hi ashley here and today i'm going to show you how to make a spawn bag
first you need to pick out which type of grain you'll be using i am going to do an experiment
today and we'll be using milo millet in whole oat to see which grain will colonize the fastest
our first grain is milo milo is a very heavy grain and has a lot of inoculation points then we have
millet millet is even smaller than milo and also has a lot of inoculation points and whole oat is
the lightest grain of them all and is the biggest grain but also absorbs a lot of water so it's
really good for the mushrooms as well next you'll need to measure how much grain you will need for
each bag i will be using a three pound spawn bag and i found that this cup that i'm using is
perfect if i measure three cups of each grain it's exactly a three pound bag the thing is is milo
is a really heavy grain and whole oat is a really light grain so if you try to actually measure out
the weight of them maya will have less grain and be more dense and whole oat will have more grain
and be less dense so if you use the cup measure method then you're pretty much guaranteed to get
like a perfect measurement now you need to add water and a little bit of gypsum fill the bucket
so the water is completely covering the grain and that there's enough room to soak up as much water
as possible then you will need to add one teaspoon of gypsum per bucket gypsum helps add some
minerals for the museum to digest as well as stops the grain from sticking and clumping together
i'm sorry i did not get a video of myself adding gypsum to the buckets i forgot so make sure to
add at least one teaspoon of gypsum per bucket and then mix it up and then close the lid off
and let it soak for 24 hours now we need to drain the grain and then fill our spa bag
now it's time to sterilize the bag i will be using a six quart pressure cooker that i bought
from walmart for twenty dollars these things are super cheap but they have some downfolds that i'm
going to talk about later the first thing that you'll need to do is find an appropriate spacer
for the bottom of the pressure cooker lots of things can work for spacers they just need to
be able to withstand the heat and have enough room for airflow then add a few cups of water you want
to make sure that you add enough water so that it doesn't evaporate by the end of your sterilization
now fold the bag carefully on the creases with the filter facing out and place the bag long way so it
doesn't catch on the release pin in the cooker then place a metal topper on the bag to prevent
the bag from sticking to the release valve on the top of the pressure cooker if you don't do this
it can cause a bomb and your pressure will cooker will blow up then turn your stove on low heat and
sterilize for two hours from what i mentioned earlier these pressure cookers have two main
problems first i can only sterilize one bag at a time and second they heat up extremely fast and
don't have a pressure gauge so it's very easy to overheat and melt the bag after two hours turn off
the stove and let the pressure cooker cool down then remove the spawn bag and place in a sterile
container and then let it cool down for 24 hours if you inoculate your spine when they're too hot
it will kill the spore now you can start the process over with your remaining bags
after all the hassle i ended up upgrading my pressure cooker to the presto 23 quart pressure
canner or cooker this thing is awesome and alleviates all of the problems that that one has
one if you notice this one can only do one bag this one can do many i can even have a second
layer also this pressure cooker comes with a sealer for the top already which is super nice
and the top of the actual pressure cooker has a gauge so now we can set the gauge to 15 psi
for two hours and we're ready to go so simple and easy after 24 hours our spawn bags are cooled down
and now it's time to inoculate them first you will need to make sure that you are in a sterile
environment like in front of laminar flow or in a room that has no airflow then sterilize everything
with alcohol and now it's time to prepare our spam bag in this case we're using a colonized
spawn bag to inoculate our new sterile spawn bag break up the colonized grain and mix really well
then start to prepare your spawn bags open up your spawn bags and prepare them for inoculation
then cut a small hole at the top of your spawn bag
and for this experiment i will be dividing the spawn bag equally between the three spawn bags but
this spawn bag could actually probably inoculate anywhere from five to seven bags if not more
then seal the bags i use a vacuum sealer but do not vacuum out the air just seal the bag
then mix up the bags really well and reset them
finally set your bags in a dark warm place for about 10 to 30 days and watch them fully colonize
okay so i am two days into my experiment to see which uh grain will colonize the fi the fastest
uh first i have whole oat which is doing pretty good but i think that this will be the slowest
then i have a milo which the milo seems like it's just exploding steering really well and
then i have millet and um millet is a really small grain and i thought that it would just
colonize faster because it has more inoculation points which if you kind of look at the back uh
between the milo and the millet this looks like it's doing better but this looks and feels this
is a lot heavier too that it's just like just colonizing so much faster so after two days um
it's hard to tell really who's winning uh but they all look fantastic
milo
and millet
millet smells terrible i really dislike the smell of millet
so yeah see how it goes okay so we are five days into my spawn bag experiment
and so far i think that milo is definitely doing the best i wanted to show you guys
so we have whole oat and i have actually made a line on the back of all these to kind of show you
how fast they're growing and i made this line about 12 hours hours ago right before i went
to sleep um and here it kind of shows you the progression so like hold is definitely going
but i only have like a half an inch here where look at milo milo's almost like a full inch
it's just really progressing well and then millet i mean just barely is crossing this line so in the
end i mean milo holt seem like they're colonizing faster but millet is definitely not far behind
so in the end i think i'm going to end up using a combination
of all three of these or possibly just whole oat and milo uh are more maybe milo and just
mill it so we'll see how things go looking super nice show you guys really pretty
milo
and you know it
you can kind of see that let's need some work
you