Nice, I’d love to find one of those some time.

Not yet but I probably will at some point. Wild oysters are better than cultivated so maybe these will be too.

Though with oysters the wild ones I’m eating are probably a different species than the cultivated. Someone sequenced a grocery store oyster for fun and it turned out to be something close to Pleurotus floridanus while the ones we have in the PNW are usually P. pulmonarius or sometimes P. ostreatus.

I’ve considered it enough to have the this guide bookmarked but I haven’t read through it yet.

FYI, Mycota’s mycoblitz no longer has a limit on submissions. That said, none of my submissions have made it through the queue yet.

Mica caps are a type of inky cap, Coprinellus and Coprinopsis are close relatives and both can turn to ink. They only have the sparkly particles when they’re fresh, these are starting to turn to ink so it’s not surprising they don’t have it. Coprinopsis atramenteria is usually larger and duller-colored.

Plastic buckets drilled holes are good reusable option. If you want to avoid plastics all together you could use some of this spawn to plug a small alder log.

Your jars probably over-colonized because there wasn’t enough surface area getting proper ventilation/evaporation to trigger primordia formation so it just kept colonizing. It looks like pins didn’t start until the mycelium grew over the top of the jar and by then all the food was already used up.

Topfruiting jars isn’t a great method even for terrestrial mushrooms, I imagine it’s worse for oysters. Consider using small oven bags instead, that way you can cut the sides to trigger fruiting earlier and across a wider surface.