Daily Mushroom Grow Thread
So hey /b/, I started getting into the mushroom growing. Instead of buying spores online and ruining them, I settle a couple of try-error shots with local champignon as a source.
So I tried cloning methods. 3 Different approaches. Three different results and will post photos of them.
The three containers were cleaned, gloves and tools with 4% sodium hypochlorite solution. I moisted the cardbox, the brown rice and the sliced mushrooms in three separated containers with 5% chlorine dioxide solution.
1. Moisted Cardbox with slices.
2. Moisted Brown rice with slices
3. Moisted Brown rice, Cardbox and slices.
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After one week
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1. Thin white hairs connected to the slices spread among the cardbox. Not sure if mycelium or mold, so far it looks white and healthy.
2. No show of mycelium, bacteria, or even mold. It looks exactly how I left it. Looks like the cardbox is the key for mycelium to growth enough to be visible.
3. This is the most amazing result. It does has white liquid around the slices. But besides that the water has go complete whitish to yellowish tone. Half of the container looks complete yellow or with yellow dots and in its radio there are lots of bubbles. From what I have read some types of molds are resistant and attach to the rice, once the environment its right and have no competition they kick off.
Please correct me, give advices and over all what can I do to prevent cases like container 3? Because at some point i will need to use grains for the substrate to actually make mycelium grow into caps.
>>987250
Container 1
>>987251
Container 1
>>987266
nah this legit works. button mushrooms are a cultivated variety. they're very strong. you can add the cardboard runs to compost and mushrooms will grow in your compost.
results are highly unpredictable.
also i am having a problem with my mushrooms. corn spawned to straw/alfalfa 4:1 I am getting wildly ridiculous clumps of aerial mycelium like 5cm wide and high. never seen anything like this before. its not cobweb. i just want fruit.
>>987266
>>987286
Container 3
>>987295
Container 3
go to shroomery.org or similar for extensive information. Although I needed to clone a cube from a dried sample and it took a number of tries, but I succeeded. Champs must be way easier. I also cloned oyster mushroom from a fruitbody bought at a grocery store.
What you want is buy a pressure cooker, a bunch of petri dishes and use at least a still air box to lower the risk of contamination when working.
Prepare petris with PDA. You want to have a larger number of dishes and go with multiple samples as it's a high chance bacteria or mold (usually) will be on a sample when cloning and you want to increase the odds you got a clean sample than just one out of one. Carve a piece of mushroom from the center of stalk which should be mold-free. Put it into the dish and wait. If mycelium runs and turns into white-hairy stuff very fast, like two-three days, then it's mold. Mushroom takes around a week to start developing mycelium on agar. When a sample starts growing but there's also contam, you can transplant the clone.
After you succeed with a clean sample, PC grains and transfer pieces of colonized agar to the jar. Wait for colonization to finish. This will be your spawn.
As for cardboard. It's true that a mushroom runs mycelium there great, the problem is contaminations that don't vanish anywhere. They are still dornmant in/on the cardboard and they will start to develop the moment you transfer your culture to agar or grain. This is basically what you saw with container #3.
Go with agar and sterility. Eventually you'll succeed.
>>987295
AHAHAHA
are you trying to make grain spawn by just putting a mushroom on wet rice?
this wont work. grain is the favorite food of many things. not only is your white rice too wet and soggy to be grainspawn, it's yellow and gross. no idea what you did there. start with rice flower and vermiculite and do what this guy says.
>>987297
Container 2
Looks exactly as the beginning, the slices never did mycelium.
My conclusion here is that the first step its to grow them in cardbox and then move them into grains/subtrate.
>>987297
Thanks man.
How should I sterilize the substrate? I will boil them and then cool it down to 5 Celsius in a the same container to test if the yellow mold can be removed from the brown rice. I was planning used microwave, as it kills them too in theory.
Will post results the next week.
>>987302
> sterilize
You pressure cook it for 40-90 minutes. Time depends on what and jow much you're PCing. There ate time tables online. And yeah, I read that people bake or microwave stuff and it works, but I never attempted that. Sounds too amateur, haha. Unless you're poor, just buy a pressure cooker. I got mine at Ikea for around €50, iirc.
>>987299
>your white rice too wet
Exactly that another error I have learn. Too much water will make the mushroom to grow very slow and the grain mold grow as quick as possible.
I will do another container with the same amount of water (on purpose) but testing the sterile grains. If the grains remain wet with no mold, then I will choose that method of sterilizing the substrate.
>>987307
sorry for mistypes, on a phone and didn't re-check properly what I've written
>>987307
>Sounds too amateur
To be honest I am an manufacture engineer. Never did anything besides basic biology were you learn about photosynthesis. The objective is too learn the most common error and possible problems before going into a more big scale. Microwave could work but its not sustainable option as I reach a 50 kilograms flux or its cost, pasteurization on pressurized cooking sounds fine.
There is a friend that can supply me cheap brown rice, so that's why I need to test it in every possible scenario.
If the mycelium grows healthy I will try to move them to a liquid culture for even more fast and big size cloning, but that will be another stage.
>>987250
>daily mushroom grow thread
lmao
do some reading u dumb fuck
>>987250
>/b/
>>987331
=<)
>>987310
brown rice is already cheap. Stop throwing out nonsense to try to justify the fact that you don't know what the fuck you're doing.
>>987250
I love these indians
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oormRweSf3E
>>987389
this is just so fucking genius
they basically just create something from nothing
Pressure cooker? Fuck that just throw it all on the oven at like 350 degrees. That'll kill fucking everything.
>>987406
lol, idiot detected
>>987310
microwave doesnt work. they've studied it. only thing that works better than wet steam sterilization is gamma irradiation which is used in industrial farms. unfortunately the government frowns on private citizens owning cobalt-60
>>987394
>from nothing
mushroom growing is labour intensive.
>>987302
just throw it out and start again with a pressure cooker, spore syringe and canning jars. you cant try to reuse the rice because the bacteria has already turned the mushroom food into mushroom poison. you will just be cooking mushroom poison and nothing will grow in it except for another color of shitty mold.
>>987307
should we tell him about how horse poop is best mushroom substrate? would love to see his mums face when she walks in and he's frying up some horse turds.
First off, it's not a daily thread - that'd be way too spammy for this board.
Secondly, holy shit, READ. As others have mentioned, shroomery.org. Read up on agar and cloning, or "cardboard tek".
Third, wassup other mycologist. Didn't know there were so many here. What are you guys doing right now? I'm working on growing out shiitake for some outdoor hardwood inoculation, and stepping towards a large scale grow op for oysters.
Having lots of trouble cloning from storebought oysters with agar, though.
Pic isn't mine but it's dank
what's the point of growing mushrooms, when you can legally buy high purity, 4-substituted tryptamines of various kinds for super cheap?
Eating mushrooms feels toxic to me. Instant nausea. I'd much rather just have some synthetic metocin or psilacetin.
>>987628
Cloning oyster from a store-bought fruit was easy for me. They are large so it was not difficult to extract a clean sample. Clone frosted up and ran mycelium vigorously, I'm really surprised you're having trouble with oysters and agar.
I've been trying to clone shiitake from a fruit for outdoor hardwood cultivation too. Here I had no success so far. Most samples didn't pick up, the others were surrounded by a shitload of contams. I had one promising dish, but due to my laziness didn't transplant soon enough and then it was overrun and contaminated with mold.
Did you clone shiitake or did you grow it from spores or even got inoculated plugs? If cloned, are they anything special to clone?
pic's not mine, but I had a very similar grow. Stalks were thick. That was probably due to too low light, and probably too high CO2 levels.
>>987915
Go on...
>>987915
> actually doing synthetic drugs unironically
Second time attempting. First time I had 100% success with brown rice flour sterilized in a pressure cooker. This time I'm doing for wild bird seed. Golden teachers already inocculated and mycelium taking off. Albinos in pressure cooker cooling.
>>988604
any tips on keeping sterile? Trying to spawn shiitake in a PF tek mason jar like your pic related but all my jars get contaminated.
>>988605
The first time I did it I just drilled two small holes on opposite sides put the lid on seal side up close lid but not all the way and i put tin foil over the life down this side slightly. Pressure cooked an hour. Cooled over night. Sterilize needle with lighter till red hot and wipe off with paper towel soaked in rubbing alcohol. Let cool for a minute. In a small area with not much air movement I cleaned of debris and sprayed oust like crazy and let it settle. Open pressure cooker shook up syringe and one at a time took tinfoil off and squirt 1cc per jar(1/2 per hole) and replaced foil and then put them in a poor lit Area or in a cabinet. Checked sometimes. I had one start to form mold but it actually took it over. Everyone told me not to eat the shrooms off the cake but I did...
>>988605
This time I used quart sized instead of pint sized. And I got a tyvek envelope and put it underneath the lid for extra contamination resistance. And I drilled three holes and use two layers of foil.
in b4 MASSIVE mold contamination
>>988604
Top is goldent teachers. Bottom albino. Left is either never shaken or shaken before inoculation. Right is shaken twice, daily or every few days. Also far left on bottom and top have extra spores.
The one I put extra has most mycelium growth at the top.
This was shook once before inoculation. Each spot under hole had similar growth. Some more spread wide than down the side. The ones shook up are showing minimal growth but I'm sure will finish first. The one shook once after innoculation looks like the ones I didnt shake, but more randomly placed.
>>988605
tyvek is a meme.
just use micropore tape. you can buy it at a pharmacy. wherever you can buy bandages and first aid stuff. its the white sticky tape.
tyvek tends to have an uneven pore structure and allows contamination. just use micropore tape to cover the jar holes.
as for contamination after full colonization, it doesnt happen if your conditions are right. just buy some vermiculite, make a layer of dry vermiculite at the bottom of your tote. then place cakes on top of the dry layer. then moisten some vermiculite and fill tote up to the level of the cakes 1/2 inch.
i clean the vermiculite by wetting with boiling hot water in a sealed container and waiting for it to cool down below 40C.
too much water creates a bad environment for mushrooms. but makes a good environment for trichoderma and bacterial infections. they wont infect if you dont make them too wet. because even though they're exposed to the open atmosphere, they have all the food and can eat other molds and bacteria while the shitty spores from contaminants are trying to steal the food. think of it like walking up to the walls of Constantinople and pissing on the wall and expecting it to fall over.
>>988657
too much water anon.
dry your soaked grains before PCing
also dont soak for so long. split grains invite contamination.
>>988661
Yeah I simmered them and more popped than I would have liked. I'm hoping for the best tho. As long as one jar makes it..
>>988671
I keep having trouble with contamination on the bottom of my tubs. not enough ventilation on the bottom I think
>>988661
I rinsed a few times, soaked 12 hours rinsed simmered an hour and rinsed again and let drain for fifteen minutes. Should I have not simmered, or not as long or stirred More often. Is15 minutes not enough drain time?
This is pic of second wbs attempt. It's worse isn't it :( is simmering just a extra step I'm doing that's doing more damage than good or what
>>988673
Like a shoe box tub? What kinda set up?
>>988673
I made a shotgun terrarium my first grow. Rice flour tek. Small holes two inches apart all sides. I'm assuming you didn't do this and lined with a trashbag and poured substrate into it or something similar?
Spores can survive being in a fridge for a month right?
>>988675
yeah basically a monotub. but the condensation drips down to the bottom and it gets too hot so it just pools gross yellow myc piss at the bottom. I'm going to try a much less ambitious bulk grow this time and put a layer of dry verm at the bottom to catch it.
havnt had any success with bulk grows yet. I think they're too big so they just get too hot and fuck themselves over.
i've had no problem with pf tek. I just want to learn to into bulk
>>988680
mate I'm using spores that survived in a cupboard for 4 years.
>>988658
> fill tote up to the level of the cakes 1/2 inch.
What's the advantage of burying the cakes vs rolling them in verm and keeping on top of a layer of moist perlite?
>>988681
After preparing a syringe with spores, is it imperative to keep them cold for a while for them to germinate? I made a number of spore prints from my first grow of cubes and now I try to reset the genetics by growing spores. But it just doesn't work. They just seem dead. All of them do come from a single mushroom clone, could that be a reason?
>>988745
does the liquid in the syringes turn purple? I use my girlfriends hitachi massager to disperse the clumps.
I use Iv saline for the water instead of cooking the syringes as well. it works.
its better but not neccessary to rehydrate the spores overnight for them to work faster.
the water needs to be below 40C or it will kill them.maybe you are not using enough spore solution so the spores just settle on a piece of vermiculite with no food and die?
>>988745
I used to make my cakes fairly rich in riceflour. so much so that there was enough left over for it to colonize the vermiculite like a bulk substrate.
I think perlite is cheaper than vermiculite in the USA which is why its recommended.
>>988747
It did turn dark purple, yes. I had three attempts so far.
a) hydrated spores in sterilized water (room temp around 20C) and inoculated sterilized rye grain right away. Nothing. Jars went mold two weeks after, but that was due to me peeking.
b) dropped some dry spores on agar. Nothing.
c) hydrated spores and kept in a syringe for a week then sprayed on agar. The area where spore solution dried up went somewhat white, but not myc white. It will be a week soon since I did that and I'm still not sure if it's contam or mycelium will grow eventually. This was with my second spore solution. I mixed in less spores so the solution wasn't that purple. But I checked under microscope - the spores are there.
I guess I'll just keep trying. Also start another grow from clones to make more prints.
>>988748
I'm researching to start bulk growing. Spraying SG daily gives more meaning to life, but is annoying when you're tired.
>>988754
multistrain looks weird on agar. did you mix the agar to the right concentration? if its too rich it can reduce water availability. give saline a go. you can buy it from pharmacies and stuff for like a dollar for a 10ml tube. all these subsidies for drug addicts making my hobby cheaper.
sometimes it takes a while for spores to germinate. but two weeks is a bit long.
when you make your spore prints try folding aluminium foil in the oven then let it cool down, open the folded aluminium and place the cap on it under a jar. then make a spore syringe right away using sterile syringe and saline then inject 1cc into a pint of grain with a layer on the bottom.
also, great success apparently. I had one jar left over that didnt fit in my PC and couldnt be fucked to sterilize it. so i let it germinate then injected spores to lol this isnt going to work. IT FUCKING COLONIZED HOLY SHIT WUT. but very slowly compared to the sterile jars. like 4x as long. maybe germinating corn produces some kind of antibiotic/anti fungal agent.
also, I had this problem when i used a needle of too small a diameter. try to get 14g drawing syringes. they're much wider and i found i had far better success with larger gauge needles apparently the velocity of the liquid smashes the spores around a bit in smaller gauges.
>>988860
oh shit apparently it does produce antimicrobial compounds.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC92969/
so you can make grain spawn with corn that has been soaked to field capacity but not sterilized. needs more testing. perhaps i managed to find some point where peak antimicrobial activity was existant or some kind of perfect innoculation time. the roots were about 5cm long from memory, maybe longer.
>>988860
Thanks. Lots of useful information.
Could be that rye jars I tried to inoculate with spores were too dry. I'll try your method with saline after I acquire fresh spores.
Today I looked at the petri with hydrated spore solution and guess what! Mycelium is growing (black arrows) [at least it looks like mycelium]. So at room temp (around +22C) it took 6 days for it to appear. There's also that white stuff I talked about which actually looks like it's yeast (or some bacteria, I'm not familiar with that stuff too much), marked with red. I admit, my spore printing didn't follow sterile procedure. Simply grabbed a cleanish pieced of foil, layed it out in a petri, dropped a cap and covered with a lid. Next time I have caps, I'll fully sterilize the foil and jars or petris that I'll be covering caps with. The method with two sheets of foil (one smaller to print, and bigger to cover and fold over edges) I read somewhere seemed most appealing.
Gotta transfer that sucker after it joins up and before yeast (or whatever that is) takes over. Don't need the suspense of mycelium fighting with contam.
>>988915
I use my old 1/2 pint jars as petri dishes. that way i can just PC them. (no flow hood) and just inject spores through a hole in the top. i just use one layer of micropore tape and peel it up just enough that the needle will fit past then seal it up again quick by pressing down the same piece.
your petri dishes need parafilm or at least micropore tape around the edges. that's part of your problem.
you can also do tissue biopsies with large bore needles then push air through the syringe to pop out the core you took. you can draw air into the syringe by heating the tip of the needle red hot then slowly drawing in air. then wait to cool and take biopsy.
I make a bunch of folded pieces of alfoil then fold them in a bigger piece. this way when time comes to collect the print i can just fold it over immediately, fold the edges up and slip into a little baggy. this makes it easier later when making syringes. because then you can lay everything out, get ready and open the folded foil and quickly get the spores. the more handling of anything means more contamination possibilities.
>>988747
>I use my girlfriends hitachi massager to disperse the clumps.
this is funny to me, polite sage
>>987406
Jars will explode/crack when water inside them turns to steam, hence pressure cooker. It keeps internal jar pressure and external pressure in equilibrium. That way you can cook your jars while keeping them sealed to avoid mold spores. Them shits be errywhere.
>>988860
>did you mix the agar to the right concentration
I boil 50g of potatoes in 200ml of tap water (it's chlorine free) for one hour. Add water to get back to 200ml, plus 4g dextrose, a pinch of yeast and 4g of agar agar. Heap it up for everything to dissolve nicely and sterilize afterwards. Though once I did with 2g dextrose. Seems to have worked better as in mycelium propagated faster and contamination slower, but could be my imagination talking - need more experience.
>>988923
I clean petris with bleach or percarbonate cleaner, rinse well and load into a pressure cooker for 40 mins. Wait until all cools off a bit then pour agar into plates using a syringe. Petris end up with whitish stains because of settled calcium, but I have not noticed contaminations due to moisture present in them. Will buy an erlenmeyer flask eventually. Tried pouring from a wide neck glass directly, but that doesn't work as agar spills over petri's edges and then it's an open gate for contaminations.
At first I did all biological activities in a large tote put sideways. Works fine if air in the room is still, it's generally clean, you control your breathing, etc. After I got evident process contaminants in a dish, I drilled two holes in the tote and made myself a still air box. Much easier and less stressful to work in. No contams so far.
As for micropore tape. I'm well aware of possible contaminations because I lack wrapping. The thing is I'm not sure I can get micropore tape in this backwards country I live in. At least it's not popular as I have not heard of it. Will ask for it at a pharmacy anyway.
Usually I use food wrap. It also helps to keep moisture in, but prevents air circulation. I still don't quite understand if it's important to have a slight fresh air intake for faster mycelium grow. That being said, I had only one contamination so far that obviously started from the edge of a petri (could also have been introduced by me while transplanting the sample. Though mycelium devoured the bluish mold).
Thanks for the biopsy advice. That's a cool idea, didn't come think of that.
pic is a few oysters I harvested yesterday. Forgot to take a picture until I dropped them into a pan.
>>989298
oh. I just buy the reagent grade MEA. its cheap on ebay.
im sure you can get it. it's just the white surgical tape. anywhere that sells things like wound dressings will have it.
>>989300
>food wrap
this is bad. you need air exchange. all surgical dressing stuff is breathable except for certain particular things that are labelled non0breathable because its only for specific surgical purposes where you want to kill the skin. skin dies if its not exposed to air.
>>989313
After lunch went to pharmacy and bought it. Surely they had it, just needed to know what to look for. Is 2.5cm wide convenient enough to work with?
As for air exchange, yeah I noticed jars are colonized slower when wrapped up tight when compared to timeframes other people report. Same for mycelium growth on agar.
>>989321
yeah. it doesnt allow free air exchange but it allows gas exchange. so like you can sweat through it which is the point. well gas can cross the membrane.
when I use jars I only just put it over the hole in the top with nothing else. serves as an air port and injection site.
where the fuck in the world is it called urgopore? what does urgo mean?
also sticky side is sterile. so every time I use it I tear off the first few cm that have previously been exposed and trash it.
I think that's the size I use . yeah seems to work. if not, it tears really easily so you can make any shape you need.
>>989324
> urgopore
This is a trademark. Produced by Urgo Medical, a French company. Damn, their website is so made by students.
Anyway, as long as it sticks and is clean enough, I'm happy. The price could be lower though. I paid 2.28 euro for 5m roll. Feels like I was robbed.
>>989326
yeah costs about 1 euro in australia. still cheaper than parafilm which is what they use in labs. it's about 30 euro.
>>989327
After a quick search, I found local med stuff dealer selling a 38m roll of Parafilm (10cm wide) for 33.88 euro. That's around 0.9 euro/m, twice expensive as what I paid for paper tape, but it's 10cm and parafilm! Anyway, don't need it. Maybe some time later when I begin embryo experiments or some shit.
>>987394
I have some news for you about the laws of thermodynamics.
