PuffM4gicDr4gon said: Thanks for the tip faht! I'll drop the temp down.
I am using a cheap temp/rH digital meter, but I only use it to get a general idea of what the room is sitting at. Mostly so I'm not keeping my closet at too high temp/rh for long enough to worry about mold growing on my walls.
I have wanted something that can take a reading inside a FC and be trusted, I'll look into the inkbird meters. I like their brewers temp probe, I use it to pasteurze in my slow cooker.
I’m sure a brewers probe works well. Anything besides cheap gauges. Pans do really well when their environment is 78-80ish. I’m not going to be able control higher temps here pretty soon when the outside temps get really high but if you are able to control it, that’s the temp inside their chamber I’d shoot for
Thought I’d give a little info on how I do my leading edge aerial myc transfers.. how much I take and where from. I see ppl giving it a go and I want to make sure they’re doing it correctly.
So here’s the wrapped plate.. I usually do this in front of the ffu obv, but for this, I’m just burning the plate so I can take pics. I will say that if you’re going to be doing these aerial transfers, you need to have a higher nute % than .5 the sweet spot for me has been 1%. Anything below that and the myc struggles to make aerial myc or myc that is thick enough to get anything to stick to the scalpel hook.
I recommend LME agar over gwa. Bacteria loooooooves grain water agar. Ime, it moves twice as fast on it and it’s a bit difficult to gauge %. Obv you could figure the % out by doing trails and using those same ingredient amounts every time but for me it’s just not worth it. Idk about PDA as I’ve never used it. I also recommend a slightly firmer agar mix. I use 1 gram over 2%. I keep it simple and just use that for whatever amount I’m making in each 500ml media bottle. When I make 40 plates, I use 3 media bottles… one has 250ml in it, another has 350ml and the other has 450ml.
I do this so I don’t have to be in a super rush to pour before my agar solidifies. The 250ml cools faster than the 350 and that cools faster than the 450. This gives me time between each bottle to rinse the used bottle out with hot water and rearrange the poured plates so they’re sitting nested straight up and down so I don’t get uneven plate thickness and resanitize my gloves and have them dry etc, with a couple minutes extra before the next bottle is at pouring temp. I’ve also seen that less full media bottles (at least the ones I use) are less likely to have dripping occur, which can be annoying af even with pour rings.
Anyway, so I go a gram above 2% on each bottle.. so, the 250ml bottle would get 6g total and 8g for the 350ml etc. the % varies slightly between em but the agar is firmer on all plates. I do this because the amount of myc I’m trying to get off the scalpel tip is so small that a lot of times I’ll have to push the tip into the agar and move it side to side to release the myc from the hook… having slightly firmer myc makes it so I don’t pull up chunks of my plate surface.
Now, Here’s the plate lol

Favorite tool, the hooked scalpel.

Now when I put the hook in my scapel tip, I orient the hook bending to the left because I’m right-handed so, when I scrape the leading edge, I need to scrape the right side of the plate. I also do this with the sharp side of the blade facing up because when possible (when the leading edge is near the edge of the plate), I rest the blade on the plate edge for stabilizing… because it is absolutely imperative that you do not dip the hook into the agar, at. all. If you do it or if you see that you are pulling myc off the plate that was attached to the agar, start over and reheat your tip
Because I rest the blade tip on the plate edge, having the dull side down allows me to pull the scalpel a little bit while it’s resting there to scrape the myc edge with more precision. The sharp side will gouge into the plate edge, otherwise.

You want the newest, leading edge tips of the mycelium. This harder than it sounds.. they want to just brush off the hook so, a couple passes might be needed. This the location that I scrape.

This plate was opened recently to take a transfer from.. being that I use a ffu, there’s air blowing on the open plate. This will cause the myc to start to lay down fairly quickly. You can see the point at which it was opened and where the new myc leading edge started growing.
If you are using a ffu or hood and plan on taking multiple transfers from a single plate, you need to have multiple scalpels ready to use immediately because that leading edge will start to lay down fast. Don’t unwrap plate until you’re ready to do the transfer(s) as vented plates (which most are) allow airflow from your hood and will start the laying down.. process.
You can see that I didn’t dip the tip in agar or disturb the myc attached to the agar. The only thing on my scalpel end are the broken tips of the leading edge. This is even more myc on the tip than I’d normally have because I couldn’t get the camera to see what’s usually there.. it’s usually a white speck barely visible to the naked eye and it’s in the inside of the hook, not the outside

It’s that small. It’s so small that when I go to push it into the receiving plate (always backwards, never forwards—or side to side with the hook pushed into the agar surface if I’m unsure if it came off), it compresses Into a myc ball that’s even less white and a lot times I can’t tell if it’s still attached to the tip so I’ll run the tip through the agar sideways until I can’t see it on the tip at all even bringing the tip as close to my face as I’m comfortable with.
It can take days to even see if the transfer was complete and if I don’t see anything by day 5, I’ll redo it. This is growth after 3 days and in all these next pics, you can’t even see initial transfer tissue. Notice all the drag marks in the agar where I was trying to make sure the transfer was made

And here’s five days

Looking pretty clean so far but I’ll let these grow out (these are 3 of like 45 plates all done at the same time and in about the same condition) and do another transfer to make sure they’re clean.
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