Hi I'm on my first try with two strains, one is the B+ and the other the Golden Teacher. I have used the pf tek.
The miscelium took almost five weeks to colonize the jars (not completly but I read that the miscelium should'nt stay longer in the jars) The temperature during incubation was around 23c to 29c. I believe everything till then whent quite well since I had'nt had not one infection out of 8 jars. On the fifth week I dunked the cakes in a pot and left in the fridge over night then rolled them and put them in a container with lots of wet perlite and aluminum foil underneath the cake. I open the lid and mist a bit every day, the cakes have plenty of non direct sunlight every day and the temperature know is 20c-25c but now is day 8 after dunking and rolling the cakes and I see no pins forming...Still no signs of infections and seems I got enough humidity in the container with no water excess on the base of the container. So my questions are: Should'nt I see pins forming by now? Must I wait some more? Should I dunk and put them in the fridge once more? Any hint might help. Many Thanks

I've had pinning take longer. If the cakes weren't 100% colonized when you birthed them for instance. If temps are cooler... there are a number of things.

What do you have going for a fruiting chamber? While those cakes certainly need humidity, they also need regular fresh air exchange. So if they're not getting enough of that, it can delay pinning. You should be misting and fanning 4 times a day minimum.

No more dunking yet, unless the cakes are drying out.

Wow four times a day ??????? I was doing that only once a day.
I've got the regular plastic chamber everybody has for growing mushrooms filled with an inch and a half perlite and the cakes sitting on aluminum foil. I did'nt open holes on the container trying to avoid contamination cause it's in a not so clean semibasement toolhouse. For aeriation I just lift the lid and move it's one side up and down for air to exchange.

My opinion... build a proper Shotgun Fruiting Chamber... 1/4" holes every 2" and 4" of wet perlite in the bottom.

http://www.mushroomvideos.com/Terrarium-Tek

Other folks have other faves but that is mine and has worked well for me. It's about as hands off as un-automated ones go (you still need to mist and fan though).

Read up on FAE... super important. Try to find a bit cleaner place for it and keep it up off the ground. Closet is no good... small rooms no good. You want a room with normal air circulation.

Finding your sweetspot as far as fruiting chamber + environment will take a little effort and paying attention, but once you find it, you'll be all set.

Get the fruiting chamber ironed out first and foremost.

Good luck

I'm on my first grow ever using PF cakes and Golden Teachers myself. I'm using the shotgun fruiting chamber and had pins at day 7 and lots at 8.

Something that you should keep in mind when reading about time-frames of growing is a saying I learned from a biologist.

"Given the proper nutritional intake, and holding constant all variables such as humidity, ambient lighting, barometric pressure, and temperature. The organism will do what it damn well pleases!"

Life does what it wants, so a couple days late is nothing. I wouldn't sweat it too much, just relax and let life do its thing.

Sometimes if your cakes are super dried out it really slows down the pinning and mushroom fruiting process. You might try doing a 12-24 hour dunk on a few of them and see if that does the trick. I generally use a unopened bottle of spring water for that purpose.

(edit: I use perlite which holds up very well to long dunking times but if you use vermiculite instead you may not want to dunk for that long because vermiculite can sometimes crumble easier if you soak it for too much time.)

I've got two pins coming out of a cake from past Thursday. I'll wait and see what happens till Tuesday and then redunk them all.
One thing I suspect is that the print I started with was already 6 months old. I've read that in such cases extra rehydration is needed but without knowing how to achieve that on this stage except by spraying inside the fruiting chamber. Any way the fruiting chamber has started to saturate so I suppose I can't spray any more and I've stopped for a while.
Hope I dont mess up, it's 7 weeks from when I began this

Also you should have kept the myc in the jars until it starts to slightly constrict/shrink and you see primordia forming(ie little dots)

That would help drastically

But i completley agree with Mustleid's quote. Even if you shot up the same jars, with the same syringe OF SPORES, and everything about the jars is completley the same, completley different parts (i forgot the proper word, strains maybe???) of the mycelium would colonize in the different jars. Every spore when using multispore syringes is different and carrie different genetics

Each of your jars may very well contain fairly different genetics, if you started with spores

let me calm your nerves my friend!

I too had slow colonization, i believe it was due to the supplier sending old/less viable spores it took about 3-3& 1/2 weeks to even see visible signs of germination and a little over 2 months for my golden teachers to fully colonize the jar and only 1 out of 4 jars even germinated (no contams in the jars that were duds after uncapping i even took a wiff and it smelled the same as the day i nocced them) and it took about 2-3 weeks in the fruiting chamber to start seeing any pins(yes i let it consolidate in the jars for a week before birthing the cakes). now just the other day i saw 3 pins!! came back today and there are more pins than i can count, still moving slowly but also steady..... so keep at it budd make sure your doing enough fan and mist you will soon be able to enjoy the fruits of your labor

also maybe look into buying some petri dishes and making a spore print or two that way you will have a new bunch of what should be close 100% viable spores to use.

ONE OTHER thing with the spraying/rehydration i found that spraying every other time i fan is adequate, so if i fan 8 times a day i will spray 4 time and i run a air pump with an air stone in a cup of water at night when im sleeping to keep fresh air and humidity up other wise the cake would go 8 full hours it no fresh air

hope this helps
good day & cheers

-2j

Also, you should look into monotubs after a bit of time with the pf tek.

A well designed Monotub will give insaannnee yields, and you can experiment with many variables of it

Monotubs are prolly the most effective, imo, at producing mushies, especially when considering the effort put in (the fresh air automatically and passively circulate through in a decent tub, with no effort

Any luck yet?

Inquiring shroomsters want to know

Luck??? Never on me. Got only a big shroom. Decided to dunk and roll all 8 cakes and I did. Also put an aquarium air stone sending fresh air in the fruiting chamber 24 hour for better FAE. Right now I'm quite upset cause I've tried to make a print with the big mushroom, left tht cap between two pieces of alluminum foil, folded the edges and put a small wheight on top, left for over 30 hours and opened the foil half an hour before. THERE WAS NO SPORE PRINT. I'm out of courage right now HOW CAN I MAKE A BUNCH OF MUSHROOMS IF I CANT MAKE A SPORE PRINT??????????? There is no smiley for my dissapointment. Anyway I left the cap in the foil for an other 24 hour period and I'm going to watch some movie to forget. "Good will hunting" is what I'm planning to watch. See ya when I've got better news (I hope).

Sorry for my bad mood a few days earlier but I was anxious about messing up after the hard and fearfull of contamination colonization part.
Last days I've noticed that four out of eight cakes are so full of shroomies I could'nt imagine and they all are beauties too. At last after two months I see my first grow, soooo gooood.
What shoud I do with the cakes that dont have any mushrooms growing on them? Actually we are talking about two B+ cakes and two Goldenteachers near the oposite edges of the fruiting container (strange isn't it?). I think of dunking them and putting them in the fridge for a whole night (although that will be there third dunk and roll) or instead just leaving them in the fruiting container for some more days or a week and a half. I also think that the micelium is colonizing the layer of vermiculite which is a second one after the second previous dunk. Should I or not roll the cakes from now on?
Thanks for your replies guys.

I´m no expert here, but I would just wait a couple more days.



This is actually a good news, isn´t it?

Let us just be a little more patient with our Mushrooms In fact, I have just entered a fruiting stage as well, and my cakes also seem to be a little delayed...)

My advice would be to acquire some faster growing strains, I had trouble with b+ as well I think it grows very sluggishly IMO.

My best luck with speed and yield has been with South american strains such as Brazil....Brazil also gives a nice visual/profound type trip and a nice dark spore print.
also some other strains such as burmese yangoon, lipa yai, Koh Sumai, Cambodia, Z strain and Gulf Coast are all pretty fast too compared to B+.

thats your problem right there, temperature, you want to have your incubation temperature set to a minimum of 27 and no higher than 29 c, any colder and they will take a lot longer to grow (what happened to you) and much hotter and you could kill your mycelium.

so you might want to make an incubation chamber, which is 2 big plastic totes inside each other, the bottom one filled with water, with an aquarium heater in the bottom one, aquarium heaters allow you to set your temperature exactly to the degree, so set it at 27c / 80f (the mycelium makes its own heat when growing so this is high enough).... using a incubation chamber you should be able to fully colonise your cakes in 2 weeks ish, rather than 5!

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hrm, thats not the strain (B+ in your case), they are all cubensis, they say a cube is a cube is a cube...

Your problem is more likely to be that your B+ spores / syringe where older or stored badly, and / or your temperature was out (usually to low) .... old / badly stored spores will make the resulting mycelium grow considerably slower and low temps stunt growth.