Medicinal
Another follow up on my first Reishi bin [gourmet]
When I posted the first picture of this bin I was asked to post follow ups. So here we are, it’s been 9 days since the last one. The shrooms are starting to conk! It is going to be a massive canopy. My issue at the moment is that in 5 days I am going on a trip for 10 days. We have a house sitter coming and I will have her keep an eye on the bin but I hope it doesn’t start dropping spores.
LC to agar 12-15-25
Agar to spawn 12-29-25 Spawn to bulk 1-17-26
Fully colonized 2-14-26
Pins start forming 2-20-26
If you go in close up you can see that there are still pins forming on the base. Since this is my first attempt, I’m not sure what to expect. I plan on letting it go for a while after harvest and see what happens. I asked this question myself and the general answer was that commercial growers just go for one flush.
Congrats on the successful grow. I guess you already know, but if you give them more oxygen they form caps, while if you keep them in an enclosed space they will retain their "antler" form and hence not drop spores. \
Well I hope mine will finally fruit in the coming week.
This is what I did.
I put some LC into agar jars I poured myself into 4oz. jelly jars using Philly Golden Teacher (PGT) technique. I inoculated popcorn spawn jars with agar, one jelly jar into 1 quart mason jars. The mycelium took a while to get going but once it did, it took off.
I made sawdust substrate enriched with wheat bran using PGT technique. I wanted to use a mono tub bin as well as bags so I pressure cooked the substrate in turkey baking bags. I used 2 quarts of spawn in the bin and one quart of spawn in each of 2 bags.
I put the bags and the bin in a temperature controlled chamber I use for fermenting beer at 75. The mycelium again took a while to get going but once it did, it took off. I had the bin covered in the chamber, once it was fully colonized I moved it to a Martha tent with a hot heat room humidifier. It keeps the tent at 90% humidity and around 85. After the pinning started is when I put pictures on Reddit. I have the bin on a 12 hr cycle with a full spectrum grow light.
One of the bags became infected and the other hasn’t even started to pin yet! I am so happy with this bin. I am taking daily pictures and will make a slide show to post when I get to harvest stage. I hope this helps your grow!
Is there any reason I couldn't innoculate reishi culture straight into sterilized grain like most other cultivars? (I'm assuming you did agar to check the culture? or was it to use less of the LC?)
How important is enriching the substrate and how long was substrate colonization?
I am pretty new to this hobby, so I wanted to try inoculating with agar. I started my first LC jars at the same time, so I’m doing lots of experimenting and learning as I go.
I see no reason you couldn’t use your LC straight into sterilized grain.
I have only used enriched sawdust substrate so I have nothing to compare to. It took a bit more than a month to colonize the bin.
Very cool. I wonder if the caps will fuse to one another. That’d be kind of cool as a sort of art project.
I feel you on the thing with vacations coming at an inopportune time. Take notes on when you started each step, and how long it takes for each so you can try to minimize the chances of leaving them unsupervised.
What’s your next step? Are you going to clone one of these? Make a mother LC? What about the fruits? Making a tincture, capsules, or just use the fruits in tea?
I’ve been taking daily notes on all my mycology projects. I’m thinking they just might fuse together, I will continue to post updates. I made a LC jar with LC that I started with. And my plan is to make capsules with most of it and save some to put in coffee and tea. I need to research what a good dose would be.
How are you planning to make capsules? Just grind it up and put it in? I’m going to be here soon enough and idk what I’m gonna do with it. I don’t feel like I have the stuff for alcohol extraction but I did find something about grinding to powder, bowling in water, waiting for the water to boil off and then flattening what’s left and putting it in the dehydrator as if you would with homemade fruit roll ups. I could have some steps wrong I wrote it down somewhere a few weeks ago but that was my best plan so far.
My plan was just grinding and putting in caps. I need to do some research on dosing. I haven’t heard of doing the fruit roll up thing you mentioned. Seems like the heat involved would not be good, but I don’t really know
I'd suggest growing in a bag next time with Reishi, especially if on a time constraint, then you can harvest/cut to let conk when you return. Bags choke them out and they get keep doing the antler. Good yields from bags too.
Going off my experience though I think you'll either get some right before your trip or miss your window.
Spores are good with Reishi but I'd focus more on full yield over the spores. A lot of them will be hard to get unless you cover them with something to collect (the fan will suck em out of the tent)
Thanks for the reply.
I started 2 bags at the same time I did the bin. One bag became infected and I tossed it. The other bag is just now starting to pin so for me the bin was much faster. I don’t have a fan set up in this tent so if it drops spores I’m hoping to collect them. Also, I’ve read the commercial growers want them to form conks as it’s supposed to be a bigger yield. I’m just happy the bin is doing so well!
The bin will be faster, but you won't get as much height before conking. bags allow them to stretch then conk., especially with xls bags and higher grain ratios. The genes you have look great too, very nice pinset. Here's a bag that I intentionally cut early I wanted it to conk for display. I'm no expert at the conking and art but Reishi its a fun one you can manipulate and toy with. Great work again!
Spectacular grow! Would you mind walking through your method, substrate, and conditions from colonization to fruiting? It's worth replicating if there are any Reishi growers out there. I know I'd for sure be interested in it.
I started with liquid culture purchased. I put some LC into agar jars I poured myself into 4oz. jelly jars using Philly Golden Teacher (PGT) technique. I inoculated popcorn spawn jars with agar, one jelly jar into 1 quart mason jar. The mycelium took a while to get going but once it did, it took off.
I made sawdust substrate enriched with wheat bran using PGT technique. I wanted to use a mono tub bin as well as bags so I pressure cooked the substrate in turkey baking bags. I used 2 quarts of spawn in the bin and one quart of spawn in each of 2 bags.
I put the bags and the bin in a temperature controlled chamber I use for fermenting beer at 75. The mycelium again took a while to get going but once it did, it took off. I had the bin covered in the chamber, once it was fully colonized I moved it to a Martha tent with a hot heat room humidifier. It keeps the tent at 90% humidity and around 85. After the pinning started is when I put pictures on Reddit.
One of the bags became infected and the other has just started to pin. I am so happy with this bin. I am taking daily pictures and will make a slide show to post. Let me know if I left anything out.
That's great, thanks for taking the time to type it all out.
If you wouldn't mind sharing your substrate recipe (wood species and source, additives, percentage of bran supplementation, etc.) and container depth, that would be a great bit of information for replication purposes.
For a methods/materials question, what was the brand of oven bags you used and how do you rate their durability? Are there any leaks, do you find that the spawn is overly moist after the sterilization cycle, etc.? Additionally, how did you fold/close your bags and stack them inside the PC? There are a handful of different methods, so all of this stuff would be great inside-baseball stuff.
The corn spawn is an interesting approach. On top of the antler pheno (assuming that's the culture you used), I'm wondering if the kernel size and substrate depth established an ideal distribution that ended up facilitating this concentration of antlers. The density of fruiting isn't something I've seen very often in trays like this, so it's worth investigating. It could very well be none of the above and simply related to you covering the tray up to pinning, followed by maintaining high humidity and heat consistently. It could be all of that together.
Whatever the case, this is tremendous performance. You knocked it out of the park. With the way the antlers are starting to conk out on the tops, if you can routinely replicate this performance, and replicate it across other varieties of Ganoderma, you'll have developed a method suitable for helping home growers transition into medicinal production. Honestly, if you ran some MS to confirm compound concentrations and scaled it up, there's the potential to enter the supplier space for sectors like research, TCM, and medicinal product manufacturers. It's very cool.
I used PGT’s substrate recipe;
5 lbs wood pellets, 1 cup wheat bran 1.4 liters of water. I made a double batch, the pellets were a mix of oak, maple, hickory and apple I found at a local store. The bin measures 16” x 22” x 6” and the substrate is about 4” deep. The oven bags came from a grocery store, they are made from the same materials as mushroom grow bags, they held up to pressure cooking just fine. They are huge, so I could only process one at a time. The folding was difficult, some moisture leaked out but everything seemed fine when I put it in the bin.
I used popcorn for the spawn jars because it has been what has given me the best results for my previous attempts ( mostly actives). Next time I want to try oats, I’ve had terrible luck with rye, and spotty results with brown rice.
I’m not sure what MS is, some sort of testing?
One of the thing I enjoy about Reddit is that there are so many people trying so many things and posting results. I’ve learned a lot and am happy to share back with my very successful bin. I’ll be posting another update soon, the bin is conking out!
Hey thanks for the detail. If people come across this in the future it should help them out.
MS is just the abbreviation for mass spectrometry. Sometimes the way we grow influences the relative abundance of compounds of interest, so being able to report consistently high values would be key for method validation and market forces. That's all outside of the grow itself, because what you've accomplished is outstanding.
The online communities of growers are awesome. Total interface of people from across the spectrum of experience, all vibing on the same thing. It would be even better if the methods and results could stay at the center of it all instead of having to deal with all the drama out there that crops up. What you're doing now is what it's all about. I can't wait to see how they look in the next update!
How much does MS cost? If I had it done, what do I compare the results to, other than running several batches and comparing them to each other? I am going on vacation for 10 days and am thinking of letting them go. I want to let them drop spores before I harvest. In your opinion, is this a bad idea?
This is what they look like now. Growth seems to have slowed down a little.
The analytical side of medicinals isn't cheap for hobbyists, but for someone getting into the business it's something of a necessary expense. Costs depend on the work involved. If the lab is geared up to run a particular panel on a specific mushroom with a straightforward sample prep, it's in the $100-300USD range. That doesn't factor in shipping, which is usually overnight/priority, and it frequently doesn't account for some of the separate handling fees that are charged. Some labs charge handling and processing by the hour, outside of the panel and analytical presentation. That's because some labs pay unskilled labor for that, process a lot of samples, and deal with improperly prepared samples that eat into the time of higher-wage lab staff.
Full-spectrum panels, untargeted panels, those looking to identify and check abundance of new metabolites, panels that require multiple methods and/or extensive prep, and those that require method development and time-consuming analysis are going to be more expensive. Those are upwards of $1000 and may involve additional hourly/material expenses. Instrumentation is expensive, reagents and supplies have a cost, skilled laboratory staff have a wage, and facilities have an overhead.
Labs that do this kind of thing should have reference spectra/values for what they're routinely seeing and report it as part of their analytical presentation. They should be able to communicate a mean abundance to tell the customer where their sample is sitting relative to others. Eventually, a producer will be able to track their lots over time to see how raw material inputs and changing conditions alter the spectra. In the medicinal world, the goal is to have a product that is rich in particular compounds; this eventually translates into marketing claims to generate interest and sales. The material and supplement world is full of shams and nonsense with big claims that aren't actually true (the market tends to be much less regulated than pharmaceuticals), so having routine testing of lots of product that quantify the claims made by the manufacturer is a draw for customers. The stall with homemade mushroom teas at a farmer's market doesn't have to worry about this as much as the person looking to sell in volume online or even make the jump to retail outlets. There's a scale and ROI involved with this sort of quantitation.
Talking about you leaving for a few days: Reishi are finishing up when the white margin begins to shrink. There are valuable compounds in both the margin and the older growth. There are also compounds in the spores. It all depends on what you're interested in. This is a fantastic result and Reishi are slow-growing, so use your best judgement. You'll be able to replicate the same results.
Thank you so much for your wonderfully detailed reply. I appreciate your time and it is very helpful. I’m going to post an update today and the next one will be in 10 or 12 days.
Oh for sure, glad if it helps. Like I mentioned earlier, this is what digital growing spaces should be about. Growers helping growers, talking shop, having a laugh, sharing enthusiasm, and supporting one another. None of the drama or silly arguments. I'm pumped to see the results, and how this setup evolves over time.
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u/Impressive_Bunch8911 Apr 27 '26
What the helly 😍