I'm back!! After an eight month hiatus I have returned to grow more mushrooms... life got in the way. All previous projects kind of got abandoned when I stopped, I managed to throw the fruiting blocks into the tent and get fruits out of it, but I had a bunch of stuff that didn't make it.
I had a bunch of jar of pre sterilized grain I had prepared months back and didn't get around to using, so I nocc'd them up with the 9/10 month old liquid cultures out of my fridge.
My Grey and Blue Oyster cultures had a layer of a mycelial matting overlaying the top of the LC. This mat was so thick that I couldn't break it up with the stir plate or get a syringe through to the LC underneath... I should have taken a picture, it was impressive the amount of solid mycelium the culture produced from a liquid nutrient broth, sitting in the cold and the dark... I am starting a new liquid culture for the blue oysters, They had such a meaty cap for an oyster, my favorite out of the three kinds of oysters I've successfully fruited thus far, needs to get back into the mix.
White Oyster, Lions Mane, Enoki and the Prince Liquid cultures all mixed up nicely and I've got solid growth in 8 little grain spawn jars. all from LC's I started 9 or 10 months ago then forgot about in my culture fridge... On that note, my grain jars sitting there for months on the counter looked VERY dry, so I used about 8 - 10 ml of inoculant for each 1/2 pint grain jar, typically in freshly prepared grain that would cause a pool of liquid at the bottom of the grain jar, however my dry grains soaked it all up rather quickly.
I failed to fruit "The Prince" (agaricus augustus) last run so I'm hoping for better results this time round. It'll be a different substrate this time, and sterilized not pasteurized, in a myco bag not a growing tray. I'll have less surface area and that should decrease my yield potential but I want to try colonizing substrate in a bag, then rolling back the top and casing it. I lost a few shallow trays to contamination in my previous attempts with this strain.
I had a bunch of substrate (that I did not label) prepared, I'm not 100% sure what blend it was, I think it's masters mix but I am unsure if I used hardwood or softwood... I'm going to put the white oyster grain spawn to it all, Oysters eat everything. this way I don't have to worry about waste.
I am mixing some fresh substrate for my Lions mane and Enoki grain spawn today. I have two jars of spawn for lions mane, I'm going to put one on masters mix with hardwood, the other I'm going to try 85%HW and 15% wheat bran, I have seen some nice fruits from people growing on that substrate so I figure I'd try them side by side with the same strain.
I made a tea of sorts by simmering some Oak pellets, added a tiny pinch of gypsum and malt extract (less malt than I would normally put into a LC), I am going to use this to try and grow a LC for my warm weather strain of shiitake. this strain has not grown in standard liquid media recipes... It grows fine on agar and grain, it just doesn't like being suspended in a liquid, so I'm going to try to trick it with oak tea... and if that doesn't work I have 3 more agar dishes with it ready to use straight to grain. It's a really dark broth.
I soaked a bunch of rye yesterday and am about to go prepare it for it's run through the PC. Going to put shiitake 3790 (my cold weather shiitake) to half of it. Start a grain master with the warm weather shiitake with some of it as well.
Many mushrooms to come. I'll even take some pictures!