1st Time Solo - Growing Great

[Haneru]

Inaugural Post Alert! (I can sense far-away cringing)

I helped a friend setup a few grows (3rd time's a charm?....Bonne Maman jam jars) in the spring of 2005 - resulting in some very fine Ecuadoran and Z-Strain shrooms, but had/have never done it solo. He gave me coffee-filter prints of each strain (and lots of tools - such as a huge All-American pressure cooker), and so I decided to see whether or not 4 years in the crisper drawer had completely killed these samples (rather than ordering fresh syringes, prints, etc). I also had a 6+ year old print I purchased from an Amsterdam head shop - labelled "Amazonian". I've watched the PF Tek done start-to-finish, after all...how hard could it be to do it myself? So with a desire to have a few grams of dried shrooms stashed away for my own enjoyment, I set about acquiring the various ingredients.

In the end, I had underestimated how uber-complicated the whole thing was gonna be, and (ignoring sensible advice obtained here and otherwhere) performed the preparation, sterilization and inoculation of 11 half-pint Bell jars while completely stoned. So...multiple mistakes were made (doh!) Also, I had only one available weekend (40+ hours) to get the process completed and cleaned up, etc. - therefore, time was a critical consideration.

I was unable to locate my bag of organic rice flour on Day -1 (it has since reappeared...right where I left it), and so I mixed up an extemporaneous concoction from the pantry. My substrate recipe was thus:

4 cups vermiculite
1 cup Bob's Red Mill Millet Flour
1/4 cup Spectrum Essentials Ground Flax Seed ("with Omega-3's and Lignans")
1/4 cup Kretschmer Toasted Wheat Germ
1/2 cup Earth's Best Organic Whole Grain / Multi-Grain Cereal (an "Iron-Fortified Blend of Oats, Spelt & Barley" baby cereal - perhaps now discontinued?)
*water was added until slight pooling/draining was evident from the evenly moistened material

Which was much too much of the stuff...but w/e - it's what I had to work with and - again - I was high.

Biggest "tragedy" was that some ingredient or other swelled within the jars inside the pc, and oozed to run over the side of each (I used aluminum foil 'caps'), glomming to the glass like plaster of paris. But I had NO time to resterilize and cool down a new set - so I went with these messy jars anyway. My spore prints I dusted into individual sterile shot glasses, and then drew each up with about 9 cc's of pc'd water into separate syringes. After clumsily inoculating each jar, I covered it with a square of pc'd aluminum foil, and then scoured all 11 to clean away the sticky, gluey gunk from wherever I could reach (ie - any glass not covered in foil). Then I sprayed each jar down with Lysol.

I know...I know....these should contam straightaway, right? The nutrient rich liquor had - of course - percolated upward through the protective verm barrier. My stoner sterile-field-maintenance skills had been a constant hazard. PLUS, I had not even allowed the spores to hydrate within a syringe overnight. Just used the needle tip to scrape the entire prints into a shot glass, then drew the very darkly-purple liquid up, and squirted it straight into 4 sites on each jar - one print <-> 9 cc <-> 3-4 jars...BAM!

So I was thinking it was gonna be a complete and total waste, and that - even if they didn't immediately slime over in blech, I would have to wait for weeks and weeks to see real activity. Certainly my bud and I had waited a long, LONG time for colonization the first time with these exact same strains. And probably 33% of those contam'd.

But...uh.....NO! In four days, 7 of the jars (all of the Z-strain and Ecuadoran jars) were 35 to 50% colonized. [Only one of the Amazonian jars has survived, thus far (day 8), showing only a dime-sized circle of myc]. But as of today, the Ecuadorian (my friend and I call them "Q" strain for reasons I've now forgotten) and the Z-Strain jars are thriving and vigourous, and I hope to birth them all in a week.
My question is: What ingredient(s) should I modify in order to eliminate the "boil over" during pc'ing?

I believe this riceless formula promotes aggressive colonization, albeit having been arrived at through some accidental, blundering incompetence of my own. I realize my problems with technique and such will improve with experience, but - unless it's just the Luck of the Devil, this 1st time out - the substrate mix occasioned by my ineptitude and Sheer Dumb Luck is looking like awesome sauce.

here's a link to the album of my project (so far)

Thank you for any input/feedback at all
Haneru

[Haneru]

Hey friendly 'topiates - re-reading my initial post (and noting the lack of responses), I see that I was prematurely self-congratulatory and probably overly optimistic about my weak-ass 1st time pf tek grow report - so let me add that I'm really in awe of the vast vat of information freely available from the experts on such sites as this. It makes a newb such as myself feel like an early pro (until my numerous incompetencies rise up to bite me in my too-big-for-my-britches butt).

Having said that (and hopfully less smarmily), I really would like to ask for any tricks to avoid "boil-over" during pressure sterilization, using the recipe I posted above. I have seen a thread here about using minute rice (only as an experiment, I believe) which successfully colonized after the rice ha been presoaked? And that gave rise to some troubling potency questions....

Will any fruit I'm lucky enough to see from this recipe lack psilocybin, since I used nothing "brown"? Could/should I presoak any of the constituents of my "Haneru Newb Mix #1" mix? Eliminate\mod any ingredients? I suspect the wheat germ would give off alot of gasses during pressure cooking - unless it wasn't substrate effluvia that was the issue, but maybe excessive water? And have the benefits/drawbacks of employing "pre-chelated" (ie - prepared and dehydrated/crystallized) grains such as those readily available in organic baby cereals been evaluated...are they known to burst outta the jar lids during pc?

I'll do this all again and do it more cleanly and according to published/validated teks (still using the beginner grade strains such as Z and EQ, however) - but I'm gonna fruit this first batch, as I am loathe to have wasted the prints I spent.

Also (again): I went straight from four-year-old prints to the jar, NOT pausing for spore rehydration delay. And both strains (aggressive colonizers though they're known to be) are beating prior performance and published expectations. It makes me ponder a few points of the pf tek, as it currently stands - just as it prompts me to continue abusing the Mycotopia search feature...

atm, I'm lookining for answers to my questions above, and for any LQ tek using blue agave nectar (which would seem to be geographically resonant with cubey's, at any rate).

Thanks for tolerating my inquiries, screeds and inadvertant bumps,

Haneru

[feralronin]

Since you have found your BRF follow the PF tek to the letter. You wont have issues of boil over because there will be no swelling of the jars, usually they slightly settle from the boiling water and pressure.

[Haneru]

Of course, you're completely right (and ty for the reply). I'll be sure to follow the pf tek to the letter for a few jars, next time up - even if only as some control for my own substrate mix, which I still hope to tweak against future jar boil-overs. But I suspect that the more congruent the tek is with the inside of a cow (and to the rainy plains beneath), the happier the resulting shrooms will be. Too, it seems to me that the accumulated shroom farmer lit I've seen only references the BRF arbitrarily and conventionally...like Gramma's recipe for standing rib roast that requires the ends to be cut off - not because this step aids the flavour, but because the old lady's oven was so small. Just because it's always done doesn't mean it's optimally done, right?

Not that I've seen cows chowing down on flax seed, wheat germ, and millet...but still...wouldn't they if they could?