NSF

This is a side track but I really think we educate new comers to mycology the wrong way around. We go in the same way as the mushroom lifecycle but really we should do it in reverse. We should help people make their fruiting rooms and encourage people to buy ready to fruit blocks. Then once they pass that, they go backwards to grain inoculation of substrate and substrate prep. Once they are successful, go to grain to grain. Then last and hardest is sterile tissue work...which is the bit we're currently discussing. In my opinion it's the easiest to get wrong and the most disheartening when it goes wrong, as it prevents all other parts of the life cycle from being possible.

I can't believe people are finding the no pour tek so hard. It's a piece of piss and it's definitely the way to go. Mix the liquids of your agar recipe, I use Stamets MYEA recipe (have tried others and will use them when ingredients aren't available). Mix in the powders, malt extract is best in powdered form, light malt, not dark malt. It's pretty much another sugar. No you don't want maltodextrin. Heat and dissolve the powders. Slowly stir in your agar and bring to the boil, keep stirring, it will boil over. Let it cool slightly, or not if you are pouring from a turkish coffee pot, with the nice long handle. Put sauce containers all over your bench and pour a good 30 of them. Leave the lids off, let those suckers cool right down to room temp. Then put lids on them all. I then stack them in towers of 8. I put each stack of 8 into a 80mm wide PP bag, I fold the bottom under and I put them in my PC. So I tend to PC four towers of 8, each in their own bags. Also, put your scalpel or pin or knife or tweezers or lock picking tool into a PP bag, add a drop of water and roll up, put that in your PC too. You could seal the bags up with sandwich bag twist ties. Let the PC come to heat until it's blowing steam with gusto. Then add the weight. Once the weight starts dancing set your timer for 60 mins and set the temp right so the weight is just dancing a little. After 60 mins, turn off the heat. Come back the following day to a completely cooled PC and carry it to your running hood. Open it in your hood and get to work. If you don't use all your plates, don't worry, they are double sealed from contams.

Don't get petri dishes, well glass is ok but ordinary petri dishes are a single use item. I've got a few tubes of gamma radiated sealed tubes of petri dishes if you did happen to want to buy some. You can't PC them though, as I found out...messy. Why do you need big diameter sauce containers? Just pour a couple more smaller dishes, take less wedges from each. It's also better to have more dishes, meaning one contam shouldn't affect all. I buy the smallest take away 'sauce' containers I can, I get them from an asian grocer. A couple of bucks for 50, a couple of bucks for some lids. When I say sauce containers, you know what you get take away soy, or sweet and sour or sweet chilli sauce in. Maybe 50ml capacity.

Oops, I just posted a question in the other thread. My bad. I'd love to try and find, eat and cultivate these.

I haven't done log grows but I hear that nitens is the greatest, in fact I've read a study that logs cut, left to sit for 6 weeks, then inoculated will produce the greatest yields. Although you don't want a log with a diameter greater than 15cm, otherwise there's too much heart wood, which is low in sugars. I've had success with sawdust added to the boiling water, strained, then add the agar. I've also boiled grain and sawdust together. They worked fine. Whether they worked better, well I didn't keep good enough records. I had the theory that I was going to put the mycelium on grain, then on sawdust, so why not have it exposed to both from the outset. You can prepare sawdust spawn rather than breaking up old blocks or grain spawn. Good work on identifying that grain spawn counts as a substrate. Because S75 is so finnicky about supplements I like to use ww44. It produces great meaty fruit. The safest way to produce spawn is to go from agar to grain master (about 1 litre) and then from there expand to production grain (20 or more litres). Once you use all that up, go back to agar and go to a fresh grain master. Because you have agar at the start of your process you can always ID contams. You keep your strain vigorous too.

Where the hell are the Craterellus? Someone get a print! They aren't mycorrhizal!

Do not be afraid of high temps. Shiitake love the high temps. My oysters are still producing lovely bouquets. I'm in Melbourne and we've had a few days in the forties and it has been very dry. I just heard a few drops of rain, the first for about 4 weeks. In the last couple of weeks I've had agaricus, agrocybe, nebrodensis, shiitake and oysters. The other thing you need to consider is that 8 weeks from now you are heading in to Autumn which is perfect conditions. So you should be trying to produce as much substrate now and inoculate it, by the time it colonises you'll welcome the cooler weather with open arms. I'm more than happy to help you out. I can even supply you some spawn if you are looking for it. My grow room is just a few bits of green house plastic under the deck, it isn't temp controlled and the breeze gets in there, drying it out. My humidity is pumped in but it's only on a timer.

If you know of some nice southern slope pine plantations where we can hunt saffies and they're closer to home I'm happy to go to those instead.

SA is apparently where to find ceps (boletus edulis). I'll be inoculating some Pinus pinea and some chestnut seedlings with Boletus aereus once the weather cools down. ZPBG if you want to head out for a hunt in the pines near marysville and we make a day trip of it then let me know. I'm keen. Oh and native chanterelles grow on natives, well, that's where I've found them. They're tiny, elusive and infrequent too...bastards.

It tends to rely on mid august rains and the rains need to keep coming through until September, it's normally all over by October. I managed to get out with a pro and we picked 23kgs of these bad boys in half a day. Was a very exciting day for me! Pretty exciting for him too at $60 a kg.

any temp above about 60 (i think) kills h202 and prevents it being effective at all. So you can add it before you PC but it will be rendered useless during the cooking. Instead of using h202 I like to pour my plates into take away PP sauce containers, 50ml odd, put the lids on, make a stack about 8 high and put those in a little PP bag, fold the bag over and PC (well I make a few of these stacks and PC altogether). So the only time they are exposed to contams is when I am putting tissue onto them inside my hood. So I go with the less vector theory, rather than defense theory. Defense theory being h202.

Adding the silver and the h202 post cook? Once the temp of the agar has dropped a little but before it sets?

Psylo, can you please post a link to the seller of the AA you are getting?

The shipping from the US would be prohibitively expensive. I'm sure like any business that Aussie mushroom supplies is making a profit, but looking at the prices, he's not making as much profit as red back trading. I had an Op shop try and sell me 1L Utility jars, dirty, without lids for $3 each. I laughed and told them where to go. The chick had looked online and saw they were apparently $9 each brand new and thought she was doing me a favour offering them for $3. GTFO!

You can keep it all in the family and get your jars and lids from this bloke: http://www.aussimushroomsupplies.com/index.php?cPath=5&osCsid=418a302744a4de91ba257a1e07789bb6 Better priced than redback.

Just on the issue with asbestos...asbestos is perfectly safe to eat, it doesn't cause your digestive tract any harm whatsoever. If you breath in the fibres, well that's a different story altogether. /backontopic

Interesting about using it in casing. This recipe definitely isn't for casing though. That doesn't mean they don't use it in casing too but this is just in the spawn lab.

Any vague directions for us geologically inept hunters out there? I am STINGING to get out and hunt some of these bad boys!

You actually want both for rye spawn. You generally don't want to put lime/chalk in your substrate mixes though, unless you want to alter the pH. That being said, I've got some grow bags that I added a little lime to that are still flushing 12 months after inoculation. Here's a bulk grain spawn ingredient chart. Equal weight of grain to water. Just do some math to divide it down to the size of your grain cook.

Is anyone prepared to tell him that his HUG kit isn't Hypsizygus but it's just a different strain of oyster? H. ulmarius doesn't have decurrent gills, just like H. tessulatus.

If you live near an asian grocer they often have tubes of them, clearly I'm on the sauce container bandwagon. Not being able to use a plastic petri dish twice was a rather messy and disappointing discovery.

So were you finding Suillus granulatus, Suillus luteus or Phlebopus marginatus? Maybe Leccinum scabrum? I know there are porcini in the Adelaide hills but because they fetch such a good price the spots are very guarded secrets. Yes, you can buy them in Adelaide markets these days. I'm a Victorian resident and I just want to road trip over there and feel the excitement of finding porcini! I'd help pick them, then maybe buy a few and cook them right there in the forest. There's zero chance of anyone sharing their known spots though.

What about Ganoderma Rude for the second one?

You're in aus, you don't need to source prints. Why not speed things along and spend the same amount of money on a bag of grain spawn (plus $12 or so for shipping?) Or even one step back and get an agar plate sent to you? I'm happy to help you out with either. Omsource is selling ready made bags about to spring forth with fruit. He's got plates and spawn too. I'd recommend going with that rather than a print.

You've found porcini?! I'd consider handing over my left one to know one or two of those locations! Any pics?