Man, putting me to shame with my tiny mushroom grow but this is a heck of a read. I have much to learn im sure.
Ps. Hope you found more containers for your bud
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Ha, not with lots of failure, you only really see the success here. Took me a long time to get it right, my first harvests only yielded about 6g (dry) which I gave most away to my friends. My second attempt was a complete failure and all my jars were contaminated so that set me back about 2 1/2 months whilst I tried to cultivate some myc from tissue because cylocybe was shut and I couldnt buy any more syringes 
I have some rye grain almost done colonising and this is the farthest i’ve gotten with that, so far all my grows have been using BRF -> bulk tek so i’ve got a ton more reading I need to do!
its all fun and part of the learning process, though.
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Yeah i actually ordered from them too, got the myco pots this year after my failures with rye (still got a bag left of it) , ill probably go back to the bags from etsy as thats cheapest and simplest without having to sterilise things myself. I got quite a few mates locally that are interested but from the looks of it i may not even get 10g dried per cake with these. Nice and easy to use pots though.
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Nice, good luck! Hopefully I might be able to do a spore run on here with spores I get from my upcoming harvest, that’d be cool.
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That could be really cool to try. I was considering making my own prints from these i have fruiting.
The tester i popped out and cased is looking nice if i might say so myself. But i do like the tight spacing on the bottom one.
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You got nothing to lose by trying! I was skeptical with my prints but that chonk you see above was from one of those syringes I made, and I didnt particularly try to be “as sterile as possible”. Literally just put caps on some foil shiny side down, cut stem from cap and put on foil, then put a jar or cup over and leave for 24 hrs, remove cap and jar and fold the foil in on itself twice, put in a baggy and you’re golden. Bonus points for spraying the table/foil with alc when placing them, and doing it all in a SAB, and cutting the stem with sterile (or alc wiped) scalpel - those will all help with sterility but I didnt do it except just alc spraying down my hands/foil.
Then to make the syringe, I bought some sterile h2o off amazon, but bottled water is probably OK. Open foil in a SAB, scrape the spores into a shot glass or dish, pull up some CCs of sterile water in a syringe and squirt onto the spores, then suck back up - repeat a couple times.
Or if you start getting into agar work, you could just put the spores directly onto agar (by scraping them onto the agar), or pull some up with a sterile cotton swab and rub on the agar
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Would boiled water from a dehumidifier work? I’m not sure on how sterile the water is from bottles to be honest. Or the process they use. Might be up for a swap?
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Im not sure, possibly? Only one way to find out! You could always try collecting the steam from the boiled water
Possibly in the future, right now I have so many agar dishes that half of them are in cold storage
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Ah I see, I’m so low tec i don’t even have a still air box but agar is very interesting as you can get quite a good strain concentrated down and producing evenly.
GrowTracker
Almost exactly 5 years ago, I started developing an app to log my grows. I started off using shitty spreadsheets to log my grows via google forms which created this
I quickly realised that it didnt scale, I wanted to log more data, and have a better native experience. I do software development for a living and all the other apps that were out there already like GrowBuddy required an online account or signing up to some system and I didnt want that.
So 5 years ago on 5 May 2015, I started working on GrowTracker.
The first version of the app (actually v1.1) was released 14 Aug 2015.
The requirements were simple: Be offline (no internet access), store data in a well structured way, allow me to log “actions” to a “plant”.
v1.1 was quite basic and allowed me to log the stages of growth with watering details. Ultimately found it wasnt suitable really because I was storing NPK values when really I wanted to log which product I was using and what amounts because I couldn’t calculate what the final NPK was of a solution from multiple additives.
The next few versions were mainly small feature additions and bug fixes with things like adding an encryption mode, a discrete version of the app which changed the launcher icon and hides the images, export growlogs, etc.
After v1.4 was released, I began working on version 2.0 of the app. This version would be incompatible with 1.x as the data structure would be changing, so a major version (semver) was required.
I updated the data structure to allow me to add additives to a watering and the ability to group plants together into “gardens”.
A few months later, v2.0 was released
Since Aug 2016 I have been working on v2.x, adding new features where they make sense or requested by some users, have released 14 updates to the app with features including;
- Dark theme
- Feeding schedules - Allows you to create a schedule with pre-set nutrients to auto populate in the watering view
- Garden stats
- Addons (like updater)
- Launcher widgets
- Backup feature
- Full exporting growlog for plant or garden
- Update to material design
- Additional languages support
Over time I found myself working on the app less and less. Mainly because it satisfied my needs so well I had no reason to work on it. I work on it every now and then when I have the motivation, but that is hard to have when you do the same work professionally and just want to relax after work which leaves just the weekend and who wants to be coding on the weekend?
A new vision
We find ourselves in very interesting times right now. I have a lot more free time on my hand these days, and have started mixing more with the Android dev community, reading up on the latest and greatest ways of coding, and found my current practices to be very very outdated. I like to learn by doing, so I started playing around with these new tools and quickly found them to be pretty exciting and came to the realisation that there is a LOT i’ve missed out on over the last few years of Android development.
I needed something to put these new development APIs to practice, and what better way than making something you can use yourself? So I decided that I didnt have enough stuff on my plate and needed another thing to work on during this lockdown, so to skill myself up i’ve decided to start GrowTracker 3.0.
Using contacts and weed as bribe payment, i’ve asked a designer friend to help me design a new version of the app with a new approach, a fresh UI and UX.
I’ve been playing around with a few other apps like Jane, GrowHelper, and others, and although I still believe that my app is far superior to others (not only in the fact that mine is open source and free, but in terms of usability), some of them have a better approach to how the data is actually logged, and thinking about how I grow, their approach makes more sense to me, so I am rebuilding the app from the ground up with these considerations in mind.
The app is actually the reason I found Overgrow. I dont really advertise my app, if someone asks about apps I suggest mine, but apart from that I dont really create any posts promoting or anything, its just a hobby app that I put out there if other people wanted to use. One day I was checking the traffic to my repo and saw a few posts linking to it which was quite nice, to see other people suggesting others check out my app.
This is a workshop after all, so I thought why not add the other thing’s im building into it 
I’ll probably post updates about development here as and when it makes sense, but you can follow the code here. I dont expect a first release any time soon, however
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I think I’m actually using your app or at least attempting to. I’ll be using it in more earnest when I can start from seed.
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Ooh very nice, you tracking colonisation speeds too?
No, i’ve been trying out too many different agar recipes to be able to track and compare speeds. There’s a couple more recipes I want to try before I start doing a strain hunt with the genetics ive got going - so I have time to test out the ones ive got and select from the best performers in fruit
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Gen 12 is finally done.
Plants + yields:
- CBD Medgom - 70g
- Jack Herer - 66g
- Galet OG - 160g
- Chronic Haze - 88g
- Berries & Cheese - 375g
- Blue Cheese - 117g
- Amnesia x OG - 138g
- Unknown - 40g
Total for 10 plants: 1054g. Around 100g a plant which isnt terrible, i’ve had worse harvests, but the most i’ve pulled from a single generation grow, albeit not completely fair because I havent run 2 tents at the same time before.
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Probably smoke it haha, over a long period of time of course. I have a couple friends I sell to although one of them has had to go back to his home country because of covid so he’ll be missing out 
This should last me well enough until my next harvest. That’s usually the goal, then any surplus I sell goes towards bills and more equipment/supplies
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Yes, this seems to be a ‘cash negative’ hobby.
That reminds me I need to do up the balance sheet for my grow (I don’t like that part)
Cheers
G
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Oh yes I stopped tracking my expenditures and sales a long time ago. For me, even though I know im not breaking even, even on electricity, I save in the fact I always have supply, it’s a hobby I spend time on, I don’t have to deal with shady dealers, etc. I’m thankful I am in a DINK long term relationship, it certainly helps
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