In continuation of my last post — my adventures of cloning an oyster mushroom and turning trash into food, I am starting to see pins form.

I took the small colonized Tupperware of cardboard and ended up adding it to a Hoka Shoe Box with more cardboard and the original substrate block.

After several days in the shoebox under my sink — the shoe box was getting a little funky and the ink on the outside of the box was concerning me so I made sure there were no rotting left over fruit bodies. I picked the small ones off the substrate block and tried to remove as much old tissue from the original clone. 

These guys had to go. With contamination concerns in mind — I decided to take it a step further and sanitized an old storage bin with some AF3 sanitization wipes and hot water. I also decided to break up the original substrate amongst some more cardboard. 

I then decided to break out the plastic freezer bag of coffee grounds I had been saving in my freezer. You can microwave them to pasteurize them. I was collecting them from individual K-cups so I was storing them in the freezer to prevent any unwanted molds from forming. To defrost them, I just used hot tap water as I did with the cardboard rinse.

Almost overnight, I experienced an explosion in growth.

More growth:

Eventually, the entire tub was basically colonized so I decided to introduce fruiting conditions — Making sure to fan them a few times a day (fresh air exchange), dropping the temperature to around 66F, and using an LED with blue (triggers fruiting) and indirect sunlight.

At this point — I was questioning if I was even still growing anything useful. After about 7 days of new exposure to light I put the tub back under the sink for a night and decided to check back the next day.

Pins are forming!