Mushroom caps closing up – Grow Mushrooms on Coffee

This topic has 2 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 8 years, 9 months ago by Zoran Rukavina.

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April 29, 2017 at 10:23 am #2159

Gareth Williams
Participant

Hi,

We’ve grown several bags of mushrooms with no problem. We’ve now got a clear plastic box with holes drilled in and perlite in the bottom. There’s a monitor in there and both the temperature and humidity have been good. However, with the latest crop, rather than flattening out, the mushroom caps have curled up in on themselves – kind of resemble a trumpet. To start with, we drilled more holes because the stems were really long so we assumed it was a CO2 issue, but that hasn’t solved it.

Any ideas as to what it could be?

Thanks,

Gareth

May 2, 2017 at 12:18 pm #2166

Adam
Keymaster

Hi Gareth,

this is something that we’ve seen once or twice before, and to be honest I don’t have a clear explanation as to why it happens. My thoughts are that it’s a mutation which occurs during the colonisation period and shows up during fruiting.

When we’ve seen it, it tends to be an isolated bag and the rest from the same batch all have grown fine. Is this the case for you? Was it just one bag or a number of them?

best wishes,

Adam

July 28, 2017 at 1:22 pm #2254

Zoran Rukavina
Participant

Gareth & Adam, did your mushrooms looked similar to this? All these, including tiny fruits in mason jars are P. Ulmarius. I bought a mushroom grow kit and after the 1st flush, which looked normal, all fruits looked like this. At that time I kept the kit enclosed in a shotgun terrarium. After having 3 flushes, I inoculated 5 bags with crumbed mycelium from used kit. Each bag contains cca 2kg substrate @ field capacity. Substrate is made out of 80% lime soaked sugar cane bagase and 20% pasteurised coffee waste (@ 75C), with small addition of garden gypsum. Mason jars are part of one of my experiments. They contain 100% coffee waste, several weeks old, which was not pasteurised, nor sterilised. I inoculated these with stem cut offs from the second flush from the original kit. I contacted the supplier yesterday. After seeing these pictures, they are of the opinion that there was the CO2 build up created by large quantity of living organisms. I have the cut off hole on one side 10×10 cm, covered by the dense gauze. The supplier suggested to me to unzip at least one side. This, of course, caused RH to drop under 80%. I am moisturising the greenhouse with one 22 W ultrasonic mister and an aquarium pump with bubler immeresed in a separate container.
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