I came up with this, in a cooler room:

It’s just my SAB, with a humidifier hooked in, on a timer so it ran 15 minutes every hour, which kept the humidity around 95 percent or higher (with the top on, of course). After three days, nothing – – so I bunged them back into the grow chamber. Keeping my fingers crossed!

When I first started with mushrooms, it was one of those “boil some cardboard, then mix with some cut-up mushrooms in a garbage bag, and put it under your bed and forget it for a few months” deals, which actually worked, at least in the sense that I had a big bag of nice mushroom-smellying cardboardy mycelium. And I tried a couple of other times, also with straw, but no mushrooms . . . but on 10/26 (apparently, I don’t quite remember it) it looks like I mixed up some of the the cardboardy mycelium with straw and bagged it up.

Anyway (this story is getting longer than it deserves) I cleaned out all those various bags & boxes of straw & cardboard from under my bed (literally) and put them all into the garage, where they will go into some sort of mushroom compost pile, in the spring, but kept the bag. And – – glorioski and mmmBop – – after a couple of days, here’s what I saw:

I assume they’re responding to the O2, since they bag had been in a plastic garbage bag. The mycelium growth through the straw is very uneven, which I assume is due to lazy mixing with the cardboard:

Anyway, pretty excited. A lot of the would-be pins are stuck behind the plastic, so I cut more holes in the bag to free them from their bondage.

As for the pinks, the ones I bagged on 1/10 have gone nuts, with a spawn run of less than 10 days.

Eagerly growing through the filter! Pics from 1/20 and 1/21:

I’ve tried the lime pasteurization process twice, the first time with 6g per gallon of water, the second with 10g +. Both times something has sprouted . . . doesn’t really seem to be a problem, certainly less so if I keep the bags in relative shade during their spawn runs, but still kind of annoying. This doesn’t seem to be problem with heat pasteurization (using the same straw).

All things mushroomy these days 🙂

-R