Hi all, I’m also looking for a review on the way we are making buckets for cultivating oysters in them. Seems simple enough but would be nice to get a second pair of eyes and a recommendation for a hole layout.
Here is what we are currently doing:
We are collecting 10L buckets (which were originally peanut butter buckets from a local Sudanese restaurant called Sahara). We drill 6mm holes in the bucket. We use 4 columns, with two holes in each column (also tried a few other buckets with variations of this).
We fill the buckets with inoculated substrate almost to the brim.
Then we’ve tried two methods:
- Putting micropore tape over the holes while its colonizing
- Putting one bucket with holes into another bucket without holes around it.
Here are some photos.
Here you can see one of the 10L buckets with 5mm holes in 12 columns, which we let sit in another bucket. This photo is after 3 weeks of colonizing. You can see the mycelium is growing out of the holes (is that a bad sign?)
I know its good practice not to open the lid and check in on it, but we wanted to see what was going on in there. Here’s a photo with the lid open. Looks like mycelium, but still not very close to fully colonized after 3 weeks of sitting. But also its cold in the basement so maybe it will just take a while?
Here’s a photo of a smaller bucket we did as a sanity check. And a couple 1L bags on top as another sanity check. They all appear close to fully colonized.
Do you think bringing them to the fruiting chamber and removing the micro pore tape will be enough of a trigger to get them to fruit?
We haven’t tried to fruit any of the buckets yet, any feedback appreciated.