The first time I pasteurised a load of substrate, I was left with some pretty unpleasant looking pillow cases once they had been filled with sawdust and straw and stuck in hot water for two hours! Clearly, others had gone before me and would know the secrets of how to revive them, so I contacted my mushroom guru and asked how he cleaned them. His answer, elegant in its simplicity was: “I don’t!”
It turns out he had evolved past using pillow cases and now used nylon brewers’ bags which are much easier to clean and reuse. This left me in somewhat of a quandary, but I am nothing if not stubborn! I dumped the pillowcases into a trug of clean water and sloshed them around to remove as much particulate material as I could, then turned them inside out and hung them on the line. Once any remaining particles dried off they were easy to remove by shaking the pillowcases. After that it was just a case of running them through the washing machine with a load of washing and they came out ready to go again, if not looking totally pristine.
The Second Flush
After the first flush of mushrooms from the containers, I removed the remains of the previous flush, re-applied the tape and then returned the buckets to the fruiting chamber and continued spraying with water regularly. The mycelium was still growing rampantly through the buckets and I held out great hopes.
After a couple of weeks there was no response so I tried the water soak overnight, but still there was no response and after a couple of weeks more I came up with a new idea which I am still investigating. But there was no second flush from that set of containers.
Lessons Learned
As always with this stuff there are lessons to be learned and from comments on my posts and my own research, I believe the lack of fruiting and other mushroom issues can be put down to –
1. not enough ventilation in the fruiting chamber allowing an accumulation of carbon dioxide, and/or
2. lack of humidity in the fruiting chamber, the spraying I was doing just wasn’t enough.
Another suggestion which came up (thanks Bart Acres) was rather than leave a space at the top of the bucket, fill the buckets up to the top leaving no air gap. This will encourage more and better flushes.
I have a couple of ideas that I am currently working on which I hope will remedy the above issues and in doing so provide more better-quality mushrooms. I’ll report on those as the results come in. Stay tuned!
The rest of the story:
