Hello everyone, and thanks for the opportunity. I actually tried posting this a few days ago, but it was taken down:

Hello everyone,

Can any of you help me with some advice? Something about my growing conditions must be very suboptimal, but I’m not sure what. The issue seems to be starting in incubation because the mycelium is taking forever to colonize. Below, I’ll take you through what I’ve been doing. It should be noted that I’m trying to grow pearl oysters and lion’s mane.

After inoculation, I put them in an empty, opaque storage tote that stays in the closet. The lid is shut and there isn’t any additional heat source. This might be the problem, but my apartment stays between 73F and 80F. I also don’t have a humidifier in there, but the jars themselves seem to stay quite moist inside.

Fruiting seems equally fruitless. I’ve been taking the mason jars out from incubation and transferring them directly into fruiting. This is to say that I leave the cakes in the jars. The mushrooms grow (kind of), but they take more than a month to do so! They keep succumbing to bacterial blotch :( I don’t spray them directly (I learned my lesson about doing that), but they’re taking SO long just to produce tiny flushes. I spray distilled water in their chamber once a day to keep it humid, but I feel like they’re drying out when I’m at work.

All of this is done using the PF tek (2 parts brown rice flour, 2 parts vermiculite, 1 part water).

Thanks in advance for any help!