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LadysKnight
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Re: OctopusDisco's first grow log [Re: OctopusDisco] 1
#28612703 - 01/07/24 07:32 AM (4 months, 8 days ago) |
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Quote:
OctopusDisco said:
Quote:
LadysKnight said: The dark coir color and lack of colonized surface with fruits sings too wet, which is odd for such a small vessel.
I figured it would dry out quickly--being so small and all--so I may have been a little heavy-handed with the misting. Those are technically my first fruits, not including the in vitro pins that formed!
I think the micro container served its purpose in the sense that my idle fingers were focused on the container with the least to lose. My expectations were pretty low regarding yield, especially when considering the amount of substrate. To be fair, I don't think I made any terrible mistakes, but I know a little bit more about how to handle the mini containers from observing the micro container.
Quick update on the "cloning a dried mushroom" project: healthy mycelium growth is now visible on 3 plates! I can't for the life of me remember what the fruits looked like before I put them in the coffee grinder, so it'll be a cool little surprise if I'm able to eventually get some clean cultures.
Congratulations on first fruits, you're winning!
Not sure where the coffee grinder fits in, but cloning from dry is no cakewalk. Well done.
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OctopusDisco
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Re: OctopusDisco's first grow log [Re: LadysKnight]
#28613331 - 01/07/24 06:39 PM (4 months, 8 days ago) |
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Here's the first "flush" of the micro container! Didn't even register 0.1g on the scale, but what it lacks in size it makes up for in cuteness 

In other news, I birthed, dunked, grated, and spawned the other jars about a week ago. I wanted to see what impact substrate depth has on the fruits, so for each jar I disproportionately distributed the spawn/coco mix to two small containers. I have some painters tape to keep track of which jar spawned what container. The first number of the serial number is the jar, followed by container id, followed by spawn date.

Unfortunately, the containers from jar 4 appear to have some sort of growth that I haven't seen outside of my contaminated plates. To my inexperienced eye, it appears too "stringy" to be cube myc, and looks more like the pin mold that I've seen on some of my plates.
I'm thinking the course of action will be to keep an eye on it. If I confirm a pin mold contamination, I'll just toss the container. I figure if its somewhere, it's likely present everywhere.
Let me know if you suggest otherwise! I already have more that I could ever use in a lifetime with my first harvest , but I wouldn't mind taking steps to save the container if possible

Edit 24/1/7: Forgot to add some photos
Edited by OctopusDisco (01/08/24 12:37 PM)
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OctopusDisco
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Re: OctopusDisco's first grow log [Re: LadysKnight]
#28613344 - 01/07/24 06:53 PM (4 months, 8 days ago) |
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Quote:
LadysKnight said: Congratulations on first fruits, you're winning!
Not sure where the coffee grinder fits in, but cloning from dry is no cakewalk. Well done.
Thank you! Just having a lot of fun lol.
I used a coffee grinder to grind up the dried fruits. It didn't get to a powder-like texture, but still contained some chunks that I was able to cut in half to take samples from.
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OctopusDisco
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Re: OctopusDisco's first grow log [Re: OctopusDisco]
#28614097 - 01/08/24 01:10 PM (4 months, 7 days ago) |
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First real flush is dried! 37g wet, around 2g dry lol (I would estimate the amount of spawn to be around 100-150 ml of colonized BRF/verm cake that was grated and then mixed 1:2 with coco at/a bit under field capacity). There was still a bit of substrate attached to the fruits when I weighed them wet, so it makes sense that dry mass was <10% of the wet mass. Still have a lot of learning to do with respect to harvesting, good thing I should have plenty of practice soon!

Also, I didn't like the way this.... thing was looking at me, so I sprayed it with some H2O2. I took a look at this thread that has pictures of what it shouldn't look like and the growth seems a lot like dactylium. Even if it isn't dactylium, it still looks very different from all the other mycelium I've seen. The thing that has me worried the most isn't necessarily the string-like growth, it's the length to which the strings are growing without branching at all, almost like spider silk threads.

Anyway, the H2O2 deed is done. I figured I'd rather try my hand at fighting a potential contamination than watching one take over a container.
The "cloning a dried fruit" project is going well. Unfortunately, I can't take any good pictures because the sauce containers I bought have lids that are difficult to see through. Disposable petris and 500ml media bottles are now priorities on the shopping list.
Thank you to everyone who shares knowledge on this site. I couldn't tell mycelium from my elbow about two months ago, and now I have much-needed medicine. Love you all
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OctopusDisco
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Re: OctopusDisco's first grow log [Re: OctopusDisco]
#28617018 - 01/10/24 11:16 PM (4 months, 4 days ago) |
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Happy day, everyone!
Time for another update! First an overall update, then an update of the BRF cakes I spawned to bulk in mini-containers (smaller than a shoebox), then a PHOTO UPDATE of the "cloning a dried fruit" project (the photos aren't great though because I'm an idiot and bought bad sauce containers.
Overall update
I weighed everything I've harvested so far and it came out to 2.4g dry, giving me 24 1# capsules with ~0.1g each 
The overall plan is to let these containers flush out while cleaning up the cultures from the "clone a dried fruit" project and getting some grain ready.
I have access to a lot of different kinds of grain, but it seems like rye berries are standard operating procedure when available. Please correct me here if I'm wrong!!
The labelling convention in the pictures is the same as listed above: [jar #].[container #] [date spawned]. After these stop fruiting, I'm going to employ a new ID/serial system that will make it easier to track (at least for me).
BRF cakes to bulk
I'll provide a text update where appropriate, then just provide photo updates. Dactylium (or whatever the hell that thing was) is dead for now. I'll let you know if it returns.
A tiny spot on 1.1 started to turn green, so I cut it out and isolated the container from the rest.

2.1 has a weird spot that looks different from the rest of the mycelium. I think it's just condensation that dripped from the lid, but I'll keep an eye on it.

Everything else:

Cloning a dried fruit
To recap this project:
- I obtained some amount of mushies about 6 months ago and ate a certain amount, but not everything. These were very dry and may have been PE, but I am not confident in that whatsoever. ('fruits A')
- I obtained a different amount of different mushies about 4 months ago and ate a different amount, but not everything. These were kind of parbaked when it comes to drying, and I would describe them as having been "spongy". Besides that characteristic, I think they were more grey than brown. ('fruits B')
- I used an electric coffee grinder to grind these up and pack some capsules, and had some leftover that I put in a mason jar with some dry silica packets about 2 months ago.
- On 1/1, I took some culture samples in my SAB. I'm fairly confident that I got samples both fruits, because there were some very tough caps (fruits A) and some softer stipe matter (fruits B). I was able to get some samples from clean interiors of both, as well as some dirty-as-shit samples.
- The dirty-as-shit sampleswere basically just remnants of the pulverized fruits tossed in a janky sauce containers filled with nutrient agar. They all are contaminated.
- The samples from the clean interiors look to have healthy mycelium growth. I took T1s today and will post photos when there is something interesting
Here's a bunch of photos:
Apologies for having to endure the pictures of the shitty sauce containers. I am 100% ordering some petris to make cleaning cultures easier, but for the amount of grain I'm going to be using at a time (not more than 1/2 pint), I kind of like the smaller containers for agar to grain. I did a test with brown rice where I inoculated with "soft" vs "hard" agar. I won't be using brown rice in spawn that I care about, but I had some in the closet and got what I needed out of the test: soft agar is a clear winner when it comes to inoculation.
This is all to say that I willl be buying petris as well as some different sauce containers. I did some extensive searching through the Amazon and came across a review that sold me:

Not that I'll need to PC these, but it seems like that reviewer knows what I want to use these for, generally speaking.
That's all for now! I'll probably have another upate this weekend
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OctopusDisco
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Re: OctopusDisco's first grow log [Re: OctopusDisco]
#28618688 - 01/12/24 01:01 PM (4 months, 3 days ago) |
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Happy day, Shromies
Quick update:
Contaminated container 1.1 (green spots)
I mentioned I observed a green spot in container 1.1 in my last post. I did some research on green contaminants and apparently once it's green, it's sporulating (read: "fucked"). Since we're just having fun here. I decided to try to fight the contaminant, cutting out the green portion and isolating the container from the others.
Looked today and I observed some more small green growth:

Seems like I have a handful of options:
1) Burn it all 2) Throw it outside, throw some debris on top, and see if anything happens 3) Fight it
Leaning toward option 1. I have other containers that look clean, so I don't need this one to fruit.
Option 2 sounds like a pretty low-lift effort, but given the amount of substrate and the potential for yield that it implies, any effort might be too much effort.
Option 3 doesn't sound appealing compared to the other options, but I'm open to trying something out if any of you have a strong conviction.
Cloning dried fruit
3 of the 10 plates looked to have some healthy mycelium growth (hoping it's not just mold, but we'll find out), and 1 of those 3 plates seemed more aggressive than the other 2. I took 4 transfers from each of the 3 plates on 240110--all of which are looking good, pictures coming with the next update.
The picture below is of the more aggressive culture and its growth through the openings in the agar that were the result of the transfers.

I'll probably have another update this weekend
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LadysKnight
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Re: OctopusDisco's first grow log [Re: OctopusDisco] 1
#28618725 - 01/12/24 01:45 PM (4 months, 3 days ago) |
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The clone is looking ok as far as I can see. Regarding the contaminated tubs, they all go out to the compost pile when I see mold. Sometimes they recover enough to fruit, sometimes not.
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OctopusDisco
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Re: OctopusDisco's first grow log [Re: LadysKnight]
#28618759 - 01/12/24 02:18 PM (4 months, 3 days ago) |
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Quote:
LadysKnight said: The clone is looking ok as far as I can see. Regarding the contaminated tubs, they all go out to the compost pile when I see mold. Sometimes they recover enough to fruit, sometimes not.
Thanks for checking in, LK! I'm relieved to hear you say that the clone culture looks ok. I just ordered some 60mm petris and they should arrive this weekend, so I'll be able to post some better pictures of these clone cultures in about a week or so. In the meantime, thank you for putting up with these difficult photos.
I have vermicompost going right now, so it looks like this sub is going to become worm food
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OctopusDisco
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Re: OctopusDisco's first grow log [Re: OctopusDisco]
#28628338 - 01/20/24 09:35 AM (3 months, 26 days ago) |
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Happy day, everyone!
I feel like a lot has happened since the last post, so let's get caught up Overall, the strategy is to:
1) Fruit everything that is currently in bulk or grain (just started a few more grain jars, more detail below) 2) Pick 1 unique phenotype characteristic from each of the 3 genetic sources I have and selectively breed until the characteristic appears consistently from spore 3) Do some crosses using various methods
BRF Cakes to Bulk
I ended up tossing the container that had signs of mold. Figured the worms would get more utility out of it than I.
The sub that put out a first flush already put out a whopping 3 fruits on the second flush. It had some questionable spawn to begin with, so that one will be going to the worms as well!
There is some id info on painters tape. The first number represents the jar the spawn came from. The second number is the container id (not important at all). The date is the date spawned to bulk.
So pumped to see some fruits in the containers with larger subs! Hopefully these will be a bit larger than the fruits from the other sub. I think there's something going on with 2.1, but at least we're getting some fruits!

Cloning a Dried Fruit This project is going great! 3 of the samples ended up producing mycelium. I took some T1s a while back (2 to normal agar, 2 to soft agar) and let those grow out. While all 3 look clean, one of the cultures is different from anything I've seen yet, and the words that keep coming to mind are "vigorous" and "thicc" (with two "c's"). Within a couple of days, the mycelium had pretty much filled in the gas in the agar where I took the transfers. Trying to manage expectations, but I'm excited to see what kind of fruiting bodies this culture produces. I took a piece of this culture to water agar, and immediately it sent out a mycelium "rope" (12 o'clock in the picture), where the other two did not.

The other 2 cultures look great, but more similar to the Golden Teacher mycelium I've been working with.

After the cultures grew out on the soft agar, I tossed the best-looking plate of each into it's own jar of rye berries. I feel the rye is too dry, so I'll cook it longer next time.
These jars use a new serial id system to help me keep track of cultures (info linked in my signature). The single digits all by themselves have no meaning (I wasn't able to remove the permanent marker from the last run).
Unsurprisingly, the culture that was most vigorous on agar is most vigorous in the jars (2.1.240117)

Whole Brown Rice Grain Spawn
I think this is the first time I'm mentioning this project. I wanted to experiment with normal vs soft agar, so I put some spores to agar, transferred once to their respective hardness agar, then went agar to brown rice. I sincerely apologize for neglecting my duties and failing to document the process with photos. The learning here is that soft agar was much faster at colonizing the brown rice compared to the normal agar.
I'm also curious about how "fruitable surface area" to sub volume ratios will impact fruiting characteristics. This is in no way a scientific study; observation is an integral part of the scientific method, however. The purpose of this study is to:
1) Observe any differences in fruiting characteristics that can be used to motivate an actual experiment 2) Test the performance of these new deli containers and compare them to the containers that are fruiting currently (purple and blue lids).
The goal is to dial in a process that I can use to run scientific experiments with a decent sample size of around 60 subjects per experiment (30 test, 30 control). The deli containers would be great because it allows for a greater degree of control. I just need to make sure that the sub volume is enough to produce fruits that would be expected in larger monos.

Thanks for reading!
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OctopusDisco
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Re: OctopusDisco's first grow log [Re: OctopusDisco] 1
#28632668 - 01/23/24 09:41 PM (3 months, 22 days ago) |
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I have an update, but not as big of an update as I would like.
This isn't self-deprecating play on words about the harvest. I'm completely satisfied with the haul, it's just that I took a bunch of photos this morning of the containers I was going to harvest, as well as some agar work, but I didn't realize until I went to take the pictures below that there was no card in the camera I was too disheartened to take the agar photos again, but I'll take some more in a day or two.
Luckily, there will be plenty more photo opportunities!
BRF Cakes to Bulk
Harvested containers 1.2 and 2.1 (some photos of these in posts above), yielding about 7 and 6 grams, respectively. I'm definitely learning more and more with each flush. Regarding how much FAE to provide, I really like the containers I'm using. They have 4 latches, and when all 4 are engaged, there is a pretty airtight seal; the more latches that are disengaged, the more FAE is provided. I never had all 4 latches engaged at the same time.
I did a lot wrong with the first container that I harvested on 240108 (container 3.1). The main thing I did wrong was that I actually tried to do things to it after spawning. Granted, the cleanliness of the spawn was suspect, but I opened it a lot and misted it from like day 2. Comparing the progress of 3.1 to the two I just harvested (especially 1.2), this is now my mantra:

For container 1.2, I had three latches engaged AT ALL TIMES, never opening to fan, mist, take photos, peek in, breathe on, etc.
Once the mycelium popped through the top layer, surface conditions stayed real nice, knots formed, followed by pins. The most recent harvests had more well-defined clusters as opposed to an even pin set, but I don't think I can point to any reason why this is the case. Edit 240124: After pins were formed and fruiting was underway, I only kept two latches engaged. I disengaged all latches toward the end of the flush.
I'm still working on getting my harvesting technique dialed, but it, too, gets better with each harvest. I had originally planned to chop and stump, but instead I pulled out the clusters and tried to get as much of the substrate off as I could, then dried in an oven on low with the door open.
I ended up cloning the fruit from container 2.1 that is in the top-left corner, as it is the largest fruit I've gotten to-date (a whopping 4 grams wet).
Container 1.2 (7 grams dry)

Container 2.1 (6 grams dry)

I'll take some photos of everything else give an update soon!
Edited by OctopusDisco (01/24/24 11:50 AM)
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OctopusDisco
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Re: OctopusDisco's first grow log [Re: OctopusDisco]
#28637758 - 01/28/24 08:33 AM (3 months, 18 days ago) |
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Update time! First off, I harvested another container (can't remember the container number, I think 4.2) and got 7.5g dry this time. Not breaking any records, but improving each time. I also let this one go a bit longer than the others, simply because I hadn't let any go that long yet, so that is most likely the only reason this container surpassed the others.
At this point, I've gotten a first flush from all of the containers from the original BRF/Verm cakes that I spawned to bulk in containers of various sizes! Some of the spawn was questionable, and thus some of the containers have not made it to the second flush. There are three more containers left, and one looks like the dactylium might be back. I have it separated and I'll keep an eye on it, but I'm feeling like that sub might be worm food.
Also, I went to make 14g worth of tea to make gummies with... and spilled the tea everywhere Thankfully, I have enough capsules to last until some more containers fruit.
From here on out, I'm going to use the new serial system to keep track of culture. If it's not clear from the picture, I'll do my best to provide info in a caption:
[id_number].[series_identifier].[transfer_number].[event_date]
id_number: I'll keep an updated list in the link in my signature, but right now, 1 represents cultures from the GT MSS, and 2 represents cultures from the "Cloning Dried Fruit" project.
series_identifier: A way for me to keep track of potential within-culture genetic heterogeneity. For example, there were 3 clean-ish cultures that came out of the dried fruit clones, and each has it's own series identifier. These will also be kept up-to-date in the link in my signature.
transfer_number: Included when applicable. T0, T1, etc.
Update
I was able to take some photos of the harvest and of the "cloning a dried fruit" project before my camera died, but I don't have pictures of anything else, really Well, at least the harvest and some petris. I also have each series colonizing their respective jar of one half pint of rye berries. Being my first time using rye and only having experience with brown rice, I wanted to err on the side of being too dry instead of too moist; naturally, it's far too dry and the mycelium seems to be taking forever to colonize fully. The grain with 2.2 is taking the longest and looking the weakest, and it might be suspect, but it also grows differently than the other two on agar, so we'll just have to wait and see! 2.1 seems to be the most robust, both on agar and on grain, followed by 2.3, then 2.2.
Harvest

Cloning a Dried Fruit
The color of the agar represents the type: clear (or a yellowish-brown) is normal agar made with 2% LME and 2% agar by weight, blue is no-nutrient "water agar", and green is "soft agar" made with 2% LME and 1% agar powder by weight.
I'm thinking the process will be: 1) Grow a culture on normal agar 2) Transfer relatively large donor wedge to water agar (size seen in pictures below, 60mm petri in photos) 3) Transfer very small clean sample to soft agar 4) Agar to grain
I still have a lot of testing to do with respect to water agar and how contaminants respond to the medium, but it seems promising. If any of you have experience with this, I'd love to hear it!
I'll keep same-culture pictures in their own rows. If you don't see rows of pictures, each culture will begin with a photo or caption id.
I popped open the water agar plates that were used to inoculate the soft agar for two reasons: one, I want to see if any contaminants grow, and two, I wanted to show the miniscule size of the donor wedge and the sample that was taken. I wish I would have taken the photo when I actually took the sample, because I can't say for certain that mycelium was even visible in the sample I took, but there is certainly growth on the soft agar plates where the samples ended up! Also, you'll see some water agar that has larger donor wedges. This is way better and I will be doing this from now on, since it gives the mycelium some more nutrients to go search for some more food, making it easier to see where to take samples from. Anyway, here are a bunch of photos:

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OctopusDisco
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Re: OctopusDisco's first grow log [Re: OctopusDisco]
#28648707 - 02/06/24 08:54 AM (3 months, 9 days ago) |
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I have a quick update, but no photos, unfortunately.
Original BRF/Verm cakes
After all of the containers had a first flush, I did my best to set them up for a second flush. I tried the "dunk and do nothing", the "mist heavily and do nothing", the "dunk and add another pseudo-casing/top layer", and the "just float the sub while harvesting and do nothing" techniques, but I have yet to conjure a proper second flush. This is definitely the area of my cult skills that could use the most improvement.
I still have two containers that are attempting a second flush, but I have pretty low confidence that it will be anything more than a couple of fruits. As such, this will be the final update for this part of my adventure!
Cloning a dried fruit
To recap, I was able to successfully clone some dried tissue, resulting in 3 plates with clean myc growth.
I took some T1s to semi-solid agar (what I was calling "soft" agar before), let them expand a bit, and sent them to some rye berries that were a bit on the dry side. 3 weeks and a few shakes later, these grain jars were spawned to bulk on 240205. Culture 2.1 is still the most vigorous of the 3, and I can't wait to see what the fruits are like!
I also took some T1s to no-nutrient water agar, then T2s to semi-solid agar (the green plates in my last post). These plates were sent to grain 240205, but the whole process was super sloppy and I'm not very happy.
The sloppiness was mainly driven by my inability to cleanly get the semi-solid agar out of the petri. I ended up holding the dish open incorrectly, for far too long, and scraping most of the agar out with a scalpel. I would be shocked if any of these jars ended up completely clean.
After my experiences, I think I'm going to get a couple of cultures that I like, make some clean LC of each, and use the LC to expand the culture on semi-solid agar sauce/slime cups to send to grain, since the sauce cups make it easier to "pinch" the agar out of the container compared to normal petris.
Thank you for reading
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OctopusDisco
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Re: OctopusDisco's first grow log [Re: OctopusDisco] 1
#28652657 - 02/09/24 08:33 AM (3 months, 6 days ago) |
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Happy Friday, everyone!
Cloning a dried fruit I'm curious if anyone has a strong conviction as to what the bright white bit in 2.1.240204 might be.
At first, I thought trich. However, I noticed this spot around 2 days ago and it hasn't grown at a different pace compared to the other bits of mycelium poking through the top layer. It hasn't changed color, and to top it off, it looks identical to the culture on agar, especially on the transfer wedge. I wish I could take a good photo for you, but none of them turn out. I have no clue what the genetics are, btw. Also, the top layer on this container is super thin. This is because I'm an idiot and put way too much coco in container 2.2.240204 and didn't have enough for the other 2 subs.
Anyway, my leading hypothesis is that the bright white spot is a piece of colonized grain that was almost directly exposed to the surface.
Cultures 2.3 and 2.1, respectively, on grain (on-the-dry-side rye berries) jars before spawning to bulk:

Culture 2.1 on grain before spawning to bulk:

Culture 2.1 after spawning to bulk:

Culture 2.2 after spawning to bulk (I don't have a picture of the jar before spawning, but it looked similar to 2.3):

Culture 2.3 on grain before spawning to bulk:

Culture 2.3 after spawning to bulk:

Cultures on grain (whole brown rice):

Fruiting Chamber test
This is a little test I'm doing. I like the prospect of fruiting in something like this because I can control more variables during fruiting, and I can run more containers without getting overwhelmed. This is beneficial for many reasons, the main one for me being the ability to run experiments with decent power. I took the tradeoff of more humidity and less FAE to start as I dialed these in. I left the larger deli container unmodified--since I assumed there would be no seal--and things have been looking great!
It's been exactly 3 weeks since spawning, and they've looked pretty much just like this for about a week (granted it's been cooler in my house for the past 10 days due to my central heat being off, around 18-19C). None of my other containers have looked nearly as "dewy", so I did some investigation and it looks like the condensation around the inside of the larger deli container drips down creates a pseudo-seal that restricts FAE! I have some cool ideas for the future, but for now, I just drilled a hole in the top and slapped a filter sticker on it. I'll just keep drilling holes and slapping stickers on these fuckers until FAE is just right!:
Edited by OctopusDisco (02/16/24 09:53 PM)
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OctopusDisco
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Re: OctopusDisco's first grow log [Re: OctopusDisco]
#28658057 - 02/13/24 07:48 AM (3 months, 2 days ago) |
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Photo update and a question!
Cloning a dried fruit
The mycelium from culture 2.1 is different than any of the others I've seen. It is dense and puffy, resulting in umbonate uniform growth. This is consistent across different batches of agar as well as various agar recipes (solid and semi-solid). I have some photos of culture 2.3 for comparison.
Anyone have any idea what this is? I'm not totally discounting the possibility that I'm mold faming, but I haven't seen ANY color besides varying shades of white.
2.1.240204:

2.1.T3.240205:

2.2.240204: No photo here, since there's not much interesting. This container has a lower spawn:sub ratio (around 1:3.5 instead of 1:2) and a thicker top layer, and it's barely starting to break through the surface.
2.3.240204:

2.3.T3.240205:
Edited by OctopusDisco (02/16/24 09:53 PM)
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OctopusDisco
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Re: OctopusDisco's first grow log [Re: OctopusDisco]
#28663150 - 02/16/24 09:40 PM (2 months, 29 days ago) |
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Apart from the photos, container 2.3.240205 is knotting. Culture 2.1 continues to be weird. I'll take some photos of those this weekend 
Fruiting Chamber Test

Cloning Dried Fruit
Cultures on 2% Malt Extract Agar ('MEA'):
Edited by OctopusDisco (02/20/24 03:12 PM)
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OctopusDisco
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Re: OctopusDisco's first grow log [Re: OctopusDisco] 1
#28669530 - 02/21/24 10:32 AM (2 months, 25 days ago) |
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Happy day, everyone!! It's update time 
Overall, the goal is still to pick some phenotypes from the cultures I have, clone, take spore prints, and do some selective breeding. I have chosen to select for umbonate cap shape from the GT MSS and I have 2 clones growing out on water agar now. I'll share some photos at some point!
Cloning a Dried Fruit
2.1.240204: No photo here. There's not much different from the last photo.
2.2.240204: No photo here. Culture is colonizing sub surface, albeit at a relatively slow pace.
2.3.240204: At least this container is interesting! The knots came quick, followed by what I believe to be metabolite droplets, and now there are pins The pictures below are over the past two days, with the picture of the outside of the container being taken most recently. No funky smells or anything. Stoked to be getting the first pins from this project 

Fruiting Chamber ('FC') Test
There were two questions I wanted to explore with this test:
1) Will this type of fruiting chamber work, in general? Yes. 2) Are there any observable differences in fruiting characteristics based on exposed surface area to volume ratio? Since this is not a true experiment, the observations will be useful only in designing a true experiment.
- It is clear that there is a difference between the two FC designs, since the design with more exposed sub was faster to fruit.
- Surface conditions were optimal in both designs.
- Although the intention was to test the impact of changes in exposed surface area to volume ratio, really this is testing the impact of changes in the size of hole in the smaller container. This is an important distinction. Since the size of the hole has an impact on the evaporation rate from the substrate, the chambers had observable differences in humidity, with the larger holes creating more humidity. This breaks the experiment by way of the ceteris paribus assumption. To test the impact of changes in exposed surface area to volume ratio, we need everything else to remain the same.
50g wet:

44g wet:

Less exposed sub:

Top-fruiting Test
I had some questionable grain spawn and wanted to try top-fruiting. That's pretty much it.
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OctopusDisco
Quabity Assuance

Registered: 12/10/23
Posts: 101
Loc: In a bear hole
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Re: OctopusDisco's first grow log [Re: OctopusDisco]
#28672722 - 02/23/24 11:39 AM (2 months, 23 days ago) |
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Quick update this morning
Cloning a Dried Fruit
2.3.240204: The amber metabolite droplets just seem to be... gone . Now, many fruits have taken their place! I'll post another photo of the whole tub later this week, but I wanted to share a picture of these upside-down shrooms! My significant other mentioned the word "pooping", but to me, it kind of looks like two legs, a butt, and a tail 

FC Test
46g wet:
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OctopusDisco
Quabity Assuance

Registered: 12/10/23
Posts: 101
Loc: In a bear hole
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Re: OctopusDisco's first grow log [Re: OctopusDisco] 1
#28682282 - 03/01/24 08:18 AM (2 months, 16 days ago) |
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Happy Friday, Shrome skillets
I've got a quick photo update!
Cloning Dried Fruit
2.1.240204: No photo here. This culture colonized the entire sub fairly quickly, but since then the only changes I've seen have been beads of moisture growing on the surface. This culture just started knotting on plates, so I'm going to let the container be for another week or so. If I feel like it, I might throw a casing layer on it at some point 
2.2.240204: No photo here. This culture is still colonizing the container, and seems to be the slowest colonizer of the three mystery strains.
2.3.240204: ~120g wet, 10g dry
Taken ~3/4 days ago:
Taken right before harvest:

FC Test
These "deli domes" are pretty rad. I'll be using them extensively in the future for experimentation.
~38g wet:

Some extra grain spawn and coco I threw in a plastic baggie:

Top-fruiting Test
I'll post some photos this weekend, but it's pretty cool to see how the different cultures colonize the top layer of coco. 2.3 is much more rhizomorphic, while 2.1 and 2.2 are tomentose.
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EricEricson
Average Lurker



Registered: 02/09/24
Posts: 41
Loc: American't
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Re: OctopusDisco's first grow log [Re: OctopusDisco]
#28704293 - 03/18/24 11:24 PM (1 month, 29 days ago) |
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I love reading grow logs like this. I love when people are meticulous in their cataloging of their experimentation and results. It really drives me. I'm still waiting for some BRF jars that look pretty close to being fully colonized, gonna spawn some to bulk in shoeboxes and let some consolidate for fruiting as cakes, and I might try one or two fruiting in a jar. π Reading through people's grow logs with similar teks to what I'm doing is really helping the restlessness and urge to just watch my jars lmao.
So... Nice log!!
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