Scrape between flushes?

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Cleaning cakes between flushes  -    
Scratching the Cake  15 12/24 08:52pm jared

By jared (Jared112) on Wednesday, November 07, 2001 - 03:50 pm:

I just wanted to know if I should scrape cakes between Flushes to get all the old mycleim off of the cakes or do I just cut off the good shrooms and continue to let all the pins grow or how exactly do you do this?

By Lichen (Lichen) on Wednesday, November 07, 2001 - 04:09 pm:

in order to cut down on the possibility of contamination, scrape all the casing off the flushed cakes and remove all fungal tissue and rinse, then dunk if moisture content is low, rebirth, case, and back into the terrerium.

Alternatively, you can usually get away with just picking the flush, and letting the cake flush out again without cleaning or scraping or even picking off all aborts. Usually you will get a second flush within a few days, much quicker than if you dunk etc. But I can only get away with this once or twice, before trichoderma (green mold) sets into the casing. Anyway, the flushes are usually stronger if you clean and dunk...just takes longer

By Bobby (Bobby) on Wednesday, November 07, 2001 - 04:33 pm:

I scraped after first flush and the whole cake turned blue. I dunked a put back in terranium. Is this normal? I figured it was brusing.

By jared (Jared112) on Wednesday, November 07, 2001 - 05:28 pm:

Ok so I should scrape all of the white tissue off of the cake until it looks like when I first incolated the jar? Basically what you are saying is that I will have to wait for the mycelium to grow back then it will Pin and Fruit all over again. I am also going to be using the inner resivor tech so I don't think that I will need to dunk the cakes.

By An guy (Boomer) on Wednesday, November 07, 2001 - 05:44 pm:

I think he means just to scrape until you *get* to the mycleial tissue- the white. You won't be able to get back to where it looked like when you first inoculated, as the white tissue should be grown all through the cakes by the time you scrape. By the time you get a flush, in fact.

Check out Eaty's flat cake tek- the pix that show the crumbling of the cakes to make a flat cake will show you that the mycelia will have grown all through the cake.

So no, just scrape off the casing and outer layer layer of white stuff all around the cake.

This is what I'm gathering anyway from my reading.

Someone'll be along to correct me if needed, no fear. :)

boomer

By Lichen (Lichen) on Wednesday, November 07, 2001 - 05:53 pm:

you don't actually want to be so rough on the cakes as all that...it just slows down the recovery time. Just clean the vermiculite off the cakes, and aborts and shroom tissue. You're reading too much into it. There's no reason to try scraping the mycelium off a mycelium cake :0)

By jared (Jared112) on Wednesday, November 07, 2001 - 06:01 pm:

Ok Thanks I got it. I guess that I'm making it out to be really harder than what it is. But I want to make sure that I get it perfect for the first time. I want to have a fat crop so that I can make some money off of them.

By Nan (Nanook) on Wednesday, November 07, 2001 - 06:48 pm:

Yes it is Normal for cakes to turn a nasty, sickly shade of blue, blue-gray, even blue-green. Follow the Tek: Clean, Dunk, Re-case. They may look like hell after the process, tough, give em a few days in the Fruiting Chamber with Warmth, Light, Moisture, and Fresh Air, they will puff out in fresh White Fuzz... And you are off on another flush.

I agree with Brettiejams that cutting up or into a cake roughly is going to cause contam and recovery problems. Be gentle with a clean sharp knife and remove all Aborts, loose tissue, traces of rot... Do as little damage as possible to the sheath of mycelia around the cake.

The exception, in my opinion, is with cakes that did not flush (all aborts) or fruited very weakly on the first flush. Then you have nothing to loose by scraping and cutting into the cake sheath. It can help in this instance.

Otherwise, be gentle but get all the tissue that is going to Decay removed from the cake.

Good Luck