Kiez Pilz: Back To Basics

Our first batch of buckets with Kiez Pilz was a partial success, in that the buckets colonized and we saw some fruits, but we seemed to get very low Biological Efficiency (so far only a couple kilogram of mushrooms) and many of the mushroom shapes were a bit strange.

This could be because it was a new strain cloned from the wild, or something about our fruiting chamber, or bucket tek or the combination.

With so many variables, I’ve decided to simplify things a bit and do some more basic tests.

I’ve been making 250 × 500mm standard filter bags, sterilized in the pressure cooker, and inoculated with spawn.

I’m trying different ratios of coffee and sawdust for comparison (50-50, 10-90, and 20-80), all inoculated with 0.5L of spawn.

I’m hoping this will give a baseline so we can get a sense for what types of fruits our strains can produce with our substrate, and then from there work with the pasteurization and the buckets with more awareness.

We probably should have done some tests like this to begin with before scaling up — but you live and you learn.

Now that I know that strain can make such a big difference, when working with future strains, I imagine I might start with some tests like this before doing anything else.

I’m really curious to see what happens with these bags…

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I’m also going to do a bit of research to see what papers I can find about expected biological efficiency for oysters on sawdust + coffee, at different ratios, but I still imagine it will be useful to do the tests on our specific strains.

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two nice thing about bags as opposed to buckets (for testing), is

  1. more ‘transparency’ into whats happening

  2. watching mycelium grow is a source of daily joy

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