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. 

King Blue is certainly a popular strain but goddamn is it unstable! Genetically speaking the way Andrew makes crosses doesn't promote for any DNA sequenced traits, just strange and cool mutations by chance. This has been apparent in the majority of the strains we have experimented with from his collection and now he has a warning on his site that all of his strains are in early stage development and wont offer much consistency...luckily Blotch and King Blue can be solved a few different ways. I was talking to another farm last week who was more or less creating continual air flow in their environment creating a steady level of humidification and evaporation. This is a great environment for blotch and one thing I tried to get across to him among several other growers is the use of a modulation system (ebb and flow with fans turning on and off controlled by co2 meters/termostates) is the need for the complete fogging of a room and the fast exhaust of co2 rich air...

So ive personally seen lions knocked slightly smaller logs than shiitake but interestingnly enough the first time i was ever around a bunch of Maine cultivators, I believe North Spore was there, we did a lions totem knock and if i rememeber correctly the dude whose property the gathering was on, had lions for years popping off of that block! So it certainly does work, i can say that much. Id probably go for dowel knocking over totem stacking though...

Man, wells are rough!!! A lot of folks have issues will well water as well as reservoirs of water, especially if those containers of water storage are being used to humidify grow rooms. Its best to filter the air and the water and then go the treatment route. Glad you are getting it all figured out and that video is a really good one!!! Thanks for sharing! -E

For our Blues, PO-CNS is the Jam, but for other oysters we have them all listed at www.capnstem.com in the store section!

While leading edge is always ideal, its not always possible unless you are doing daily production so what we try to do is refrigerate cultures at the halfway point when necessary for scheduling but wrapping the plates in parafilm and sealing in a small sterile filter patch bag. This slows growth a bit more than just the parafilm and it gives us a little bit of time for expansion onto GM's. If you are working with cultures that are filling up the whole dish its best to cut close to the edge but not all the way to avoid any growth thats gotten too close to the parafilm. IF colonizing dishes are left in front of a flow hood its a bit less of a worry, but if stores outside of laminar flow, contamination can be present. Hope that helps