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(1) For the love of all things good in this world, do not store more grain than you have to; or at least store it properly. For most of my commercial cultures I use organic wheat grain. Some time ago I bought 30kg sack, thinking I would cut down on costs by buying in bulk. The first sign of trouble was a few pantry moths flying around the lab. No problems I thought, I'll leave the sack out in the sun for the day to kill off the weevils and store it in another room. Well, it turns out the sack was infested, and with the humid warm conditions of late summer, I soon had 100's of moths in all my rooms, in all my medias, in all my grains, in all my supplements, in all my everything! (2) Put your agar plates in the fridge as soon as they have set. Leaving agar plates out on the bench for extended periods of time gives mites (YES MITES) a chance to crawl in, contaminate your plates with asper. sp and/ or lay eggs that will ruin your culture later. Don't try to save your plates; freeze them to kill the mites and throw away. Again, this time of year is particularly bad with high humidity. (3) If you can avoid it, don't have any timber in your clean space- given enough time and moisture you can have a mold city growing under benches, which you wont know about, absolutely loading the air with spores. Keep it stainless or plastic. Learn from my mistakes fellow mycologists. With love, Mimz