I've missed some stuff here.
Holidays just aren't holidays for me without an extra healthy dose of fuckin' off to remedy my raging case of the fuckits.
Got a question on making the jars up. I saw the process making the medium and topping it with vermiculite before steaming for a while. Would it be feasible to sterilize them in an oven instead of a pressure cooker type of thing? I know that you would need to be careful with the moisture level, more so than steaming, but it sounds like it should work out OK. Any thought from those who have ventured into this process?
Dry heat sterilization is really ineffective in this type of scenario where you need to penetrate into a three-dimensional core and keep the temperature there high and stable.
Steam/water carries heat far more effectively and can maintain those stable high temperatures.
The only thing the oven is useful for is sterilizing two-dimensional surfaces like those of foil for taking prints or glass petri dishes.
Anyone have any advice on how to best handle the next few days?
Walk away for 24 hours and relax:)
X1000.
Although they move at a really observable rate, it's always best to leave 'em be.
Clear lids make the gawking less intrusive.
First soak on this tub,
I’m seeing a bit of contamination where the stumps are located and also premature mushrooms, but overall everything is looking good............I think:)?
View attachment 1072277
Looks great!
As far as the 'aborts' and contamination over the stumps, it can be expected until you've got your culture cleaned and relatively isolated and your substrate preparation (field capacity) dialed in. Were you to gouge them out by plucking or grapefruit spoon, you would just leave even more opportunity for contamination to take hold.
Keep in mind that mycelium and mushroom tissue serve as a shield that encapsulate their food source/rhizosphere.
So long as there's full coverage of just one colony, then all the contaminating cultures are simply just stuck on the mycelium (or mushroom tissue), unable to germinate or replicate because there's nothing to actually latch onto or feed off of.
So, whenever we compromise that shield, we compromise the integrity of the the colony and thus leave gaps for contamination to find nutrient/habitat sources with which to replicate or germinate on.
There are, of course, predatory species like trichoderma that can do their own compromising of that shield, so we do our best to eliminate those competitors from the get-go with various preparations... one of the simplest being the use of mostly-inert substrates like coir.
www.docsdankspores.com
sporeworks.com
