Thesis: This is a painfully specific step by step write up of the method I use to easily take my spores from print to fruits. It's fucking easy. Requires no flame sterilization. Minimal sterile procedure. Your plates / jars are open for less than 2 seconds during both inoculation of the agar itself and moving your agar to the jars. This write up needs some editing and more work but the essentials are here.
First off, there are not a lot of pictures yet since a lot of these moves take two hands. I will get a friend to help me take some good shots soon. There are some pictures at the end but first off let me show you some tubs / harvests I've made with this method. I finally got harvested some tubs tonight and took pics of the whole first flush.
here is an awesome video by Munchauzen that looks like this:
I cannot express in words what it means to have my writeup emulated and turned into a video. A picture may say a thousand words but a video of someone emulating me is the greatest honor I could ever be given. I have received tribute in a way so flattering and I cannot ever express how much joy this makes me feel. Thank you.
The text is copied directly from his post
here.First Flushes from Two Fiji tubs harvested 6/24
the tub on the right was cased with coir/verm/gypsum/EWC
The tub on the left has no casing and was removed completely from the tote for harvest / pictures.
First Flush Harvest from a Multispore Fiji Tub 5 oz and a Second Flush from the Same Tub
Stone Jars for Galindoi around 90 days
Clones taken to minirounds then dropped, then G2G.
I would like to make it clear that very little of this ‘Tek’ is my own. The only part that I really consider to be mine is the actual grain inoculation technique I use. I would like to make some acknowledgement to the people who have played a part in making this method possible, whether they realize it or not. Without this community I would never have gotten into this hobby as much as I did.
Stromrider - The first trade I ever made. You gave me great advice when I first began working with agar.
Pastywhite - Without your agar tek I probably wouldn’t have gotten into agar for a long time. You made this fucking easy and I hope you’ll approve of this, what I consider to be, extension of your work.
Blindingleaf - Talking with you and learning our similar histories actually accelerated my interest in mycology over the last two months. You showed me that this can truly be a great outlet for people like ourselves. I used to just have one or two projects going at a time. Now I have like 10 with more coming up.
Cronicr - Your positive attitude contributes to the over-all mood of mushcult and you have made visiting this forum a positive experience for myself. Your 50 dollar adventure made me realize how many resources I really have when I felt like I never had the right equipment for doing sensitive work.
Van der Greigen - A scientific eye in the community that must not be ignored.
There are others, if I missed you I’m sorry.
UPDATE: I missed Violet. They are the whole reason I got into using no pour agar teks in the first place.
Here we go.
“Tiger Drop” Tek - Grow from your own prints - The n00b Inoculation Method.
Short Summary For Those That Don't Want to Read This Wall of Text Make your pasty plates. Set up your SAB. Inoculate your plates with spores using pre sterilized swabs. After your plates have colonized free of contamination, drop the entire plate of agar into the jar and shake. This introduces a lot of inoculate into the grains quickly and then spreads all of the mycelium on the plate all over the grains. That's the basic concept. If you want to read my entire method then continue on to see step by step how I go through this process.
What You Need for Pasty Plates:- 1 pack of Glad mini rounds
- micro pore tape (I use polyfill to no detriment)
- a drill with a 1/4" bit or very hot nail
- paper towels
- Foil
- PC
- Bar of agar agar*
- Potato flakes*
- Karo or Honey*
- Coffee grinder*
- And of course a PC, even a shitty ass one will work
* =can be substituted by buying pre made Malt Extract Agar powder that is ready to mix.
What you need in addition:
- Cotton tip applicators or inoculation loop
- Your favorite Grain spawn in jars ready to go when its time to inoculate. Quart jars work best for the size of the agar puddle we're using.
- A Still Air Box or Glovebox or Laminar flowhood
- Sprayer of bleach / water mix (mix according to sanitation directions on the bleach bottle)
- 70% Isopropyl Alcohol
I use cotton swabs because they come already sterilized. This takes out the steps of flame sterilizing which I think makes things easier for n00bs. One less step to worry about.
Make Your PlatesThe first thing you need to do is prepare your no pour agar plates
according to Pastywhite’s method. Using the glad mini rounds becomes an important part to the technique later on. Some things to keep in mind:
1) When you’re pouring the plates it’s important to use the minimum amount of agar mix possible. I find that just one and a quarter teaspoon of prepped agar is enough to cover the bottom of the glad mini round.
2) Don’t forget to use the paper towels when you PC your mini rounds. This will greatly reduce the amount of condensation you get after the PC cycle.
3) If you do get more condensation than desired, it won’t affect your actual grow / inoculation and the excess moisture should go away on it’s own after a day or two. I personally like to wait til it evaporates before I inoculate.
Set Up Your SAB1) Turn off all fans and close windows in the room.
2) Spray bleach water into the SAB. When you do this it shouldn't be done thoughtlessly. I sanitize the walls with a few spritz and then spray the bleach into the air at the top of the box so that the droplets rain down and bring contamination with them to the floor.
"Spraying removes particles larger than 1um like mold spores from the air but it doesn't remove all bacteria from the air, in fact it actually aerosolizes more bacteria when it hits the walls. The slowly settling droplets after spraying are what removes the smaller particles you don't want to avoid their formation. " -Kizzle
You should practice this thoroughly.
3) Wipe down each object to be placed in the SAB with 70% isopropyl. One by one. Take care to get into all the grooves / valleys of the outside of the mini rounds. Don’t forget to wipe the ‘tab’ down, you’ll be putting your fingers on it to open the plate.
4) I put the sterile swabs in last. I use one swab for every two plates. Each pack has two swabs in it. I usually do 8 plates at a time so I put two packs in. I like to keep the swab packs off the floor of the SAB. To do this I usually lay them down on top of a wide mouth half pint jar.
5) I keep a wide mouth half pint jar with about a centimeter of iso in it and a paper towel soaking in it. This will be used for all my sanitation from this point on. I keep this outside the SAB but you can keep it inside if you want.
Clean Yourself1) I brush my teeth and use mouthwash.
2) I take a shower and I scrub my arms and hands down really hard with a pumice stone (though if you have one of those girly puffy things that will work too) My arms are usually a little red after I do this.
3) When I step out of the shower I let my arms air dry without toweling them off.I towel dry the rest of my body and usually just wrap the towel around myself and sit down at the SAB.
Begin Working1) I spray 5 - 10 spritz of bleach mist into the SAB one more time.
2) I put on latex / nitrile gloves and sanitize them AND my well scrubbed forearms with the alcohol paper towel.
3) I re-soak the paper towel in the puddle of alcohol to kill any contaminants it may have picked up when I wiped it on my arms and gloves. ( I recognize that this is not perfect, it’s just what I do)
4) INSIDE the SAB I wipe down all of the pasty plates one more time.
5) I rip the stick-end of the swab packages to expose their handles.
6) I open my print and keep it half folded at about a 45 degree angle. The idea is that while the print is resting on the floor of the SAB ( or an upside down wide mouth half pint) the folded angle will prevent SOME air borne contaminants from landing on the print. Sometimes I may sanitize the outside of the print before I open it depending on how it’s been stored. You’re going to handle the print multiple times during the process so it doesn’t hurt.
7) Print is open. Swabs are ready to be pulled. I re sanitize my gloves.
8) Careful not to let my fingers cross over the opening of the plate, I gently pull up on the tabs of the pasty plates. Just enough to loosen the lids so they can be opened quickly. You can do this one or two at a time or do all of them. It’s up to you. I like to do two at a time.
THE MOVE1) Plates are cracked, re sanitize your hands if you wish. Then pull a swab from it’s package.
2) Quickly scrape the tip of your swab against a small area of the print you’re using. The smaller the area the better. The more area your swab covers on the print the more you risk picking up contamination.
3) With the spores on the swab in one hand, I crack the lid of a plate by about 45 - 70 degrees and gently touch the tip of the swab to the agar. When I feel the swab touch the agar I ‘roll it’ between my thumb and forefinger very quickly and gently to smear the spores over the inoculation spot.
4) With the spores on the agar I remove the swab and replace the lid. Since you’re moving quickly and only have one hand free don’t worry about snapping the lid all the way down. Just re-cover it.
5) There are still enough spores on the swab to do another dish so move to the next plate and repeat steps 3 and 4.
6) After two plates are inoculated I discard the swab (though it’s probably fine to use it for all 8 plates. My focus in this tek is getting CLEAN inoculation the FIRST time to avoid cutting later on. I now crack the lids on two more plates and remove another swab and repeat steps 2 - 5)
Your dishes are now inoculated. You should see growth in about 3 days. Contamination should be easily visible. I discard contaminated agar and wash the plates immediately since I have no intention of using them. Although to date I have not had a SINGLE contaminated plate from my multispore inoculations using this method. The only time I’ve seen contamination is when I’ve cloned fruits.
Once your plates are 50% colonized with no sign of contamination it’s safe to use them for inoculation. Though when I first started doing this I waited for my plates to fully colonize.
Let's Drop It!Once my grain jars are prepped, I follow the steps to setup my SAB again. I put the colonized plates into the SAB along with my receiving jars. These can be either master jars or spawn jars it doesn’t matter.
1) Setup SAB again. Wipe down jars and plates with iso paper towel.
2) Shower, scrubbing arms. Let arms air dry. Put on gloves and wipe gloves and arms down with alcohol.
3) 5 - 10 spritz bleach water into the SAB before going to work.
4) I wipe down the mini rounds and receiving jars once more, this time while inside the SAB.
One by one. The Tiger Drop. During this procedure, I have a neatly folded iso-soaked paper towel in my left hand the entire time.
The Inoculation Process
Part One - The Jar1) Remove the ring from the receiving jar, resting it on top of another jar rather than on the floor of the SAB.
2) Wipe down the receiving jar rim now that the ring is removed.
3) Wipe down your finger tips.
4) Pop the lid on the receiving jar just to remove the ‘seal’ but don’t remove the lid completely yet.
Part Two - The mini round.1) Wipe your finger tips down pinch / shake the bottom of the mini round to loosen the colonized agar from the bottom. It should be completely free to fall and move around inside the mini.
2) Crack the lid on the mini round.
Part Three - The Tiger Drop Written from a right-handers perspective.1) In my left hand I gently clasp the edges of the receiving jar’s lid making sure to be gentle so that my finger tips will not touch the bottom of the lid or the rim of the jar.
2) In my right hand I pick of the mini round in the palm of my hand (like you hold a cup kinda) and position my thumb to flip the lid of the round off.
3) In one synchronized motion I quickly lift the lid of the receiving jar while simultaneously popping the lid off the mini round and dumping the entire pool of agar into the receiving jar and quickly and gently replacing the lid of the receiving jar, completing the Tiger drop.
Pro-Tip: Make sure you pop the lid of the mini round away from the receiving jar. If the lid bounces off the rim of the receiving jar you are likely to knock contaminants into it. Don’t let the agar hit the edges of the jar either. You want ‘nothing but net’ in this procedure. I like to replace my jar rings as I complete each drop but if you’re brave you can probably get away with waiting to replace the rings after all the drops are completed.
This entire move can be done in less than 2 seconds with only minimal practice.
Repeat steps 1 - 3. Don’t forget to occasionally re-sanitize your fingertips between jars.
There we go. A shit load of inoculate in your grain jars. Once you inoculate all of them, shake the jars a lot to smear the mycelium from the plate over as many grains as possible. If you shake hard you can sometimes break the agar pool into two or more pieces giving you more than one concentrated inoculation point!
What a bonus! You’ve used your own spores. You’ve used pre sterilized swabs that needed no flaming. You’ve inoculated your grain masters without even having the lid open for 2 seconds! You’ve introduce a bunch of mycelium to your grain jar along with the extra nutrients of the agar and if you’ve broken the agar into more than one piece you’ve given yourself tons of inoculation points. The agar will only break up easy if you made sure to only use enough agar to cover the bottom of the mini round.
One thing I've noticed is that the grains tend to get really stuck together around the inoculation point of the plate when you let it colonize for too long. I suggest shaking up the jar when it reaches 10% colonization rather than waiting for 15 - 20. This will keep the grains from getting too tightly packed together as the mycelium bunches up around them.
Colonization after 14 days and 1 shake. 
The shaking, more than spreading the grains around, also moves the agar to a new place too giving you another inoculation point with the agar.
An Inoculation on the 6th. This one broke up enough to give me four inoculation points. Three are visible in this picture.
A clone on RGS Inoculated 8 days ago. This is the point where I shake again to keep the mycelium from bunching up too much.
That's it. I hope this helps someone grow from their own prints some day. If I can get one person to achieve that then writing this out will have been worth it and I will have felt like I have actually contributed something to this community.
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elasticaltiger 
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Hopefully this won't come back to bite my in the butt.
Papa_Smurf
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