Hello all!
So, this crop of mushrooms has not been going well. If you'll recall, I had two cakes of Golden Teachers, and two cakes of Koh Samui Super Strain. The KSSS strain has never done well for me. The yields have always been less than what I've hoped for. The fruits are always small, and they grow in like little mutants, with the stems being fatter than the caps.
That blue-green tint to the cake is bruising from excess water. I've always had difficulty striking a balance between too much water and not enough water. I've actually had situations where the cakes bruise from being too wet, but the caps crack from being too dry. It's crazy. This is the 2nd flush from these cakes. Less than a 1/4 oz between the two flushes, which is just sub-standard as all hell.
What's worse is the GT cakes, which had way healthier looking mycelium, have not fruited at all until last night. I'm not sure what's happening in my greenhouse that's causing these super low yields. If I had to venture a guess, I'd say there's a fresh air exchange issue (FAE,) so I've begun just leaving one side of the greenhouse door unzipped to allow constant oxygen in throughout the day, in addition to opening it up fully and fanning the cakes 4-5 times per day. The pins you see below just finally sprouted last night on only one cake. Still nothing on the other.
Over in my colonization chamber, I had two more cakes of each strain colonizing. The two new KSSS cakes were contaminated, and had to be destroyed (which is super frustrating because KSSS is supposed to be ultra resistant to contamination, so I don't think I'll be growing that strain again.) But the two new GT cakes look healthy, and got put into the fruiting chamber on Sunday.
So... that's what's going on. I have 4 new syringes of spores on order (ordered a mystery pack to keep the cost down. I'll let you all know what I get when they arrive.)