Good morning my friends! I wanted to share with you my first attempt with liquid cultures. I've grown from spore prints and syringes before but for some reason I have never tried a liquid culture. Here's my experience:
Tools:
ULTRA clean environment
1 quart Mason Jar
Clean spore print (in this case: Cambodian)
Pot to sterilize jar (with a dish towel at the bottom)
Pot to smoke :potl:
300 ml of water (Filtered tap water)
3 tablespoons of Karo light syrup ([color=#FF0000]red label)
Tin foil
Hammer & nail
I tried to follow this TEK pretty close
http://www.freeseedring.nl/viewtopic.php?f=97&t=2298 (Thanks eikon!)
Like any endeavor I start with vaporizing a fresh bowl. :smok:
Then I cleaned my working area, started with steam cleaning
everything. Cabinet doors, counter tops, all my utensils, etc. Then a once over with a couple Lysol wipes for good measure, followed by a spray of Lysol into the air just to make sure. I’ll keep alcohol & paper towels close by for sterilizing too.
Used a hammer & nail to make a hole in the top of the Mason jar lid. Filled 1 quart Mason Jar with 300 ml of water and added 3 tablespoons of Karo light syrup. Screwed lid on and topped with a couple pieces of tin foil and shook jar vigorously.
I filled a pot with cold tap water about 2/3 the way up the jar with a small clean dishtowel at the bottom. I don’t own a pressure cooker, never have and I doubt I ever will. I’ve found if you keep your environment clean and be anal about taking extra steps to be sanitary, then boiling the jars works just as well. The microwave method works well too but I had a glass jar full of boiling water shatter on me so I’ve been scared of it since. I put the dishtowel on the bottom so when the water boils and the jar rattles against the bottom of the pot, it won’t break. Brought water to boil and let it boil for 25 minutes. Enough time to vape another bowl. :potl:
After the boil time is over, carefully remove jar from water and let sit until it’s back around room temperature. It’s very important to wait until your jar is cooled because if the water is still to hot it will kill your spores. Usually I will just shoot a couple cc’s of spore solution into the jar via the inoculation hole in the top but this time I wanted to try something a little different. I opened up my spore print, which had recently been scraped to make a syringe, and just tapped some of the loose spores off of the print into to open jar of liquid culture. Screwed the lid back on, covered with a piece of tin foil, shook a little to mix the spores with the culture, wrapped it with a towel to keep out light and help it hold a steady temperature, and set it on top of my water heater. I had mail ordered a aquarium heater for my incubation chamber that wasn’t in yet, so the water heater method worked out well.

Every night I would check on my jar, shake her up a little, and make sure the temperature was between 80-90F.
In a week my incubation chamber was set up and ready to inoculate the jars. So after not 7 full days this is what I had.

I pulled out the jar and broke up the growing mycelium as best as I could so it could be drawn into a syringe.

I inoculated 6 jars with the liquid culture and 6 jars with spore solution so I could see a comparison in how beneficial this method is. Substrate jars and liquid culture jar are now in the incubation chamber at 86F, it still gets shaken ever day when I check conditions.
Any comments, critiques, or criticisms are welcomed and appreciated.