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Y Me no Shrooms?

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Philosopher

Rising Star
Alright its been 2 weeks since I put my cakes in the chamber and I have no sign of pins yet... I tried to induce pinning by using a light, and Ive been fanning and misting daily. The mycelium is also fluffy and white, so it should be healthy.

The strain is Great White Monster
 
2 recommendations...

- 1/4" holes 2" apart on all 6 sides of the chamber.... perlite must be as damp as possible

- mist and fan as much as possible. You didn't say how many times a day, but the more the better. Water evaporation from the surface of the cake is THE BIGGEST pinning trigger
 
Thanks i didnt know that about evaporation causing pinning. Ya i dunked for 12 hrs. Also there is some weird bumps on one of my cakes. They used to be just white mycelium bumps now they look black.
 

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Okay my 2 cents so far would be to go crazy with the mister. The PF tek downplays moisture in my opinion. From your photos the cakes seem a little dry and this might be leading to parts of the mycelium dying off at the edge of the cakes as shown in your picture and possibly giving a place for contamination to take hold. Remove these parts with a clean blade and then I would get those cakes pretty much dripping with moisture, it does nothing but benefit them in my experience.

Regarding the moisture in the chamber in general, the walls of the chamber should be pretty fogged up with droplets forming and sometimes running down. It will only encourage them to fruit more.
 
I had a large tray that was kicking off large white coral like mycelial structures that you show in pic 1 of post #6. Turned out brown as you show in the following pics, but some HUGE specimens came up from different spots 4-5 days later with careful humidity control and mist/evap cycling.

I don't know the PF tek stuff or the shotgun chamber tuning thing, I go monotubs or trays. I could be totally off base in your situation. Good luck!!
 
I would recommend getting a fish tank air pump (I got a 2000cc one at Walmart for around $10) and leave that on in your chamber. Or you can do as Pup and Paulsage suggested and add way more holes, but you still may be required to fan. In fact, even with my air pump running, I tend to fan out my chamber once or twice, even three times a day.

Another thing I noted too is instead of perlite, I am using the expanded clay pellets that you can use in hydroponics setup and they have worked great so far. The added benefit to this is I believe you can sterilize them in the oven or PC, but have not tried that yet whereas with perlite, you'll need to change it out after every fruiting operation.

My cakes took about 8 days before I was seeing any signs of pinning. The chamber is fairly small, so FAE is no issue. The expanded clay pellets take up about 2 inches of the bottom, with distilled water with a little hydrogen peroxide added to help combat any waterborne contaminants.

I'll include a pic here soon to show my example that seems to have been working. Also one more thing, while 75* F is definitely recommended, it is not uncommon for my place to drop down to 60 - 65* F during the day while I am at work and from what I can tell, they seem fine with this temperature range. Also, you mentioned that your myc is white and fluffy? It is definitely supposed to be a whitish color, but fluffy isn't really ideal, you want thick, strand-y mycelium, where it kinda looks like some kind of creature that is "grabbing" your cake with little white fingers of goodness. Fluffy tends to not produce the best fruits from what I have read so far.

Keep us posted on how it goes! :)
 
The SGF chamber looks way too dry - some folk drape/stick a moist paper towel over the inner sides of the chamber - you want 90% to 100% humidity in there.

Yellow discoloration may be bacteria, and dark spots may be mold - both appear to be just on the surface of the cake - perhaps the cake itself is fine. A lightly sprayed dose of hydrogen peroxide may help.

Once, an experimental first grow explored both cakes and tubs in parallel. Tubs won.
 
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