is there any way using the PF cake method i can do semi-bulk production?
i don't have the means to do others
should i just make a crazy amount of casings with 10-12 cakes in them or what?
any one have any ideas
You could crumble the colonized cakes and spawn pasteurized straw with them.
Other than that, the PF Tek is not exactly meant to be a bulk tek, but a mini scale cultivation tek.
I recently had a pf cake which had colonized to 50% and then stalled. Ever the experimenter, I put the cake into my glovebox and split the colonized half between two pc'd grain jars I had hanging around waiting to be innoculated. The grain jars colonized completely in around 5 days!!! The grains are cased in bread pans and in the fc right now. Got access to horse manure? I have some pasturized h-poo and cow poo cooling in the bathtub right now. I saw Anno suggest pasturized straw as well. Maybe some more details of your limitations would be helpful.
i have a small one bedroom apartment and i really can't have racks of manure hanging out
i can try the straw idea but i really don't know how to go about doing that
i have heard rye berries work well though
help?
This looks like a simple straw tek: http://www.shroomery.org/8392/Straw-as-a-Substrate . I hope this helps you. In obtaining straw, I will share one of my mistakes. I bought hay from a pet supply store thinking it would be just as good as straw. Apparently hay is LOADED with molds and endospores and difficult to use in a substrate where straw is more easily cleaned up by pasturization. I had some contamination problems with dactylium and really created some problems for myself. I'm still trying the straw as a bulking agent in cow poo but I used a bleach dunk idea (1 1/4 tbsp per gal of water submerged hay in solution overnight) to see if the contams could be cleaned up and the nutritional value left intact. Guess I'll know in a few days. If it doesn't work.......anyone got a rabbit that needs some hay?
I have read about people buying straw from Michael's craft stores. It comes in little bales and costs $3-$4. I use laundry bags for delicates (Woolite brand) to pasturize with. Available @ Wal-Mart.
CerpinTaxt,
You could also get aluminum 2quart trays or bread tins and add a few cakes to them and case 60/40 verm/coir.
Sumwhat like you see here >>> http://www.fungifun.org/English/Casing
not sure what your FC is i.e Martha,TiT,etc.
as Anno said pf tek is not for bulk.
i will test my luck with the straw teks
i will make some huge casings till then
they produce some good amounts of shrooms if i load em with cakes
thanks for the help