I’ve tried to scale down a single fruiting medium to 100-200g, and it keeps failing time after time: at best, I get small needle-sized fruiting bodies (hypsizygus tessulatus, post picture) or primordia and then small malformed underdeveloped fruiting bodies (pleurotus eryngii, inline picture). Then development just stops. Medium is enriched (sugar) alder chips, contamination starts developing long after growth is stalled. Is it really scale problem? What’s the reasonably smallest batch size?
I’m not a grower myself but fungi need oxygen and produce CO2 iirc. So if you put them into glass jars with small openings on top, it might just saturate with CO2, which of course then kills the fungus. Just spitballing though.
PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca 13 hours ago
The long fruiting bodies that just abort are because it’s starving for oxygen. Remove them from the container and put them in a box that’s kept humid (like a plastic container). Look up “shotgun fruiting chamber”. Or you can crumble your entire cake into a bin with some coco coir (contamination resistant) and the mycelium will spread and quickly start forming hyphal nodes and then fruit properly.
You got this!
alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 13 hours ago
But… but… they are in that humid plastic box! And the whole point of this experiment was to see whether I can run 100g media batches really; I had huge fruitings in these boxes just filled with autoclaved wooden stuff. The needle-like fruits do look like they are starved for oxygen; the horizontal ones started growing that way because they were loosely covered with foil (thus no light but full ventilation) - after I removed it I’ve got normal straight ones, but they still did not develop any gills or anything, just stopped. I suspect it’s something else. Almost like it just ran out of energy too soon, didn’t even have enough to retreat the mycelium - it’s one solid and seemingly inert block now (it’s been like that for some weeks; I have older attempts stuck like that for good, chunks of glistening white mycelium that doesn’t even rot)
dgdft@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
The glass jars are definitely your issue. You need something more breathable.
You asked for advice and got it. Take it or leave it.
the_artic_one@piefed.social 12 hours ago
Your jars probably over-colonized because there wasn’t enough surface area getting proper ventilation/evaporation to trigger primordia formation so it just kept colonizing. It looks like pins didn’t start until the mycelium grew over the top of the jar and by then all the food was already used up.
Topfruiting jars isn’t a great method even for terrestrial mushrooms, I imagine it’s worse for oysters. Consider using small oven bags instead, that way you can cut the sides to trigger fruiting earlier and across a wider surface.
PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca 12 hours ago
I’ve grown oyster mushrooms from the grocery store on used coffee grounds and I mixed things with my hands in open air. Take the cakes out of the jar. Put them in your fruiting chamber (or plastic bag draped over it). The mycelium is a little plant animal and it breathes oxygen. You’ve stuffed it in an airless room with a tiny little hole. The whole body needs to be able to breathe. Not just the elbow.