Silk Road forums
Discussion => Silk Road discussion => Topic started by: OneBadDream on August 09, 2013, 11:24 am
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Can tissue from a dried mushroom be used to inoculate your sterilized substrate jar?
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No, not directly. You must first make the tissue come alive again by putting it in a petri dish of nutritive agar (any kind will do). Then after you see growth and it has expanded about an inch or so, you should take some pieces from the best looking dishes and start again into new agar dishes. (You will definitely see a lot of contamination. You have to make as many dishes as is practical in order to get some that are contaminant-free.)
By the second generation you ought to be able to see some rhizomorphic growths; then you can take some good sized pieces from this second generation and inoculate some grain jars. But don't stop there, you should continue to take pieces from the good dishes and make a third and a fourth generation of active mycelial growth in petri dishes. Each generation will look better than the preceding. But after the fourth it will get to a point of being at a plateau. You can continue to take pieces from each generation and inoculate more jars, but if you continue this process a few more times, senescence will start to set in.
The object is to get a fantastic-looking mushroom somewhere along the way, one that is exceptionally strong and healthy and BIG. From this one you should do a helluva lot of cloning.
And just continue doing all this. You will have a veritable mushroom factory which will last virtually forever.
Hope I dodn't give away too many of the mushroom grower's secrets.
goblin
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You're the man goblin. Thanks a lot. Are the petri dishes with the agar reusable? Like... Say if I were to cut a good piece mycelial growth out of one that has a bit of contaminant, could you scrape the rest out and use it for the next generation? Probably not, huh? You mix agar with water and a bit of hydrogen peroxide right?
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Well usually these are plastic petri dishes. If they were glass yeah you certainly reuse them. But if there is some contaminant in a dish, it doesn't pay to take the good part out, unless you're down to an emergency low level of viable tissue and you have no more mushrooms.
In that case, you have to work with what you got and hope for the best.
Yeah H2O2 is a very good additive to put into the slightly cooled liquid agar before you pour into the dishes. You don't put it into the liquid before you autoclave. The heat will totally destroy the H2O2.
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When you first starting experimenting with cubensis what were your most common mistakes or was it pretty simple? I have the process in my head pretty well down minus a couple more questions running through my head. Oh! and I was also curious if other mushrooms can be grown in the same way? (maybe just for some practice runs for trial and error.)
Where can I get agar? Local store or somewhere or other would be nice.
What makes a spore syringe a spore syringe? Just the fact that it's 10 cc?
Do you have a preferred pressure cooker?
When reviving the dry tissue for myceliel growth what should the temperature be?
(Sorry for all the questions, but I'm really interested in growing them. It seems like it'd be a fun hobby.) :)
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When I first started it was the old PF Tek method, not much that could go wrong there. As I advanced, I learned about grains and everything that branched from the McKenna brothers experiments in the early 70s. (God bless'em!)
With grain you can grow almost any mushroom at all. Naturally the wood-loving ones like shiitake and oysters you can start them in grain but later you must transfer them to a woody substrate. The others, Agaricus bitorquis, or any of the agaricus you can do using the same as the cubensis method.
Temperature isn't that important, don't get obsessed with that. The same goes for light/no light. It just doesn't matter (other than extremes). What is important, at least past the petri dish stage, is good oxygen/carbon dioxide transfer. You must use good filtration, and keep a really clean growing environment to cut down on contams, especially the dreaded trichoderm.
Agar and pressure cookers (watch out for the FBI! just kidding) from fungi.com.
I'd suggest you register in the two best mushroom forums, mycotopia.org and the shroomery.org to learn. And be sure to look up Roger Rabbits posts, he be da man.
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Thank you so much for the information! I'll learn as much as I can from what you've given me. Hopefully my project won't turn out too bad. :)
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If anyone else would like to share their own knowledge in the mean time feel free. I'll be reading up for the most part. Thanks! ^_^