After setting up our modified mushroom monotub for our monotub tek walkthrough, we decided to put it to use. Considering we haven't done much experimenting with our new strain of oyster mushrooms - the Black Kings - we thought: might as well try to grow some in our new monotub with our Boomr Bag bulk substrate. We weren't sure how the Black Kings would do in a manure substrate. Spoiler alert: things turned out pretty cool.
Our modified monotub with a fan for fresh air exchange, a cycle timer, a humidifier, and humidistat.
After cleaning and sterilizing our tub with alcohol and replacing the polyfill, we added three Boomr Bags and one bag of Black King grain spawn using layers and then mixed the spawn and substrate together. We cased our tub with coco coir. This was on a Friday. The following Monday we returned to find a fully colonized monotub.
Our monotub fully colonized with Black King mushroom mycelium.
At this point we set up our upgrades as seen in our tek walkthrough. We set up our humidifier and humidistat to keep relative humidity between 75-90%. Our fan and cycle timer was set to one minute intervals. The fan in our monotub is set up backwards to blow fresh air in through its filter. We then cased our tub with coco coir again.
Black King pins, AKA baby mushrooms.
Flushes of different sized Black King mushrooms.
After a week or so, our Black Kings started peeking up through our casing, and a few days later we had full sized mushrooms.
Flushes of Black Kings in the fog.
The largest of the flushes at the time.
For the sake of experiment, we decided to let the mushrooms continue to grow over the weekend. They flourished, and though they were a bit overgrown, we were impressed by the size of the harvest - over 4.5lbs of mushrooms!
Notice how the tops of the Black Kings have folded upward (become concave), this is a sign that they are past the prime harvesting stage.
4.70lbs of delicious Black King mushrooms! Even though they are less aesthetically pleasing at this stage, they are still tasty.
Unfortunately, as many others have experienced, shortly after harvesting our monotub we were in the wake of COVID-19. Despite neglecting the monotub completely for over a week - we came back to check on it and found that the Black Kings had prevailed! Yet another large flush had grown (though overgrown, once again, and a bit dry).
Our second flush of Black King mushrooms with no further casing, spawn, or substrate.
We're not sure what we will cultivate next in the monotub, perhaps some Almond Agaricus or button mushrooms.
One of our customers, Hannah, was able to cultivate Chestnut mushrooms in her monotub using our Boomr Bag. See her photos below! If you've cultivated edible culinary mushrooms in your monotub using our spawn and/or substrate, let us know and send us photos!
Growing your own mushrooms at home in a monotub is an easy and cost effective way to get a large yield. Being able to control the environment of the mushrooms means they grow more quickly than they would in outdoor beds and are not dependent on weather.
Please remember to be kind to one another during these times, keep busy with hobbies if you have to, or be as unproductive as necessary! Take care of yourself, we will get through this together :)
-North Spore
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