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Messages - drfloyd

#1
PF - Tek / Re: Culture jar colonization?
September 26, 2013, 04:18:25 PM
What I've seen is to wait until the entire cake is colonized, then wait 2 days, THEN birth your cakes.  If you leave uncolonized parts of your cake exposed, they could get contaminated by the green stuff and ruin everything in your fruiting chamber.  My understanding of mushrooms of all types is they will put out chemicals that will inhibit growth of other organisms so if there is nothing exposed to colonize, then your cake is safe to birth.
#2
You could theoretically leave the jars as they are and pressure cook them which would kill everything in them and then reinoculate them dead mold and all.  That said, just clean them really well, don't even need to sterilize them at this point.  AFTER you put your rice/vermiculite or barley or rye seed in them, THEN you sterilize them.  Sterilizing before you put your grow mixture in is a waste of time and resources.  The pressure cooker is very important, don't just boil them, there are organisms that can live in boiling water, especially at high altitudes.  At 7000 ft, water boils at 87˚C/189˚F which makes the problem worse.  The combination of heat and pressure is why we can preserve foods and have them last for years in the basement.

That said, I had some VERY old spore syringes (10 years) that I just resurrected from my garage to try growing again.  The liquid was mostly dried up so...  I cleaned my work area really well with bleach 1:10 in addition to the outside of my syringes, then just soaked my syringe parts in some boiled, cooled water, stirred it up and inoculated 6 jars with the liquid.  After a week, there was plenty of the green and yellow mold growing inside, but each of the jars had some wonderful but small spots of just white.  I prepped 6 jars with barley & water, sterilized them (which also cooks the barley), then one at a time opened my contaminated jars, dumped them in my shower as if I was birthing a cake (in the shower so I could just rinse it later).  I carried them carefully to my sterile work area to not stir up the green spores and carefully clipped JUST a small bit (1-2 mm dia) of JUST the white mycelium, opened a barley jar and quickly put the white bit in.  I very carefully stayed as far away from the green areas as possible.  I put the lid on, shook like crazy.  That was 2 days ago and all of the jars are showing good colonization, one of them I had trouble breaking the lump up it is growing so well.  No sign of any contamination in any of the jars so far.