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Morelman said:
I would just wash the screen as you suggested. Put that spore-laden water into spray bottles or better yet a pressurized spray tank.

Go out into the woods and spray it around ash or elm trees.

I have some grain masters that are going to become liquid mycelium syringes later today. I'm planning on inoculating my woodlot this weekend.

Several came up where I inoculated last year.

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BlimeyGrimey said:
It would have been best to take a small tissue sample and place it on agar to get a clean clone.

Simply mixing spore dust into substrate isn't a wise idea. Especially since the spores are on a fan, they are most likely contaminated with countless other spores.

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BlimeyGrimey said:
I've cloned many mushrooms without ever seeing trich magically pop out of the culture. You just have to get a deep and clean piece of tissue.

Maybe morels are different?

I never said he SHOULD mix spores into the substrate.

BlimeyGrimey said:
Simply mixing spore dust into substrate isn't a wise idea.

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Yes the morel fruitbodies from the woods are a different situation, they act like an air filter catching everything thats on the wind. They are contaminated, not only from
the constant flow of the wind and the contaminate spores that float on those currents, but Mucor species that are in the soil as well. I've seen morels have mucor sporangia growing on them before with the morel still growing in the ground. And the contaminates are able to grow into the tissue.
So you do run a chance of getting tissue that will also have a section of the contaminate as well.
Trichoderma likes to wrap around the hyphae of the host fungi. Also you might see a spot of white
mycelium growing on the caps sometimes and that isn't the morel, its a predatory mold.

Mixing? I was just supporting the fact that it wasn't a good idea. But spores of morel will out number the contaminate spores in large amounts, thus the odds of a clean culture are greater.


Just touching the top of that build up with a flame sterilized needle tip or wire will absolutely yield a sample of morel spores, and nothing else. The odds are just too high.

And cutting tissue from a stipe is just risky, I'd say the chances of getting a contaminate are higher.
and cutting tissue in the middle layers of the stipe require higher precision and tools to do that.
Its not practical.

In addition to that, the morel mycelium itself is in a state that is different than what it is once germinated from a spore. That is, the state it is in during fruitbody development is the sexual cycle, and deriving sustenance from what has been stored away during dormancy in the form of lipids that are triglycerides. Thus it is in a different mode, it isn't out to feed but rather out to reproduce or fruit.
You're just cloning the organism while its in the sexual cycle.

Now if you wanted to try to extend the mycelium that is in the sexual cycle you would have to figure out how to replace the presence of the missing sclerotium, supplying the fungus with those lipids or triglycerides and favorable conditions.

The cells of those stipe tissue samples are going to be in a different state. Not like normal hyphae.