48 replies to this topic

[Auhron]

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!

[Arathu]

Funny how the urge AND circumstances ebb and flow.......it is a common theme and trait among the fungiphiles of the world....

 

Welcome home!

 

A

[MushLuvR]

Can't wait to see some results, Growing Medicinal/Edible mushrooms is JUST as addicting as playing with the Actives.  Changed me as a grower completely, getting out of the comfort zone of Cubes and expanding.  I want to grow them ALL... and Welcome Back.  Good Luck and serenity in your endeavors, Woodie Blocks for Life. 

 

MushL 

Edited by MushLuvR, 27 May 2022 - 02:11 PM.

[Auhron]

I mentioned pictures earlier!

 

Right before my break from growing I made a few upgrades to my tent that I did not document.  Due to the size of the tent as compared to the container I was using before - the reptile terrarium humidifier was not sufficient to maintain the required humidity so I got a 5 disc ultrasonic mist maker, it's in the tote seen here, which is its water reservoir, intake fan pushes the air/mist up through the pipe into the fruiting chamber. It is controlled by an inkbird humidity controller. The fan is rated at 54cfm, the tent is 54cf so I have a speed controller for it, should be about 12x fae per hour.

The light is affixed to the top of the pipe the cool humid refreshing life giving air is being brought in by. I have to add a few more holes though.

 Space for second set of shelves in front of this one

 

I got a rack for use in front of the air filter, helps with the agar work. I also acquired an impulse sealer!

 

4 strains of LC started 2 jars of each there is growth in the Blue Oyster Lions Mane and Cold Weather Shiitake. The Warm Weather Shiitake hates liquid mediums... I did not bother trying to picture the 2 days of growth in my strangely murky nutrient broth of oak tea.

 

Lots of grain sterilized yesterday, inoculated today, 3x Shiitake 3790, 1 Shiitake Warm Weather ( I believe the strain is solstice, or summer solstice?), 2x Lions Mane, 1x the Prince - for rd.3 of experimentation (will it fruit? or is it just a really nice compost accelerator?!?!) The little grain jars all look dirty, I put a pinch of gypsum in each grain jar, but perhaps too much? time will tell.  There is a bigger grain jar in the back, that was one of the old ones. but I didn't use liquid Culture to inoculate it, growth is stalled. It was too dry I think. I injected it with sterile nutrient broth, perhaps it'll fill out I'll give it a week. There are 8 plates with the warm weather shiitake on them there, hopefully I was meticulous enough with my sterile technique and can keep most of them.

 

6 and 1/3 fruiting blocks on the go.  The 1/3 is a small bit of substrate for "The Prince" that was sterilized 10ish months ago - 2 days in and the rather unhappy mycelium is fuzzing up onto its new food source. 3 Blocks of oyster on the mystery substrate, 2 blocks of lions mane on fresh substrate. 1 block of enoki. the enoki is part old substrate, part new. Take special note of how crisp and straight the seal on those bags are. A big step up from quadruple wrapped with elastic bands at the top!

 

Oyster recovering in it's new home

[Arathu]

Hahaha....you're done Auhron! No turning back now it just gets crazier......That's Awesome!

 

A 5 disc fogger makes for some serious mists......

 

I have to go up to Tractor Supply and get some new syringes and needles.....see if my cultures in the fridge will spark back up...

 

Good stuff.....I love this hobby......and it tastes SOOOO GOOD.....

 

A

[Auhron]

Best hobby ever. So many tasty treats. I hope your cultures are healthy!

[Auhron]

Dug the Pioppino culture out of the fridge. There was a moment of sadness. It is not supposed to look like that!! You can see there are some voids where I've made some transfers. I hope they are clean, and I hope it recovers.

 

[Arathu]

I always feel bad when I wait too long........good recovery vibes....

 

I have spawn on order......  

 

And more plates to pour.......there's always a fungus that wants to play.....

 

A

[Auhron]

Yes, always more Fungus to play with!

 

  An interesting observation, the 4 transfers I made from the Pioppino are all fuzzy, no substantial growth but all clean white fuzz.  The Original plate looks the same as the photo from yesterday, there is no fuzz at all around where I cut the transfers from.  Healthy mycelium on a clean plate grows, old contaminated plate fighting to survive, no growth.

 

 

It is a poor photo I know, but it's almost in focus in the bottom right... point is that the mycelium lives!  I offered the culture some words of encouragement. The new growth is all over the original chunk - it hasn't seemed to have jumped off onto the new agar yet.

Edited by Auhron, 31 May 2022 - 12:35 AM.

[Auhron]

Speaking of new agar:

 

I made a batch today, 500ml water, 10g agar, 10g Malt, 1g Nutritional Yeast, 0.5g Activated Charcoal.  Sterilized my glassware in the oven while the agar was in the PC.  It was twice as much as I ended up needing due to the new pour method I tried, using much less agar.

 

 

I've placed a jar of hot water on top of each stack while they cool - should help with the visible condensation on some of those plates.  I also should have let the agar cool a tiny bit more before I started. I now have 33 more plates - I used the syringe method to "pour" the plates they were only opened the tiniest clamshell directly in front of the filter. I will update a count on "clean" plates on Friday. My previous batch of plates was about a 20% fail rate, I am hoping for better results this time.

 

I also just ordered some new cultures immediately after I finished wrapping all the plates. (I might have a problem). Shimeji, Chestnut, Black Pearl King, Tarragon Oysters and Golden Oysters. Maintaining 14 cultures should be an interesting challenge. We shall see if I've overstepped.

[MushLuvR]

I've been meaning to grab that Black Pearl King myself, can't wait to see your work, most of those should be fast to fruit, looks like the longest block cycle you have is the Shiitakes.  Time it all out so you aren't overwhelmed with fruits, TRUST me, I've been there (went LM Crazy during early Pandemic).  All the best with your projects, wonderful lineup of cultures you have. 

 

MushL    

[Arathu]

I ordered plugs for my logs and some sawdust spawn for experiments.....as soon as they arrive I'll mix up a couple of new batches and pour more plates too.....

 

That is a nice lineup you're going with.....I'm going to dump some work into black and yellow morels while my logs are colonizing...

 

A

[Auhron]

@MushLuvR - Yes, while not everything is going to be running on fruiting blocks at the same time (I intend to stagger things somewhat), there will definitely be times when I'll be buried in mushrooms   I've been there before too, eating mushrooms 2x everyday, overwhelmed with flavor!  I'm excited about the Black Pearl King the most of those new cultures. I'm actually getting an extra set of shelves dedicated for the numerous Shiitake blocks that are going to start piling up...
 
@Arathu - Nice!! Morels are my 2nd favorite mushrooms, there happens to be a tree in my backyard that would work too, that project is in the distant future for me though. I hope you have success with it.  More Shiitake logs? or do you have other kinds planned? I was definitely a tad jealous of those you had on your adventures thread a couple months back.
 
 
Grow Log Updates::
 
The Oak tea for a Shiiitake LC idea was a bust, the 3790 grew a tiny (yet sadly disappointing) bit for the first few days but died a tragic death to the magnetic stir plate. There was no recovery. The Solstice just doesn't grow in LC (for me at any rate) I have 8 plates of the Solstice grown out ready to be used as inoculum, one of them was used today on a pint jar of Rye.  A liquid culture for 3790 has been started again from the mother culture on a standard Malt/Dextrose LC.  Last week I ordered a culture of Shiitake 3782, it arrived on Monday and was in my possession for less than 2 minutes before it was in a LC and on a couple agar plates. There are 3 strains of Shiitake in my collection now - I should be able to keep at least one of them happy enough to fruit for me right? I hope so. There needs to be more Shiitake in my life.

 

Made enough jars of LC that when my new order arrives in a few days I'll be able to do the same as I did with the shiitake culture and start expanding them all immediately.  Started a fresh LC for Enoki and one for Pioppino (Black Poplar) as both plates had grown out enough, and out of impatience (not wanting to wait for the afore mentioned LC to grow out) I used the rest of the plate of Pioppino to inoculate a half pint of Rye. 

 

I have a couple plates of Maitake (Grifola Frondosa) that I'm trying to grow out from the old mother, but they are moving VERY slowly - anyone have thoughts on reviving old cultures? this is the only one from my collection that hasn't really recovered from storage.

 

White Oyster Fruiting blocks are 80%ish done.  So close...

 

Enoki block was a combination of substrates and it seems to have confused the Enoki. I started a new half pint of grain, It will be spawned to softwood masters mix, seems to be the substrate of choice given how this bag looks.

 

 

HUGE IMPORTANT AWESOME UPDATE

I ordered a pressure cooker that is actually big enough for a large myco bag filled with substrate!! Gone will be the days of me sterilizing substrate 4 PINT JARS at a time because that's all that fits in my old pressure cooker, then having to transfer 8 or 9 pints in front of the filter to build a block... so yeah, there's that. Probably should have taken this step sooner. It is going to save me a whole bunch of time and eliminate a vector of contamination.  Should arrive within two weeks!!

 

 

The ambitious plan for this year is to fruit all of the mushroom cultures on this list:

• Grey Oyster
• Blue Oyster
• White Oyster
• Golden Oyster
• Tarragon Oyster
• Black Pearl King Oyster
• Lions Mane
• Maitake
• Enoki
• Shimeji
• Pioppino
• Chestnut
• The Prince
• Shiitake - Solstice
• Shiitake - 3790
• Shiitake - 3782

Maitake currently failing to come back to life, and I failed on 3 attempts with fruiting The Prince last year. Those I'm predicting to be the trouble spots. Oysters eat everything and fruit like crazy so there should be no trouble there. The Shiitakes will be an exercise in patience more than anything, we've played successfully before. We'll have some learning to do with the others.

[Arathu]

More shiitake, plus lions mane, golden oyster, and blue oyster all of which will go into logs....I also have a culture of reishi coming and definitely waiting to see if the maitake fruits again this fall....

 

More maitake will happen this coming fall into/over winter with intention to get it fruiting from large oak masses buried in the ground.....

 

Definitely operation morchella is under way....I've already created the first bed...

 

Your list is quite ambitious and, like I said earlier, hahaha YOU'RE DONE.....a hopeless servant of our fungal overlords! (like I have any room to talk)

 

I intend to have quite the log collection......and I'd love to build a small facility just for growing mushrooms....you never know....it could happen....

 

A

[rockyfungus]

Time for me to take a break and live vicariously through you guys!
Keep it up ya'll. 

[Arathu]

One of the beauties of the OMC.....vicarious cultures and substrates.....

 

Until one can bear it no longer....and then once again...a loop gets touched to another set of plates...

 

You can run rocky.....but you can't hide from the fungi...

 

A

[Oldpunk]

Holy mushroom madness.
That really is quite a list. Im looking forward to following your journey.

Excellent write ups so far.

[Auhron]

Yes Rocky, Enjoy your break. The Fungi will be calling for your return shortly.... 

 

I am very curious about Reishi, I've read all about it, one day perhaps. I'm not taking on anything else for a while. Good Luck with all those logs!

[Auhron]

The Bad

 

  The first: I'm done with Agaricus Augustus (The Prince). It's off the list. Just sitting there like a lump on it's substrate.  It was to be more of a novelty anyways...Growing my own button mushrooms.  I'll hold onto the culture in case I change my mind but I am not going to put time into that endeavor right now, I'm thinking it was a pH issue with the substrate because I used horse manure instead of cow manure.  I have made some notes and am moving forward. Too many things to do.

 

The Second: my Pioppino culture, 2/3 plates started showing contamination, there had been 4 but 1 of them was the plate I started the liquid culture with so I asked myself -  was it contaminated and I couldn't see it yet? I looked at the liquid culture. Cloudy. Layer of Scum floating on top. Back to the other agar plates. I probably should remove the grain jar started with that plate too, before it goes fugly. Sadness.

 

The Third: Pretty sure I botched that whole batch of agar. Terribly.  They are all really bad for condensation and some are already showing signs of contamination. I doubt that it was the syringe pour method, they were barely even open, I'm thinking combination plates themselves not being 100% sterilized and the condensation.  I will try again on my next day off.  I must remember to be patient, More diligent on sterile technique. Maybe I was just breathing too hard because agar stresses me out at times. More Sadness.

 

So Much Failing so early on.  Everything is fine. We'll call the agar debacle a learning experience. Again. The Prince was lucky it even got put on the list in the first place. Here's hoping that last plate of Pioppino doesn't start showing signs of contamination.  Make more Agar!! Save the Pioppino!!

 

The Good

 

On the plus side my order arrived and I have the 5 new cultures: Shimeji, Chestnut, Black Pearl, Golden Oyster and Tarragon Oyster all expanding into LC's Hooray  The plan to immediately expand onto agar has been modified, see above.

 

I read a passage about culture preservation on slant tubes filled with nutrified sawdust instead of agar - higher nutrition, won't dry out as fast as agar. Additionally running mycelium onto water agar  (just water and agar in recipe no nutrition) then suspending a chunk of the leading edge mycelium in sterilized distilled water. Suspended animation!? Apparently it (the fungal culture) can be revived indefinitely and this method doesn't require refrigeration. Curious if anyone here has tried either method? Let me know your thoughts.

 

The First of 3 White Oyster blocks is 99.99% colonized! followed by 95% for the other 2. It is almost time.

[Arathu]

Bummer on the agar....but shit certainly happens....... I like to create a control plate or three during a pour that never get used.....poured, cooled in front of the flow hood and then Parafilm taped.....

 

IMHO it is worth practicing your technique and the entire protocol, especially if you're sterilizing you're own glass and then pouring your agar....with the goal of getting nice clear agar plates that don't contaminate......

 

Then I start checking cultures....cultures that have been sitting (I have had very poor results trying NOT to use refrigerated storage) even in the refrigerator I suspect everything......

 

Without having a permanent laboratory it gets tricky. I definitely have to remind myself of the contamination vectors (probably worth making a big old poster and hanging it up) and keep myself in check....

 

Getting ready to start up my culture work again and feeling the some of the same anxiety about it although at this point I use that to motivate my diligence to technique as best as possible......

 

Do note that I have learned to take advantage of commercially produced spawn, just like my inbound plugs and sawdust so that while I'm screwing around with my home lab I have fungus growing in logs and bags too....

 

You might need to consider a flow hood upgrade if you're going to do large pours and spawn runs.....

 

It is disheartening at times but it is also from the struggles that we learn....trust me.....I've trashed not only agar and multiple cultures but also runs of grain in jars and bags.....it happens....

 

I also use Ziploc bags to keep my plates and cultures in and they go into a sealing Ziploc tote with a filter vent installed.

 

My house is 124 years old...the basement is stones and dirt.....I HAVE TO live and work with what I've go for now...the wife won't let me convert the living room or kitchen into a laboratory....yet...

 

Did I mention that I have an impressive compost heap?

 

Good vibes coming atcha!

 

A