Proper Sterilization

A few thoughts concerning proper sterilization. Because of how aggressively the oyster mushrooms had been growing, I thought that I could cut down the sterilization time from 2 hours 30 minutes to 2 hours to ~ 1 hour as the bags would still grow.

However, I realized (through Grok/GPT) - and some independent thought - that even if the bags were seemingly being colonized adequately, the rate of growth could be greatly impeded by under sterilization.

This would be because even though the mycelium would "win" every time it encountered mold or bacteria in the substrate, it would need to expend energy suppressing the growth of its competitors. This could conceivable result in a 20 - 30 % reduction in yields which may explain why my yields are so sub-optimal. A 10-lb bag which is ~3.5lbs dry and 6.5 lbs wet, would yield approximately ~5 lbs of oyster mushroom assuming BE of ~150%. However, I have been maybe harvesting much closer to 60% of that.

Therefore, I am going to make a few important changes. First I am going to start sterilizing for the full 2 to 2.5 hours. This is honestly not even overkill but just sticking to the generally recommended sterilization time. I actually suspect that this may not be the full reason for reduced yields, but one of them.

Then secondly, I am going to to use ~6-lb bags instead of 10-lb bags. This is important because it would allow for more thorough sterilization. The 10-lb bags are so large that I have an incentive to squeeze them tightly into the sterilizers almost to the point that the steam does not evenly surround the bags and likely reduces consistency of steam penetration. By using the 6-lb bags, the surface area of the bags will be more evenly exposed to the steam. That coupled with the smaller volume of the bags will produce much better sterilization.

So between the longer and fuller sterilization time (maybe even bumping up to three hours?) and the smaller bags and more thorough sterilization, this should boost yields substantially. I will be very surprised if these changes do not result in better yields.

A few other additional benefits are that the smaller bags are easier to handle and that the smaller bags usually get most of the fruiting out within the first two flushes as opposed to a larger 10-lb bag which may produce three to four flushes given adequate time. This makes sense to me as the larger volume makes it more difficult for the mycelium to push all of its resources out at once.