My first oyster pins appeared today and I’ve been thinking about humidity control. I have this big tub I made my still air box from and I’ve been wondering about using it to hold the two fruiting bags I have. I was concerned that maybe the X slices wouldn’t get enough fresh air if I covered them, but then I’ve been worried about keeping up the humidity. Now that I’m seeing some pinning though I’m feeling like the humidity is more important? I live in Colorado, which isn’t quite desert but the humidity in the house typically drops below 40% during the day (it’s high right now because we’ve been getting some rain showers).
For reference, my SAB is a typical DIY, made from a large tub with just a couple hand-sized holes cut out. There’s not a lot of airflow in that room anyway, and I’m not sure how much fresh air the mushrooms need once they start growing. Of course I realize they won’t be able to stay in the SAB too long, I know they’ll outgrow the available space, but I’m just thinking for the next few days, or however long it takes them to really fill in.
So, any thought on this? Should I close them up in the box or just leave them in open air?
Not many pics, but basically I got a compressed block of chopped straw from the farm supply place which is used for bedding (I guess for rabbits or chicks?). The pasteurization process was just soaking it in a lime bath for a day and then letting that dry for a couple hours. I put the bags together on a table outside under the tree, wiping down the surfaces with alcohol. I have a small amount of contamination in each of the bags, but the mycelium was growing nice and strong before the mold really got started so it’s never been able to grow beyond about a 1" circle so I just ignored it.
Overall it’s been quite a process. The spawn I got from ebay was way smaller than expected, I guess 10g isn’t as much as I thought, so I’ve spent a lot of time learning about prepping grain jars and then growing out my spawn on that before having enough to transfer to the fruiting bags. For these I split one quart jar between two bags. I wasn’t sure if it would be enough, but apparently it was plenty. I still have two more jars of blue and one jar of pink in the basement, plus I have the other two fruiting bags that I haven’t cut holes in yet. I’m taking everything real slowly because once I get a harvest from these first bags I still have to figure out dehydrating and storing the extra mushrooms to use later, plus I need to prep some more grain jars that I can use to get a new batch of mycelium started.