23 replies to this topic

[reverend trips]

Comparing wet to dry weights of shrooms at various stages of growth sounds like it would be easy enough.

[TVCasualty]

I tried a mini-experiment with this last year.

I was growing South Americans on WBS in cased trays.

I harvested and weighed out 100.00 grams of fresh mushrooms with veils intact and caps were just beginning to expand outward. I also harvested 100.00 grams of mature specimens from the same tray and same flush whose caps were all open to plane.

I then dried them to utterly crisp in a sealed box w/ silica gel.

Results:

Fresh...........................Dry..............% moisture

100.00g
closed caps.................10.40g..............89.6%

100.00g
mature (caps plane).....11.10g..............88.9%


This is by no means an adequate sample size to draw any conclusions, but does begin to point to only a small amount of additional mass being added after the caps begin to open up. The fresh mature specimens were a lot bigger than the fresh bullets (veils intact). I will repeat this in the future, hopefully with a larger sample, and I'll take pictures next time too.

I thought it was interesting that the younger ones had a slightly higher moisture content. My scale weighs to tenths of grams, and is calibrated.

[Bobcat]

Comparing wet to dry weights of shrooms at various stages of growth sounds like it would be easy enough.

Yah, perhaps I was over thinking that one a bit (I do that sometimes :) ). As TVcasualty has shown.

Still lots of questions though.

[Hippie3]

that's over 10% more weight for the older specimens,
significant
esp. considering that there should be NO weight increase
if cell division had truly stopped and all water was extracted .