Not getting any mushrooms

Hello all,

I just started growing mushrooms at home because i came across a glow in the dark mushroom kit.
it contained panellus stipticus spores and i grew them in the contained kit following the instructions.

however after i had removed the cake from the airtight container i have been unable to get a single shroom from the mycelium and it is slowly starting to turn brown...
what am i doing wrong here?

Pic of the current state of the shrooms, they are growing on a coffee/vermeticule substrate

they got contaminated. did you sterilize the substrate and innoculate in front of a laminar flow HEPA filter?

Andrew Brock wrote:they got contaminated. did you sterilize the substrate and innoculate in front of a laminar flow HEPA filter?

well they were fully colonised before i opened them up to the air, they were crispy white. i sterilized the substrate and inocculation needle. (not all the brown stuff is in the mycelium some is just water from the coffee grounds)

but if they are contaminated, is it possible to just re grow in a fresh pot?

are you saying you sterilized them yourself or purchased them fully colonized? it sounds like you did it yourself. correct me if I misunderstood. contamination usually occurs if innoculating without a hepa filter or without sufficient sterilization. best practice is 18 hours at near boiling.

The kit came with 2 pre-sterilized "cakes" in an airtight plastic pot. i inocculated these per instructions with a sterile needle (i worked sterile, i have lab experience). these cakes were fully colonized and crispy white when i took them out of their container for the first flush.
i put them on a layer of vermiticule with plenty of water, and let them sit in the light and aired them per instuctions (2x day). after a while they started to turn brown as if they were just dieing off. to save them i made new growing substrate with vermiticule and coffee grounds wich i sterilized in an oven. (250C for 1 hour)

when i put the browning cakes in there they started growing again and colonized the entire substrate again, and were looking healthy white. but same thing happend, they just sit there and start to turn brown again after a couple of weeks (see pics)

Jaap Turkenburg wrote:The kit came with 2 pre-sterilized "cakes" in an airtight plastic pot. i inocculated these per instructions with a sterile needle (i worked sterile, i have lab experience). these cakes were fully colonized and crispy white when i took them out of their container for the first flush.
i put them on a layer of vermiticule with plenty of water, and let them sit in the light and aired them per instuctions (2x day). after a while they started to turn brown as if they were just dieing off. to save them i made new growing substrate with vermiticule and coffee grounds wich i sterilized in an oven. (250C for 1 hour)

when i put the browning cakes in there they started growing again and colonized the entire substrate again, and were looking healthy white. but same thing happend, they just sit there and start to turn brown again after a couple of weeks (see pics)

coffee can be hard to sterilize because it is pretty fine and can compact. not sure what went wrong the first time but sounds like the second time you could have potentially contaminated. it's impossible to know for sure. even commercial farms have some contamination sometimes

Ok yeah,

So any tips to regrow from this batch? thnx for the tips btw!

you might try using a woodchip based substrate instead of the coffee grounds/vermiculite (or just add sterile woodchips to what you already have going).
Instead of a glass container for the substrate you might look into using plastic bags with fruiting holes punched in them, that way you don't have to do anything extra to get the mycelium to fruit.
Other issues could be; pH is off, too much or not enough moisture at the right times, light intensity (either too strong or too weak, both can cause issues with fruiting).
If I can find anything else about this strain, I'll post those findings here for you.

Redhawk

addendum: if that strain was doing well in an anaerobic environment and is dying in an aerobic environment, perhaps that particular strain needs less O2.