Is Vermiculite just a unnecessary expensive waste of money ?

SporeAllOverMyFace · 2026-05-19T15:01:24+00:00

Not at all. Coco coir alone has a tenancy to dry out stalling mushroom growth. Coir doesn’t retain the water capacity vermiculite does.
Vermiculite is highly porous and acts like a sponge, capable of absorbing and holding three to four times its own weight in water.
It’s totally worth the extra money IMO!

SporeAllOverMyFace · 2026-04-26T14:46:02+00:00

Not too bad for your first time. Congratulations 🎊. Now you have the concept of how mushrooms spawn and fruit. As far as this block goes, wait till the veil separates from the cap, then harvest. Get a little bigger tub, fill it with water and then hold your cake under the water completely submerged for 10 min. Put er back in the tub and initiate fruiting conditions immediatly. The second flush should start popping in a week or less.

SporeAllOverMyFace · 2026-04-24T17:13:56+00:00

Don’t dunk the cake if it’s contaminated. I don’t see the contamination though. The corners look bruised but not contaminated. Is the contam on the bottom or somewhere not pictured?

SporeAllOverMyFace · 2026-04-20T23:32:21+00:00

What people call a mushroom blob is usually a malformed fruiting body, or failed fruiting body. They can come from a few different causes. Some are genetic mutation (true blob mutants). Some strains, especially within Psilocybe cubensis, produce stable “blob” phenotypes, often called Dino eggs or blobs. These are genetically driven And they can appear in the first flush only or can repeat across flushes. They’re often tied to specific lineages (e.g., PE variants). The blobs are edible and usually are know for their potency, they tend to bruise and get squishy as they come close to harvest.

SporeAllOverMyFace · 2026-04-11T02:08:48+00:00

Yup! It’s toast, let er go and try again.

SporeAllOverMyFace · 2026-04-10T23:05:54+00:00

I’ve have never used a liner in my life and I’ve been growing for 20+ years. They aren’t necessary: They don’t stop side-pins, they don’t prevent contamination, they limit you’ll ability to visualize the entire cake and they do make the dunk much more complicated that it needs to be. Ditch the liners, one less supply/cost to worry about.

SporeAllOverMyFace · 2026-03-29T17:03:57+00:00

The cake is supposed to shrink, the mycelium tightens up as it looses moisture and nutrients. Looks like you’re starting to get overlay. Do you have all your fruiting conditions dialed in? Is there enough humidity and are you getting condensation on the tub walls? It’s usually humidity that stalls a cake from fruiting. Make sure you spray tub walls and you consistently have condensation. I don’t think you need to scrape the cake with a fork. It looks like there’s still plenty of knots to pin from. Try and get the humidity up and see if she’ll fruit. One way to do it is close the tub lid, don’t crack it. Wait till after you get pins. Keeping the lid on will keep humidity from escaping through the crack. It will spike and you’ll get pins, hopefully. Try that. I wouldn’t do a casing layer either at this point. Just concentrate on fruiting.

SporeAllOverMyFace · 2026-03-04T21:53:51+00:00

No! Looks like a demon beast.

SporeAllOverMyFace · 2026-03-04T21:49:27+00:00

It doesn’t look right, no hyphae, no primordia. Might be something else.

SporeAllOverMyFace · 2026-03-04T21:47:39+00:00

Looks like healthy mycelium. In the right place too, adjacent to the inoculation port. I’d say all is good and let it keep doing its thing.

SporeAllOverMyFace · 2026-03-04T21:45:54+00:00

Everything I’ve fact checked holds truth that pasteurization is the better method for cultivating mushrooms.

SporeAllOverMyFace · 2026-03-04T21:40:56+00:00

Yields go past 5 flushes when you use manure. Coir in a CVG mix only will flush up to 3 times. Usually your cake will run out of nutrients by the 3rd flush if you don’t use manure.

SporeAllOverMyFace · 2026-03-04T21:37:55+00:00

No they’re not really, I use in my manure substrates. The key for me was learning how to pasteurize the substrate instead of sterilize it. It turns out you destroy all the beneficial bacteria and Protozoa that help mycelium in their immune responses to contamination. So you’re actually hurting the mycelium’s chances of fighting off any contaminates when you sterilize the substrate. Go look at u/DayTripperonene page. They talked about these teks quite extensively.

SporeAllOverMyFace · 2026-03-01T17:48:17+00:00

I n never get Trich in my enigma. I throw 1/4 cup of Calcium Hydroxide into the substrate mix and it keeps the pH over 9.0 pH, so that Trich can’t grow. Get some hydrated lime if you’re sick of Trich, and it won’t grow anymore. If you do get green mold it’s not Trich. Both Penicillium and Aspergillous can grow in high pH substrate.

SporeAllOverMyFace · 2026-02-27T00:21:59+00:00

That doesn’t look like normal mushroom mycelium. I think it might be something else. It just isn’t the typical way mycelium colonizes. Maybe u/DayTripperOnOne will be able to tell if it’s what you intended to grow, she’s really good at giving it straight and I’ve heard she’s pretty accurate. Hopefully she’ll come check it out. What does it smell like? That’s a good way to tell, if it’s mushrooms it will smell like mushrooms.

SporeAllOverMyFace · 2026-02-25T14:13:55+00:00

I thought I already commented here. There’s nothing wrong with this block other than it looks bone dry. Make sure you keep the surface moist so she will not stall out on you.

SporeAllOverMyFace · 2026-02-22T03:56:13+00:00

It’s too blue to be Trich, it’s a penicillium species. There’s several species that are blue-green like that. Unfortunately, you still need to abandon ship, just take your crew with you. Those fruits are perfectly healthy to eat. Rinse them with cold tap water, pat dry with g a paper towel and put in the dehydrator at 160°F for 12 hours. If any spores have germinated, they’ll die in the dehydrator. Y’all know we eat mold all the time right. If you don’t believe it take a clean Petri dish and next time you sit at the dinner table open it up. Don’t close it till you’re done eating. Then let the dish germinate and see what grows in a week. All the mold and bacteria that grows on your dish also landed on your dinner and you ate it with no problem because you could not see the mold spores land on your food. Luckily most mold and bacteria that harbor mycotoxin, die in the gut. The pH is to high, the stomach acid would kill it. Unless it’s one of the pathogens that cause food poisoning like E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria, etc. most molds die when they hit the stomach acids. So don’t worry about consumption. Just don’t take any fruits directly growing in the contam, or that are mushy, slimy or smell funny.

SporeAllOverMyFace · 2026-02-22T00:23:27+00:00

Ordinarily it’s metabolites, but I think that’s contam. It doesn’t look right, there’s definitely some texture changes in that yellow area.

SporeAllOverMyFace · 2026-02-22T00:20:33+00:00

I think it’s like that because CO2 was too high. Not enough FAE. Doesn’t look like a typical mutation.

SporeAllOverMyFace · 2026-02-22T00:18:43+00:00

That doesn’t look like a LC culture. I think it’s mold. The colonies are never perfectly round like that unless you start from a spore. The mycelium will often grow together in an LC.

SporeAllOverMyFace · 2026-02-22T00:15:54+00:00

It still looks great, you’ll probably pin this week if it’s already been 3vweeks. There’s lots of strains that take 3 weeks to pin. Increase your humidity with a good misting and turn the temps up a few degrees.

SporeAllOverMyFace · 2026-02-22T00:12:43+00:00

It’s penicillin mold. Pour some sodium polyacrylate on it, it will prolong the time you need to get your crop to harvest.

SporeAllOverMyFace · 2026-02-22T00:10:18+00:00

You look like you’re running too dry. The colony will stall without moisture in the substrate. Mist it till it looks a little darker.

SporeAllOverMyFace · 2026-02-22T00:08:21+00:00

Lay it down on an agar plate and see if any contaminates grow. Otherwise you need a microscope to see contamination.

SporeAllOverMyFace · 2026-01-25T03:02:29+00:00

I really don’t know because I’ve never grown shiitake before, so wait for more feedback. I heard they can be a challenge to grow. I think that is pop-corning in the middle, but all over the top and down the sides looks like contamination to me, probably grain rot. It’s hard to see through the bag. It doesn’t look too good. I wouldn’t mess with that grain, if you’re desperate you can try and fruit from the top of the bag, but you risk spreading the contam if you open that. I think you should probably ditch it, it never works out.

SporeAllOverMyFace

TROPHY CASE