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[Psylo]

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Edited March 23, 2013 by Psylo

[Sallubrious]

Good questions Psylo, I've never done Shiitakes myself and I had the same questions myself.

My 2 cents

The traditional culture methods were mostly unsterile transfers so breaking up the block and expending it seems like a natural progression and should be a viable option. Once the culture is established it should be a fairly hardy adaptable beast that will lend itself to that method.

I've seen a few side by side comparisons with PDA to MEA and the MEA seems to come out on top in most cases, especially when you are trying to isolate rhizomorphic sectors (which doesn't always guarantee the production of good fruit producing strains but it does give a good idea of the vigour of the strain/substrain)

Roger Rabbit shot down the sawdust additives to agar a few times at the shroomery and he seemed to think it was unnecessary, I know it was in relation to woodlovers but I don't think it was specific to any genus, so don't take it as gospel. He stated something along the lines that the culture would just adapt to the cellulose medium without problems even with old stored cultures.

[Bigred]

i think the agar you use has a lot to do with the media you are going to transfer it to i got told adding the sawdust helps it

transfer to log's much easier

[waterboy 2.0]

I still do the odd block , mixture sawdust and shavings - no measurement but a handful of bran and half handful of gypsum. I am getting lazy and have room so I like real wood. Still not convinced that bran is needed, but a little doesnt hurt.

Just make sure if you have mostly sawdust you get some shavings to open the block up, otherwise colonisation will be patchy.

I run straight from agar to the block after doing a run out of plates. I alternate the agar to keep up vigour (which is sound practice) , but MEA seems to leap better onto the substrate IMO. I dont seed the agar with any wood/shavings , and it works, don't know if it would be better with it in.

Same with dowels, into myco bag and seed it off with agar wedges, once it leaps move it around every couple days until there are innoculation points well spread in the bag.

I cannot see why you cannot use a block as a master however(?). I would presume doing it before it browns off, as its heading towards pin initiation in this state.

[judanero]

Has anyone had any success with the innoculation of Eucalyptus logs?

[waterboy 2.0]

yep....shining gum -E.nitens the best to work with. If you have plantations near you and have access to the thinnings or a tree or two you'll have all you need.

I am playing with some other eucs and a some other natives here and have found a few promising species, but shining gum is king IMO.

Edited December 16, 2012 by waterboy

[trucha]

I'm growing the Aloha 75 among others.

It tends to form mutants and fruit in the bag if oversupplemented. It seems to be fine with up to 1:16 bran to sawdust. I'm mostly using tan-oak which is a Lithocarpus rather than a Quercus (its commercial firewood production waste so its already a nicely mix of particle size) I have played with a lot of different media components and mixes so far but I'm now back to tan-oak sawdust with just bran and gypsum. Making complex mixtures with fuel pellets and straw that I'd read about online gave good results in terms of colonization and fruiting but formed fragile blocks I could never get to brown right.

One error I was making and did not understand for a while was using too much grain spawn and not factoring that in as a supplement. I've dropped it to a spawn rate of twenty 2.5 kg bags per quart jar of colonized rye grain and that solved the issue. It was more of an problem for the 75 than any other strain I'm growing.

They've done fine on the bags I've done without bran too.

I think the reason most people don't do sawdust to sawdust transfers is simply increased risk of adding contaminants. It can work fine though -- I've done that fairly regularly with Hericium and also used it once to amplify some shiitake sawdust spawn of a strain I wanted to have more of for log plugging.

Its good to try inoculating anything that is a local resource. Its not like we don't all end up with some extra spawn to play with so experimentation even if failures is knowledge gained.

Edited January 23, 2013 by trucha

[NSF]

yep....shining gum -E.nitens the best to work with. If you have plantations near you and have access to the thinnings or a tree or two you'll have all you need.

I am playing with some other eucs and a some other natives here and have found a few promising species, but shining gum is king IMO.

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.

Edited January 28, 2013 by NSF

[Davo]

I've only done on Oak logs, but continue to have good results.

Will be doing another transfer in the near future and was just going to use agar to isolate then to sawdust and dowels before back to logs. My supply of Oak has run out as recently moved, but looking to the Australian natives with high hopes.