fungi1963

I have to move and cannot take my beloved flow hood with me. Needs a loving home where it can give many years of good service to its new owner!

Straw sounds exciting, I still have about 600 litres of the stuff chopped and loose packed I need to use up. Is your pasteurisation purely heat based or using a lime soak? I've been doing the latter in insulated eski containers. Cheers, Fungi1963

Looking good mate. For the straw I chop mine up in a couple minutes tops. But I'm using the baby ozito chainsaw you get when on sale at Bunnings for around the 80 mark. Feeds that inner man beast having a petrol saw blazing through a bale at warp speed. Handy little unit when you don't want to run a $1,200 saw through an unknown quality bale. And severely underestimated too, I then climbed a full grown eucalyptus and cut it down to the ground with that tiny saw just to see if it could do it and was amazed at how well it did it. I've got a few logs in barrels for a couple log grow experiments to thanks to this saw. With the freezer I suppose I could but I also use it for fermentations so I'm trying to keep it as multipurposed as possible at the moment so I haven't tipped or modded it yet but if I dedicate it then its full on for modification. Though I just had a thought of building an aluminium flyscreen from and putting in screen material and using that in liue of the lid when the large mass overheats. The mass is so great its sometimes hard to control temps in the core of the straw. Cheers, Fungi1963

This is the story of my life! :-)Work tends to get in the way, or is it the spawn never seems to want to align for the weekend. Once I get to the second shaking required I usually get fed up and do a midweek straw run into the wee hours of the night. I haven't solved the overheating issue with large amounts of spawn in the fridge at one time but I've been thinking of punching a hold in the top of the chest freezer and running a PVC pipe down near the floor with fans for active co² evacuation and screens for insect barrier and perhaps fins a co2 controller to activate the fans automatically but haven't thought up a heat vent solution unless I go simple and stick a flat object on top of the pipe when wanting to keep the heat inside and then off when wanting to vent.

Very nice. *big smile*

I went grocery shopping this weekend in the local forest. Let's just say I am a very happy little vegemite! --- If I only brought more bags I could have filled the back of the car with them! I even had enough time during the hunt to collect my own wild strains of Trametes Versicolor (Turkey Tail mushroom) and get it put down on the agar plate for incubation. I started with some slippery jacks but then said buggar it, I'm all about milk caps today!

I've had an eye on a few in the USA from Amazon, again not laboratory grade optics but some decent scopes for the money, the bundled digital cameras are usually crap but if you get a scope with the attachment while leaving you free to view at the same time you can add your own camera later and pick something better in quality and probably same or lower in price. I googled microscopesindia and get a lot of from China hits as well. No idea whats up, most seem to come from China these days. Prices don't seem all that better than Amazon which probably has better warranty/returns??

H2O2 is only for clean up work or running mycelium of already germinated spores. You use it to prevent spores from germinating, hence good for high contam or low-sterile environments. Good for wild cloning too where you can dip the harvested fragment of mycelium into H2O2 to clean up the cut surfaces prior to applying to agar plates.

Thank you for the suggestion, I had a look at all images google had indexed for Xerula but couldn't find a match yet.

I did look at the other mycological flora on the hunt. Only grey's I remember had bloody long stems elevating them well above the forest floor. Caps were dark gray over more than half with the other side light gray (sun induced?). I didn't stop to look too much as I was fighting time with sunset less than 45 minutes away. These saffron's were extremely prolific but were not strong flavoured at all. They weren't bitter but they didn't have the perfumed accents I've gotten from other locations.

1st Fruting of the new mushroom setup after the fire took everything from me. My Oyster (Pleurotus ostreatus) strain is turning out to be a real pinner. A few photos Day 1 after initiating lighting into the fruiting chamber. And one photo Day 2 after initiating lighting into the fruting chamber. This strain is is looking like a good one, I'd feel confident releasing it to anyone. I put in my first two King Oyster (Pleurotus eryngii) crates into the fruting chamber so more pinning pr0n to come!

Yeah I've already switched the lighting to natural sunlight and they are flattening out quite well. Midday sun is removed and ambient light only at that time of day but the morning and late afternoon sun they get plenty of and are loving it.

I've taken most off the top ones off already, this is what they are like when about fully grown: King Oyster (Pleurotus eryngii) are still spawning out in the spawning chamber, a whilt to go yet for those.

I have them on variable temp scale 16-20C ramped.

I am more interested in those half hidden privates. Could be real interesting or a great disappointment. The world may never know...but is that what the $10 off applies to?

As I feared I had meltage in the pressure cooker, the test tubes were Wiltronics' polypropylene and held up well but the blue test tube caps are hdpe and as I thought might happen, melted and deformed at 30 minutes sterilisation at 15 psi. In other news, the polypropylene plates are doing great and this King Oyster is happy to be making itself at home and growing away quite happily.

I have to get the culture library up and running pronto, whats everyone using and where's the best place to get some?

Anyone working with Eucalyptus for wood lovers? Hoping to have an exchange of recipes. Here's mine for sawdust spawn. 80% eucalyptus sawdust 20% rice bran water to achieve 60% moisture content If inoculating flammulina velutipes (Enoki mushroom) fill jars, and pressure cook at 15 psi for one hour.

Thank you for the direct link. I was looking for glass culture tubes with screw top and washer seals as my cooker is 118C which exceeds the melting point of HDPE and most other plastics. Are you guys just steam sterilising in a standard stove pot and not using pressure? These also are just push in plastic tops, no issues with gas escape and cultures drying out under cold storage without a seal ring and positive pressure afforded by a screw cap?

Couldn't find them on that site. Any other good places anyone knows to get them?

After being wiped out by bushfire, I'm slowly, sometimes slower than I would prefer but still steadyily rebuilding. I have a replacement pressure cooker, 1000 plastic petris, a few bags of agar, some new temperature controllers, an old chest freezer converted to a heated incubator and about 10 cloned oyster mushrooms already growing by leaps and bounds inside. I am sticking to the edibles for now as I can grow them out in low-sterility environments as I really need so much more gear before I can do proper agar work, and especially master storage slants for rebuilding the culture library. For now I'm using prepared cardboard as the cloning media and its working very well with the media hostile to most contaminants. Soon I hope to have spawn and prints to trade or give away to anyone wanting to give edibles a go or learn what I've been doing and join in better with everyone and goings on here. Until that time, one thing I have always been looking to re-add to the gear collection is Stamets books. So if you have any TMC & GG&MM books laying around growing dust bunnies let me know. I'll be needing to get back into building or buying a still air glove box and laminar flow hepa unit to get back into sterile technique. I'll leave the bacticinerator out this time and just look at finding a place to get an alcohol lamp/burner I think Cheers, Fungi1963

Yes cold storage. Cheers!

I can't take good photos, but Steve Axford can. Sharing some favourites below. Cyptotrama aspratum or Gold tuft. Hygrocybe stevensoniae, NZ. Mycena adonis. Leratiomyces sp. Booyong, NSW. Campanella sp. Red cup fungi. Hairy mycena. Closeup of tiny mycena fungi. This species is (as yet) unidentified and is about 1cm high, though... Luminous fungi (Mycena chlorophos). Blue fungi (Leratiomyces sp.) Mycena interrupta. Marasmius haematocephalus, Booyong. Mycena fungi on immature macadamia nut, near Booyong, NSW. Hygrocybe graminicolor. Fungi. :-) Filoboletus manipularis. Marasmius c.f. meridionalis. Looks like a cup fungi – but it isn't. Near Booyong, NSW. Cyathus novaezelandiae or Birds Nest Fungi, Tara Ridge. Leratiomyces ceres (Redlead Roundhead). Aseroe rubra (starfish fungi). Mycena austrororida. White mycena. Yellow mycena. Marasmius haematocephalus. Pink Hygrocybe. Possibly Hygrocybe graminicolor. Leratiomyces sp. Like 3 little light globes. Found in Booyong Reserve, Booyong, NSW. Bolete. Large – 10-15cm across. Grows under a eucalypt so possible mycorrhizal.

What's the vanilla for? I'm currently using: 10g agar 10g LME 2g yeast To this base you can add a small sample of intended end substrate. Wondering how Therefore went with the PDA type recipe above.

Great sites, I didn't know the books were still in print as they're getting to be over 20 years old since published. I used to get from Amazon but they've become more difficult of late to deal with internationally. Plus they've hiked postage a lot since years ago when I first got books from them.