ok,
So I've been trying to get my damn rye to fruit correctly and haven't been all that successful... at first I thought that it was due to using medium grade verm in the inner rez that I was mixing in with the straight rye (which I still wouldn't recommend using medium verm in the inner rez when growing TEX, they basically tore themselves apart with inner pinning). So i decided to do a little experiment... I made two bins, each one has half of the bin with a fine verm inner rez (about a handful of verm per qt---six qts in each bin---three per side) and the other half without any rez at all... THEN a 1/4 of each bin had a different casing mix.. 1/4 with plain Medium verm... 1/4 with plain fine verm... 1/4 with medium verm/coir.... and the last 1/4 with fine verm/coir (a 70/30ish mix) Then I reversed which side got what in the other bin.... in other words, each substrate got each casing mix... the reason that I didn't just put all the non-rez'd rye in one bin is because I wanted both to have the same fruiting environment (same bin.) well, I came to the conclusion that rye, or at least MY rye, sucks as a straight grain to fruit. BUT some nice observations were made about inner rez's and casing mixes... I did end up losing the verm rez'd plain verm 1/4 to trich but the experiment still gave me some nice feedback... heres some pics and I'll explain what you are looking at after I present each pic....
http://mycotopia.net...=1&d=1175798308
that is the bin with the non-rez'd rye on the top there... the top left 1/4 is medium verm/coir casing and the top right 1/4 is fine verm/coir... the bottom is inner rez'd with a straight medium verm casing... and like I said, I lost that fine verm no rez 1/4 to trich... as you can see, the inner rez'd rye performed better than the no rez rye, BUT the casings with the coir in them produced better pinsets... and even more interesting (to me) is that the better of those two pinsets was with the FINE verm/coir mix not the expected medium verm/coir mix... heres that nice fine verm/coir pinset from the side...
http://mycotopia.net...=1&d=1175798628
now heres the other bin with the casing layers switched...
http://mycotopia.net...=1&d=1175798772
that top left 1/4 is fine verm/coir on inner rez... the bottom left 1/4 is med verm/coir on inner rez... top right 1/4 is fine verm on straight rye... and the bottom right 1/4 is med. verm on straight rye... as you can see the one that did the best was the fine verm/coir on inner rez and the worst over all in this experiment was the straight rye on medium verm. heres another angle of that same bin...
http://mycotopia.net...=1&d=1175798772
Soooo, I'm never doing another straight rye bin again. LOL I don't know if they just don't have enough water or what but this rye that I have sucks as a straight fruiter... probably (and hopefully) will do better being spawned to something that is very high in water content like straw and poo. any input as to others' thought on this subject would be great... of course this is just one experiment and probably should be done a number of times to conclude anything solid but for now i'm happy knowing that I probably shouldn't use MY rye as a straight grain.. :)
fahtster
