So much goddamn turkey! Anyone else's family attempt complicated routes to get mushrooms from you, prior to the holidays? Like secret drop spots, attempts at mailing fresh mushrooms, maybe i can just fruit a block at home in time!? Fun stuff on repeat every year! 

...aside from the concrete walls and old wooden agaricus racks they spray down between flushes...the reason why this works is ambient humidity cannot carry blotch like direct humidification systems. So the goal of a smaller and newer fruiting systems is to have fast and less frequent air exchanges to allow for as much down time as possible in the fruiting rooms. Another way to look at fruting kings is how Far West Fungi goes about it. They wait for pins to form inside of a clear and fully colonized bag and then they strip the entire bag (commonly considered counterintuitive to fruiting kings) but alas, their kings are always happy and healthy and free of blotch because humidification water cannot be trapped in the top fruiting plenum and turn into a blotch colony. The trick to this is timing. We will delve into a deep dive for you shortly!!!

Hell yea ,we can jam into a King Episode for sure. Somethings to keep in mind for kings, blotch will be your constant enemy as you expand and fruiting rooms become more dense, but there are some solutions. I see a lot of folks running constant air exchange these days in fruiting rooms and failing with kings, this is a direct effect of too much air exchange with humidity either struggling to keep up or remaining at a constant. Kings will always love cooler temps (50-60F) but in terms of a fruiting room design your goal must be to keep a co2 meter modulating negative pressure protocol. This means a powerful enough fan to bring the co2 in your room down quickly enough to allow for plenty of calm air in your fruiting room. This ebb and flow will most certainly benefit your kings. For example, the most fool proof kings I've encountered were at KSS down in Kennet Square. They have extremely over air handlers and conditioners that do not pop on much and absolutely no humidification systems...

So we preform monthly and weekly tests for different filters, weekly for flowhoods and monthly for overpressure filters: Pressure tests and plate tests. Id say if a fair amount of dust collected on the filter back or face its worth replacing, I know the HEPA's we use can be relaced but some make it extremely difficult to do so. Usually you would pull the front grill off and remove the filter through the face and replace and re gasket the seals. If its not too dusty try and run it and test cfm as well as plate tests to determine viability!

Have you messed around with pho-tray tech? basically laying an XLS-A bag on its side to simulate a tray?

Sick!!!

Nine times out of 10 that sponge factor comes from your CO2 being too high...The aim is to keep fruiting co2 modulating between 600-900ppm using a co2 meter to run an exhaust fan.

The best place to put your co2 meter is going to be under or close to your exhaust duct that way when the last of the co2 concentrated air leaves the room through that exit duct the co2 meter will kick off the exhaust fan. Thanks so much for the support! 

Ah yes! the ultimate in dosing technology! Using a fertilizer injector can work quite well in terms of adding a dose of treatment in line but peristaltic pumps are the name of the game. Ill gather up some info and we will assemble a deep dive on this topic with exact equipment and such!

...This allows a room to act like a lung and a wave of humdification and evaporation can be achieved to help promote mushroom growth and prevent bacteria from proliferating. If you couple this with treatment of peroxide or bleach as well as a cycling of strains you can find a balance in almost eliminating blotch from specific targeted species. 

For our Cap N Stem substrate customers we still suggest a rotation of blues in particular, this theoretically restricts a bacterial colony from attacking a particular phenotype and has been know to really help with stopping blotch in its tracks. 

We would love to get some DNA sequencing done to look into the reasons some of these Hot and Heavy Blue strains are more prone to blotch and i suspect it has something to do with the mechanism that promotes those beeeeeeefy caps!

In short, yes, alternating strains will always help and has been proven to work for a lot of cultivators.