You never know about infection

[Kevin Hoover]

I’ve been experimenting growing mushrooms again this year with mixed results. 
 

The oyster mushrooms I started in jars on wheat were almost all infected.  I think I had 2 out of 14 that were not. 

The oyster mushrooms I started in grow bags with masters mix took a very long time to produce.  I had four out of eight that were infected.  The remaining four I got good flushes on.

I’ve inoculated 16 bags of lions mane on masters mix, eight at a time.  I didn’t get any initial infection (the lions mane grew incredibly fast, 14 day till fruiting on several bags). But I had secondary infection on several bags. Might be because I cut the top of the bags off instead of just cutting slits in the bag for the mushrooms to grow. I will do another run and just slit the bags to see if that cuts down on infection. Note:  I had them in a shotgun fruiting chamber and apparently didn’t give them enough fresh air.  It distorted the appearance, but certainly did not affect the taste.

I also did a run of chestnut mushrooms in masters mix but screwed it up. Instead of one pound of hardwood sawdust, one pound of soy hulls and three pounds of water per bag, I only added one pound of water. Cooked them, inoculated them and put them in the basement. That night it occurred to me what I did.  So the next day, I opened each bag, added two pounds of water, and resealed. I figured they would all get infected. But what did I have to lose.  
 

The bags looked like they were being overtaken by mycelium like they should be.  Then I went on vacation for three weeks. Got back today.  Noticed they were fruiting in the bags, so I cut the tops off.  Only one out of eight was infected. Go figure. 
 

Saw one video where a grower was cutting the soy hull content of his substrate from fifty to thirty percent to decrease infection.  I might try that.