A few months back a friend gifted me a mystery liquid culture syringe. It was supposed to be of known species (A wild UK oyster) but so far the growth doesn't match in the slightest. The jars were inoculated on the 9th of May, standard half litres of WBS. The growth was really slow and somewhat weak looking, it took close to 3 weeks for the initial batch to fully colonise. I also inoculated some agar plates which were a lot faster but again, the growth was weak with no rhizomorphic mycelium in sight. I transferred the agar to grain, using 2/6th of a standard 100mm petri per 300ml jar of WBS this time. The growth was slightly better reaching 100% in around 10-14 days. While they were colonising they were excreting huge amounts of metabolites, more than I've ever seen with cubes or anything else I've cultivated. I tried a few different batches of fruiting from grain. In 4 trays and 4 weeks I saw no primordia, no knotting, no nothing! I spawned approx. 2l of WBS to 3-4l of horse manure and straw. This finished fairly quick (7 days) and was cased with 50:50, but again produced no rhizomorphic growth, and so far no signs of fruiting after almost 2 weeks. The substrate was placed in a small mono tub, as I thought this would give me the best all round environment to get fruits in most cases, and finally figure out what I'm dealing with!
Now here's the weird part. I still have a few jars of spawn sat on my shelf, not only are they also producing a lot of yellow metabolites, but they're growing some odd looking masses of what appears to be mycelium. They start small, round-ish and a creamy yellow colour, but become irregular brain looking things, and become quite brown. My initial thought was that I received a mislabelled sclerotia producing species, but having never grown them before I have no idea.
Here's my actual question. Will most stone producers fruit in a mono, on the substrate I mentioned? Secondly, a few of my jars stalled at ~90%, is WBS optimal for these species? or would grass seed be a better and possibly the only viable choice? And finally, I've read isolated reports of copelandia sp. producing stones. This was my second thought based on growth, but again have no experience with sclerotia producers, and very little with psilocybes in general when compared to edible species. Is their mycelium similar to copelandia, with weaker more delicate growth, or are you likely to see plenty of rhizomorphs? .... I know that's a fair few questions, so I thank anyone in advance. I also know it'll be impossible to do anything but speculate without photos, so I will do my best to get a replacement camera and post some pics asap, but I just have to know something!! Its driving me a bit loopy not being able to get them to fruit
Edited by Amino (06/23/20 03:08 PM)
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As promised, here's some pictures. I'm having trouble figuring out the close up/macro functionality (if any) on the Note 4, so I apologise for the dodgy quality. I hope you can see what I'm referring to. These are the result of agar to grain, followed by grain to grain.



Here's one of the growth on agar,

And the original jars, each one was inoculated with around 1.5-2 ml of fairly thick liquid culture,


 Note: The foil was placed on there loosely to minimise water loss, as we were in a heat wave and was struggling to keep temps below 30-32C. The jars were plenty moist, and this was done purely as a preventative measure.
As you can see, the growth isn't what you'd expect from Pleurotus. In my experience all Pleurotus species are extremely vigorous and aggressive. Are these even sclerotia at all? The mono had a few small ones on its surface before it was cased. They didn't resemble the growths oyster mushrooms typically form clusters from, but were too small to get a feel of... I'm at a loss until someone comments, or something fruits
Edited by Amino (06/23/20 03:13 PM)
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