Thank you, I was so pleased to see this transfer grow out so vigorously, knew I had to share!
For starters, I do all my work under a laminar flow hood. This is from a liquid culture syringe, it took about two weeks for the first blob of mycelium to grow out on the agar and was a bit sporadic but with sections of nice rhizomorphic growth. Once I had enough good sections to choose from, I transferred a few wedges to fresh plates. From there it was about 12 days until I had the plate above, but it was very consistent growth across all transfers (took 3, this is just the one I ended up turning into LC).
For agar, I make my own using this video by Fungaia as a general recipe base. It’s more involved to make because it calls for more than just water/agar/sugar/peptone, but rather all that plus a mix of pulverised grains, straw, hardwoods, and other trace minerals. I strongly believe in it, though, I feel like the industry standard recipe for agar is easier to make but lacks complex nutrition. In the video, it is equated to a person drinking nothing but soda. Sure, there’s calories there that our bodies are capable of processing, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be healthy, especially when compared to a person eating full balanced meals.
For capturing and storing genetics, I like using a tube like this to drop some of the best agar wedges into, top that up with sterilized water, cap, wrap the cap with parafilm, then fridge.
Thank you so much for your response! I recently built a LFH and plan to start using it soon. Life’s been a bit hectic since we had a baby 7 months ago, so my hobbies have taken a back seat for a while. Right now I’m not messing with LC or agar because of a lack of bandwidth.
Please post about your LFH work.
I’m really impressed with your approach to working with agar. That mushroom species seems pretty rare and fascinating!
I’d love to see the substrate and fruit bodies you propagate this on too.
Thank you, I was so pleased to see this transfer grow out so vigorously, knew I had to share!
For starters, I do all my work under a laminar flow hood. This is from a liquid culture syringe, it took about two weeks for the first blob of mycelium to grow out on the agar and was a bit sporadic but with sections of nice rhizomorphic growth. Once I had enough good sections to choose from, I transferred a few wedges to fresh plates. From there it was about 12 days until I had the plate above, but it was very consistent growth across all transfers (took 3, this is just the one I ended up turning into LC).
For agar, I make my own using this video by Fungaia as a general recipe base. It’s more involved to make because it calls for more than just water/agar/sugar/peptone, but rather all that plus a mix of pulverised grains, straw, hardwoods, and other trace minerals. I strongly believe in it, though, I feel like the industry standard recipe for agar is easier to make but lacks complex nutrition. In the video, it is equated to a person drinking nothing but soda. Sure, there’s calories there that our bodies are capable of processing, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be healthy, especially when compared to a person eating full balanced meals.
For capturing and storing genetics, I like using a tube like this to drop some of the best agar wedges into, top that up with sterilized water, cap, wrap the cap with parafilm, then fridge.
Thank you so much for your response! I recently built a LFH and plan to start using it soon. Life’s been a bit hectic since we had a baby 7 months ago, so my hobbies have taken a back seat for a while. Right now I’m not messing with LC or agar because of a lack of bandwidth.
Please post about your LFH work.
I’m really impressed with your approach to working with agar. That mushroom species seems pretty rare and fascinating!
I’d love to see the substrate and fruit bodies you propagate this on too.