ThurmanMurman said:

boxtrotalpha said:

Hey friends, got some weird growth in my agar. Thinking it's myc but it's blobby? This look legit for GT or is it something else?



Sorry for lack of a better picture my phones old and suffers a lot

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Looks like mold at 6:30, something at 12:30 and I'd guess there's something fucky with that center.

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Scemilope said:

SkanskKorv said:

So as long as it's peat moss it doesn't matter which kind it is? Also I just noticed the post is from 2005. Is this still up to date 20 years later?

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Yep, that info on peat is still solid.

You don't want long fiber sphagnum.
Looks like this:


The peat you want will look like this:

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Packerbacker12 said:

What's everyone's opinion on using overgrown plates? I had some family in town for a week and couldn't get to my plates that I probably let go too long beforehand anyway. I've always just tossed them and started over but thought I'd ask to see if I can save some plates. They were all clean prior to being overgrown.

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LewDoja said:

Packerbacker12 said:

What's everyone's opinion on using overgrown plates? I had some family in town for a week and couldn't get to my plates that I probably let go too long beforehand anyway. I've always just tossed them and started over but thought I'd ask to see if I can save some plates. They were all clean prior to being overgrown.

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Hot pour if there's enough room... it will help bring the hardiest hyphea into the light...

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raccoon_cat said:

Does anyone have any suggestions on what I can do to improve my success rate with agar wedge inoculation of grain jars in a SAB? So far I'm having a ~10% success rate. Most of the time I get trich within a few days.

My plates are probably bacterial, but they don't have any visible trich when I'm trying to transfer from them. Is that a safe assumption that if I don't see trich on the plate, it's coming from the air or my skin during the inoculation process? Or can trich hide like some other contaminants?

I use an alcohol lamp just to the side of my SAB to flame the scalpel. I hold it over it til it glows, then bring it inside the SAB to cool off. I've just been holding it in the SAB to cool off since unlike with an agar transfer, I don't have a blank plate to cool the blade off in. Maybe I should start doing that though. Once the blade has cooled a bit, I lift the lid off my donor plate and cut out a wedge. My cutting is probably sloppy, I'll admit. Then, I take the (already loosened) lid off the receiving jar and drop the wedge in. The wedge is probably exposed within the SAB for 5-10 seconds because I don't have my technique down super well yet. Also sometimes I think I've loosened the lid more than I actually have, so I sit there fumbling with it one handed while holding the scalpel. Not great.

Sorry for the not-so-quick question but if I were to TL;DR - how get lower contam rate during agar wedge inoculation in a SAB? If anyone knows of a good video specific to this process in a SAB, I would love to watch it. So far, after a decent amount of searching, I've only found videos using flow hoods, or SAB videos where they use LC and not agar. What would really help would be to see how "the pros" do it in a SAB.

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hey there! unfortunately this isn't always an easily open & shut case. ime, contam issues can be tricky to track down, as there are many things that can lead to a single symptom. there are a lot of reasons a jar can go south; for example, what filters are you using for your lids? i legitimately can ONLY use full sized SFDs with a gasket to seal the lids, otherwise i get moldy jars. i've done side by side tests & without fail, the jars without a proper seal mold out while jars that seal on the rim stay sterile. sounds crazy, but it's true so

is there a fan, or air conditioning running while you're doing sterile work? or any sort of draft at all? are you working really close to the front of your SAB? are your arm holes large, or too small thus causing air currents? are your grains being sterilized properly? perhaps you are venting your pressure cooker for an insufficient amount of time? are your grains properly hydrated? maybe you sneezed too many times in your grow room. oh, which planets are in retrograde again??

you seem like you've done your homework, & your methods  in the SAB sound solid to me (assuming you're not doing something egregiously wrong without realizing it.) biggest rule for me personally with the SAB was to not hover or hold anything above something i wanted to stay sterile. i feel like i was pretty sloppy in my SAB days over all & still rarely saw mold in jars. & honestly, you'd be surprised with how many fumbles most of us here get away with lol. most outright contams in jars could be traced back to me bumping the SAB, or forgetting to turn off my AC unit, or dropping something etc. not saying that you couldn't be doing something wrong while transferring, but i feel like if your agar plates generally look clean then your jars shouldn't be any worse. definitely not 90% failure types of worse- unless your plates are actual dog shit, you'd think you'd get lucky at least some of the time. have you done blank transfers to rule that out? as in, transferring blank wedges or 'inoculating' grain jars with blank wedges? imo is a good way to at least test your techniques (assuming it isn't a filtering/sterilizing/draft issue). does stuff stay sterile on the shelf? plates & jars should never show mold if everything is working correctly. i've had jars stay sterile for months before use in tests i've done. sterlized in vitro things should always come up clean.

i doubt cooling your scalpel in a plate will make a difference, & many here would probably recommend that you don't do that. i think it's fine, but tbh i'll usually cool it toward the edge of the donor plate/right where i'm taking the transfer if i feel i need to cool it more than giving it 10-20 seconds before diving in. in an SAB, more movements mean more chances to fuck things up, so i think it's better to not dive into a plate twice if you don't have to.

this can be a pretty complex problem so don't be surprised if you get in the weeds a bit. my PMs are always open too if you need someone to bounce ideas off of!

northsidetyrant said:

Going to bed soon but thank you! I will check this out tmro and yes I did alot of research before hand and have lab experience so I kinda went balls deep into the hobby but now am just realizing the potential for lost $ lol

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Packerbacker12 said:

What's everyone's opinion on using overgrown plates? I had some family in town for a week and couldn't get to my plates that I probably let go too long beforehand anyway. I've always just tossed them and started over but thought I'd ask to see if I can save some plates. They were all clean prior to being overgrown.

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LewDoja said:

Hot pour if there's enough room... it will help bring the hardiest hyphea into the light...

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Lew, you seem to really love hot pouring! I'll have to give it a try some time. Usually when I'm pouring, I've made exactly enough to pour couple sleeves of plates (and that's also as much as I'd want to fill the bottle). Next time maybe I'll just make an extra bottle for some hot pour trials.

raccoon_cat said:

Does anyone have any suggestions on what I can do to improve my success rate with agar wedge inoculation of grain jars in a SAB? So far I'm having a ~10% success rate. Most of the time I get trich within a few days.

My plates are probably bacterial, but they don't have any visible trich when I'm trying to transfer from them. Is that a safe assumption that if I don't see trich on the plate, it's coming from the air or my skin during the inoculation process? Or can trich hide like some other contaminants?

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Quote:

I use an alcohol lamp just to the side of my SAB to flame the scalpel. I hold it over it til it glows, then bring it inside the SAB to cool off. I've just been holding it in the SAB to cool off since unlike with an agar transfer, I don't have a blank plate to cool the blade off in. Maybe I should start doing that though.

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Circumstances said:

Life happened and I kinda screwed up my first harvest by not being home when the spores dropped so I missed it by 3 days. I had tried one mushroom from the grow before the spores dropped and got high from it, so I know there should have been potency in them then.

So I harvested the mushrooms that at that point looked fairly black and had gotten a bit wet/slimey, and dried them at 70c for 16hours in my oven (Yes I know get a dehydrater, I am going to get it) with open lid and with the oven fan blasting (verified the temprature with a probe). In the end the dried mushrooms look almost charcoal black, but if you take a nibble of it, it doesn't taste burnt at all. I don't know if I have just tried too small dosages but I don't seem to be getting any effect from them now? I chopped up 1.5g yesterday and let it steep in lemon juice for 30 minutes and didn't really get much of an effect.

Did I just take too small of a dosage, did I ruin it by letting them drop the spores and still wait for a few days, or drying them at too high of a temperature?

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DERRAYLD said:

If the dried mushrooms went black during drying they're now going to be bunk.

You didn't dry correctly, the oven has to be open with a fan pointing at the door.
If you don't remove the excess moisture you're essentially boiling your mushrooms in their own juices.

I've done this in the past by mistake when I bumped the oven door closed and ruined 250g of PR.
Ultimately an oven isn't the best way to dry so you have to be aware of what could happen.

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Sillysighbean said:

Is it ok to sterilise foil wrapped cotton tips in a modified jar with an sfd or will the steam cause problems?

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