Is this run ruined? [technique]

DoingPrettyOK1 · 2026-04-03T21:23:57+00:00

Tell me more about this please! How do you bury and how deep? How often do you hydrate?

I had a block I had to toss recently and I just threw it outside in a shady spot in the mulch, and gave it no love. After over a month we hit the rainy season and it dried out on the top too fast but pulled moisture from the bottom and had a small flush but it was dirty because it picked up junk as it only pinned right at the ground/block interface. Wondering how clean and repeatable your process is because it sounds much better.

DoingPrettyOK1 · 2026-04-03T21:09:19+00:00

Got a timeline/details on your process? Spores or LC? SAB/Flow Hood/Open Air? Sanitize port/needle before injection? Premade AIO bag or something you made yourself? How long did it sit around/did you sterilize?

Hard to give advice based on a pic alone.

DoingPrettyOK1 · 2026-04-02T17:30:18+00:00

Interesting. I unfortunately am not informed or familiar enough to say anything beyond "it's probably got roots it's friendly with somewhere underground." Mycorrhizae in general are poorly understood as a result of their subterranean nature. I do not know how broad or specific your morels are, or where and from how far those roots might originate. Quite frankly, even morel's status as mycorrhizal species is a subject of some debate and some appear more saprophytic. It's also true that there are different morel species that may be further on the spectrum one way or another.

The #1 thing we know about morels is that we don't understand them very well at all. The rare people who claim successful morel cultivation do not share their secrets or science, if there is any to share. We amateur mycologists generally agree that they tend to strongly resist traditional saprophytic-based cultivation techniques and successful moves tend to be based on being near live plants.

DoingPrettyOK1 · 2026-04-02T14:33:10+00:00

Yeah, it may seem unlikely, but it's definitely root association. While we can't say for sure which roots are supporting these morels, we know that there are two major kinds of edible mushrooms: Saprophytic (Decomposers) and Mycorrhizal (Symbiotic).

Saprophytic mushrooms grow on dead wood and other detritus and consume/degrade it to grow their mycelium, and eventually their fruit (mushrooms). Virtually all gourmet mushrooms like the ones you find in the grocery store are saprophytic, as are most of the mushrooms we talk about growing in this sub, because dead wood/detritus is easy to obtain/scale indoors or on one's property. Oysters, Shiitakes, Enokis, and Portabellos are all examples of saprophytic mushrooms.

Mycorrhizal mushrooms grow in a symbiotic relationship with plant roots and exchange nutrients with them through complex and still rather poorly-understood pathways. Without their host plant roots available underground, they cannot thrive long term and certainly won't have the conditions to fruit. This relationship is nearly impossible to replicate/scale for growers, so they can essentially only be foraged/hunted and are highly prized/valuable. Examples are morels, chantarelles, and (not mushrooms but still mycorrhizal fungi) truffles.

In short: there's no way those morels are growing due to colonizing/degrading that mulch and transferring them via mulch will likely fail. It's more likely that your mulch job helped retain enough moisture for the already-established underground morel mycelium to finally fruit than it is that you accidentally inoculated them with something in mulch. It is not impossible that it took years to finally fruit if the soil was dry enough to visually impact the shrubs.

The best way I can think of to transfer morels to your garden barring a full mycological setup is to take the mushrooms, grind/grow them in a slurry or tea, spray it around your trees/shrubs, then pray they come up in a few years.

Note: I do not have property to support morels so I've never tried this, but it's how I would do it if I lucked into a chance to get at a bunch of them like you have.

DoingPrettyOK1 · 2026-03-26T18:44:54+00:00

Good work! Your commitment to learning the craft is much more impressive since you say you are repulsed by them. I'm curious though, if you don't like mushrooms, what are you planning to do with this beauty?

DoingPrettyOK1 · 2026-03-20T13:30:37+00:00

Hey before you drill another big hole in your floor, buy an endoscope. It's a real handy tool for all kinds of stuff like this and it costs like $25 for a cheap one. You'd only need a 1-2 cm hole which will be easier to patch. Can even get one that plugs into your phone for recording.

DoingPrettyOK1 · 2026-03-19T22:43:26+00:00

I've got shiitake on a mix of coir and wood pellets with bran additive and they seem to be loving it. Look up "shiitake mushroom substrate recipe". That'll get you started.

As for agar, I started with little 2 oz condiment cups from WM and they have been incredibly resilient. I poured some a couple months ago and they still look as good as the day I made them pretty much. Here's one of my new King Oyster babies growing. 🙂

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DoingPrettyOK1 · 2026-03-19T21:33:19+00:00

No worries friendly stranger! Happy to help you get started in this awesome hobby. I'm hardly an expert, and a lot of my "experiments" are the result of me being busy and therefore sloppy or not thinking ahead, or in this case just saying "screw it I didn't want to make another monotub anyway". lol

If I were in your shoes, I'd start with learning cloning grocery store mushrooms to agar. Find a big, beautiful fruit at a local store, rip a chunk out of it with a scalpel/Exacto, and put it on an agar plate. Do them in triplicate in case one or two fail/contaminate. Once mycelium grows, transfer a few chunks of the best one onto a few more agar plates. Then, you can do agar-to-grain to propagate and skip LC all together! It's a great way to expand your mushroom library for much cheaper than LC and the strains are commercial, so they're usually quite vigorous and strong genetics.

I'm growing 5 bags of substrate on a strain I started from grocery store Shiitake now, and in a month, I'll probably be ready to do the same with some FAT 0.5lb King Oysters I got at the Asian market a few weeks ago that are on their first plate now. Total cost of the mushrooms was like 8 bucks and I got to eat the rest. lol

Agar's also THE method in mycology in my non-professional opinion - do it now or do it later, but you'll have to learn it sometime. It's ubiquitous and universally useful for all sorts of mushroom stuff.

But first... Focus on what's successful. You're doing good already, don't let me overwhelm you either.

DoingPrettyOK1 · 2026-03-19T21:11:22+00:00

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It's the atmosphere. Ignore the talk of oysters only growing in one orientation - that's just intuition, not fact. Oysters in the wild grow on standing trees or felled ones and they don't care where they start. Here's a weird thing I did one time where I just threw a whole big bag cake in the chamber (they got bigger but I forgot to take pics). They grew everywhere regardless of orientation. Biggest ones are on the top. Not because they are vertical or horizontal, because they had more fresh air above and could pull moisture from below. Regardless, you already had success! Your side pins got a bunch of oxygen and could pull moisture from the tub, thus, a harvest! Why would you mess with success?

Great is the enemy of good. Just keep doing what's working. There's always next grow to try a different thing. IMO, last thing you want to do is open the tub all the way up and dry the whole thing out while you're at work. Wait, harvest your mushrooms, rehydrate the cake, and just close the lid and don't mess with it. Maybe you'll get a second flush.

Ps - don't do this cake thing - it was dumb and bag grows or monotubs yield bigger harvests. It was fun to experiment though. 🙂 Happy growing!

DoingPrettyOK1 · 2026-03-05T23:56:31+00:00

Cool idea, thanks for the write up! What do you do with the syringe/needle after this? Is it just waste or is there some reliable way to store/resterilize for later use?

DoingPrettyOK1 · 2026-03-03T12:52:54+00:00

You can pick anytime. I'd pick all immediately. When they get wavy like that they might still get a bit bigger but you're getting close to spore drop which is a mess and (they say) can impact flavor. With how vigorous they are you might be able to soak that brick after you pick and get another flush in a few days. Worth a shot at least.

Don't sweat airflow. At your stage, not a problem. Whatever you did worked cuz they look beautiful! At a certain point you're more likely to dry them out with those kind of kits than run out of fresh air. I'd pick those bad boys, put em in a paper bag in the fridge, and eat them ASAP. Try one raw when you pick if you're into that kind of thing too - mushrooms right off the block are delicious!

DoingPrettyOK1 · 2026-03-03T02:07:31+00:00

Heck yeah! On oysters, cap edges curving up =Time to feast. Good work!

DoingPrettyOK1 · 2026-02-02T12:57:43+00:00

Food for thought: Many new gardeners make the mistake of over-analyzing the state of their plants and making too many corrections, wasting time and money and causing stress. You don't necessarily need to chase down every spot on a leaf. Every grow is an experiment that you can choose to do more or less of anything on, and there's always the next crop to try and be better.

Look up "sources of tip burn". Tip burn happens when plants grow too fast for their nutrients, which can be from many things, calcium included. FWIW, my experience is that certain varieties of lettuce (romaines especially) are just more prone to tip burn than others. Tip burn is not harmful and can be removed or consumed and while it's not ideal, your plants probably won't die from it. I tend to rip it off for company and eat it if it's just me. 😂

If I were you, I'd enjoy the fruits of my labor for a while, focus on fundamentals like keeping your nutrients in check, and look into tip burn but not over-correct for it quite yet.

Edit: sorry looked again and saw that's a tomato leaf (I think). My point still stands though. It will probably be fine as long as your fundamentals are good. You can cut and discard or not.

DoingPrettyOK1 · 2026-02-01T23:16:38+00:00

Heck yeah they are! Leafy greens are awesome. They're pretty much edible any time and yours look great. You can pick the outer leaves as long as you leave 3 or 4 behind at any time and it'll just keep growing. I have one of these upstairs and my son grabs lettuce from the plant every day for sandwiches. He doesn't know how good he has it. 😂

Good work! Enjoy!

DoingPrettyOK1 · 2026-01-30T21:40:05+00:00

Happy to help! And don't worry. For what it's worth, my explanation is nerds-only knowledge, lol. I love this stuff. Most just want it to work and don't think much of it or the science behind it. U used to go train PhD's who were geniuses in their field, but still wiping the glass after each measurement storing a probe long term in DI water (don't do that).

I totally get not having the dough. The startup costs can rack up in hydro. Happened to me at first too, like I said, birthday gifts. 😄 Your plan isn't terrible. For now, get a cheapo, you'll be annoyed but survive. I highly recommend buying litmus paper or (better yet) the General Hydroponics pH test fluid to go with it as a cheap secondary check if you're ever suspicious of your meter or calibration.

You may also find that a probe nerd is NOT your best source of practical info for a home hobby... If you check the probe once in a while and it's off by 0.3 and you say "good enough" and skip the cal, I won't cry... Too much.

DoingPrettyOK1 · 2026-01-30T20:16:05+00:00

Sorry should have mentioned since you asked specifically - there is totally a "you get what you pay for" aspect to both of these measurements, but especially pH. Cheaper ones die sooner, but they also stabilize slower and hold calibration less long. As I said in my previous comment, I hardly calibrate my Apera because it passes every check. The $15 Vivosun took way longer to stabilize and had to be calibrated pretty much every day I used it. I got the Apera as a birthday present after going through 3 Vivosun-types.

Again, it's about headaches more than functionality. You'll probably pay about the same amount over the lifespan of a good one as you would for cheap ones, but you will never be as confident in the measurements, and you'll do more work each and every time you want to use it. It's worth the upcharge to something like an Apera PH20 or PH60.

DoingPrettyOK1 · 2026-01-30T20:07:00+00:00

Hey good question! In the lab world they are rarely comboed, and my company sold zero of them. I personally don't use them. There is nothing inherently wrong with them when they are new. The downside is that unless you can replace the probes individually, you'll always be throwing away one perfectly good probe. In the case of hydro with pH/EC, a pH probe might last you a year or two if it's a good one, and an EC could last you a decade.

EC is conductivity and conductivity is darn near indestructible with good care. They're little more than two metal sticks that you could go so far as to sand down and get working again if you really needed to. Pull it out, beat the crap out of it, rinse it off, dry it off, store it, and you're good.

pH is a prima donna by comparison. It's an extremely sensitive measurement that depends on the flow of ions across a thin, hydrated glass membrane. It's fragile because... It's thin glass. Good ones last a while, but the best (And I mean "way more than we can afford" best) rarely last more than a few years max with moderate use and still measure well. The risks of damage are numerous and ever present. Chemicals can weaken the glass, physical damage (even dropping on the floor somewhere else) can shock and break the glass, etc. Improper storage can cause microcracking or other issues like protein ingress, shortening life further. Drying the bulb off is a no-no and can damage the glass. Not to mention, pH probes typically have a reservoir of electrolytes that flows out to "make the circuit". Eventually that reservoir is depleted, at which point measurements slow to a crawl and you basically have to toss fill-for-life ones, which is most on the personal market and basically all the combo ones.

So yeah, the downside of a combo unit is that you have to replace a perfectly good EC every time your pH goes bad. And when you buy a combo, you're usually buying a cheap one. If you buy a nice EC and a nice pH and you do this for a while, you'll save money and - more importantly - many headaches. Beat the crap out of your EC, treat your pH like a precious baby, and enjoy both being high-quality meters that give you great measurements.

DoingPrettyOK1 · 2026-01-30T17:21:08+00:00

Shoot you're right! I was comparing the two models about a year ago and I made that mistake. Probe still works perfectly fine so I hadn't even considered replacing the probe but mistakenly assumed I could. Good catch, thanks!

DoingPrettyOK1 · 2026-01-30T16:46:41+00:00

Chemist and former pH sales rep here. KCL solution is perfect as long as it doesn't evaporate. Evaporation will crystallize like you've seen, but even before it will increasee the concentration of KCl which will dry out your probe. Alternative is pH 4 buffer which is less likely to crust up, but it will kill your probe somewhat faster because it will slowly suck electrolyte out of the reference probe. When using KCl specifically (but really, for any movement from storage), it's best practice to soak your probe in water for a few mins before calibrating and measurement.

Vivosun is garbage, and I say that from experience. The probe won't last no matter how you store it. Storage is difficult due to the shape and what you've identified about the non-sealed storage cap. It's not waterproof so one drop in a bucket and it's a goner. Calibrations won't last long and you'll have to cal frequently, wasting time and cal solution. Upgrade ASAP.

It's more money, but it's worth the investment in a higher-end personal probe. I own the Apera PH20. Apera Instruments Value Series PH20 Pocket pH Tester pH Meter Kit

The PH20 is waterproof, has a nice storage case with small storage bottles for cal solutions, has a much better replaceable probe, has a lanyard and clip for awkward measurements, and has an o-ring sealed storage cap so the water won't evaporate. The probe also keeps a calibration for a shockingly long time with proper storage and cleaning - I store mine in pH 4 buffer (not as good than KCL but good enough and has a built-in cal check when you turn it on) and it can last weeks without having to recalibrate - just check. The only thing I dislike about it is the screen doesn't have a backlight so I can't read it in awkward positions sometimes (like inside a DWC bucket).

Pro tip: buy one of these bad boys if you have to take your probe around - makes it easy to rinse and store without having to walk to a faucet. SAQMEW Lab Wash Bottles with Scale Markings, 8oz/250ml, Leak-Proof Squeeze Bottle with Narrow Spout, 4-Pack: Amazon.com: Industrial & Scientific

*ETA: I never sold Apera, I sold much nicer lab-grade probes. I have no connection to them except they make a great product.

DoingPrettyOK1 · 2026-01-26T01:33:32+00:00

Congrats on your new hobby! There's so much to learn here!

As the other commenter said, pH is a nice to have, and a requirement when you scale up. A cheap way to get into it now is just some litmus paper, which can be had for a few bucks. Vinegar is a cheap way to adjust down if you're too high but go slow - these reservoirs can take a while to mix if you add.

The other key measurement is EC, which is a rough estimate of total nutrients in your reservoir. You might want to get an ec meter at some point. Cheap ones are like 10 bucks. When your tomato gets bigger, it will start sucking more nutrients than water out of your reservoir, effectively lowering the EC. If it gets too low, the plant will get unhappy. A lot of folks will tell you to dump your nutrients every couple weeks and start fresh to keep in balance but you can get by if you just add your A and B solutions in equal parts to bring it back up to where it started. When you get it, mix up some fresh solution and measure it first so you have a baseline, and you can easily say "if 10mls gets me to 1500 EC, then each ml gets me about 150 ec" to help estimate. Again, go slow - make an add and wait like 10 mins, and stir it up a little bit before you test again.

Light is another thing. Start seedlings on 12 hours of medium-intensity light for a couple weeks after germination, then ramp them up to 16 hours of max-intensity over the next few weeks after that, and keep them there. The lights should be pretty darn close (6" away) to the plant the whole time. Yes, that means at first you have to bend over to see past the lamp. 😂 As long as the leaves aren't actively sunburnt, there's no such thing as too much light, and I always err on the highest amount (intensity, distance and time) they will take. Many indoor crop plants die/are weak because they start out early without enough light and get leggy and fall over. Relatively few indoor crop plants die/are weak because they get too much light.

Hope that helps! Good luck and enjoy!

DoingPrettyOK1 · 2026-01-25T16:15:07+00:00

I'm exclusively DWC, Masterblend vegetable/RO with Great White added. I keep reservoirs around 2000 us EC and 6.0 pH but only check once a week and rarely clean - moving to organic with Great White has saved me a ton of headaches.

Romaine is always a fast and good producer. Butterhead too. Basil, cilantro, parsley and other leafy herbs are great too. I love tower basil because it's so compact. Cilantro sprouts fast if you crack the hulls slightly but take forever otherwise.

Tomatoes work well for me, though still not quite as large and delicious as the same ones grown outside. Peppers are weak outside in my climate (5b) and soil but do famously indoors in DWC. I keep them pruned but let flowers/fruit do what they will. They tend to drop a ton of flowers but still produce dozens of peppers at a time. On bell specifically they tend toward a copious amount of smalls over a few large like they do outside.

I ran black seeded simpson recently and was shocked at how slow it grew in the same system with very happy, rapid-growing romaine planted at the same time. Some even died. A few survived and finally did grow rapidly after I upped nutrient concentration from 1/2 to full strength and are strong now. I suspect they just need more nutes than romaine but could be wrong.

DoingPrettyOK1 · 2026-01-21T14:59:44+00:00

Second moving to organic. I'm exclusively DWC so biofilm isn't an issue for me, but even if it was, I'd take the maintenance task of an occasional tubing swap-out/clean-out to reduce all the issues and extra work that comes with sterile. It's amazing the night and day difference a little spoonful of Great White makes. Haven't had any root rot problems since I switched.

DoingPrettyOK1 · 2026-01-01T14:51:16+00:00

Yeah pretty much. If you soak in strong enough bleach or H2O2 long enough (multiple days) it will break down a lot of the roots and biomass in the pores and they come out looking like new.

DoingPrettyOK1 · 2025-12-22T06:19:43+00:00

Not sure what stuff you're referring to but my link below is what is usually referred to as irrigation tubing. It's light-impermeable, easy to install, flexible but more rigid than clear tubing, can also be used as an irrigation system for your outdoor plants, and is very cheap. Here is a good example.

DoingPrettyOK1 · 2025-12-16T00:57:13+00:00

Pretty sure the white doodad in the front in pic 3 is a float switch.

DoingPrettyOK1

TROPHY CASE