blakeyface said:

Okay, this may be a learning moment for me, if what you're saying is correct. If I have cloned some pristine pan spores, no contamination whatsoever. I take it to grains, then to substrate, now it is time to case. Since there is no hidden mold, no bacteria, I should not alter the PH of the casing at all...no calcium hydroxide, no calcium carbonate...because that will simply inhibit my panaeolus mycelium. Have I got that right?

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blakeyface said:

This entire exchange seemed surreal to me. Until I used an alkaline PH in my agar, I could not get rid of the ghost halo. Then I raised the PH and the halo vanished. I was ecstatic... I had been given the solution to a print riddled with mold spores. Buthoscorpio then says no, whatever had eradicated the mold, it wasn't a high PH. Moreover, a higher PH casing for pans, which seems like a consensus here for growing pans, is not only unhelpful, but is actually harmful to the grow? Like I said, surreal

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Mr Piggy said:

Alcohol can in fact introduce contamination to your work.

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jee3apha said:

Mr Piggy said:

Alcohol can in fact introduce contamination to your work.

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Why is that tho? Of course wiping sterile stuff with alcohol is just dumb, not sure if you meant this. But apart from that I can't see how it can make things worse, generally speaking.

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jee3apha said:

jee3apha said:

Mr Piggy said:

And again, it would really help if we could see your SAB setup.  Kitchen counter is a perfectly fine place to do work, it's where I started.

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Will take a picture tomorrow! Nothing fancy, it's an IKEA SAMLA 65 L with 2 holes.

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Here it is:



The black spot near the right hole is there because I tried to solder a crack. The fire is actually my stove, outside the picture. The light on top is turned off because if fucks with my camera, but it's super bright, that was quite an improvement.

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jee3apha said:

Mr Piggy said:

Alcohol can in fact introduce contamination to your work.

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Why is that tho? Of course wiping sterile stuff with alcohol is just dumb, not sure if you meant this. But apart from that I can't see how it can make things worse, generally speaking.

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Dave Bennett said:

When I searched the forum I couldn't find a single post from anyone who got Liberty Caps to fruit indoors.

I found this though. 😉

"Libs are NOT a beginner grow.  I suggest you get familiar with fruiting cubensis indoors as that's the beginner psilocybe." ~ Mr Piggy

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jee3apha said:

So I decided to try some transfers, all of them using the trench method (first attempt). I basically transferred from 3 of the previous plates:



Follows pictures of the used donor plates.

From one of the first row, I tried to transfer just the halo:



From one of the second row I tried to transfer just a wedge of the border:



From one of the third row I tried to transfer just some ropes of mycelium using a pair of tweezers:



Notice how in the meantime, the halo started looking less organized, as if it started to turn into the tomentose white mycelium on top...

I also kept one of the plates as is, just to see what happens, and how the halo will evolve.

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Mr Piggy said:

jee3apha said:

jee3apha said:

Mr Piggy said:

And again, it would really help if we could see your SAB setup.  Kitchen counter is a perfectly fine place to do work, it's where I started.

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Will take a picture tomorrow! Nothing fancy, it's an IKEA SAMLA 65 L with 2 holes.

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Here it is:



The black spot near the right hole is there because I tried to solder a crack. The fire is actually my stove, outside the picture. The light on top is turned off because if fucks with my camera, but it's super bright, that was quite an improvement.

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I think it’s a good idea to remove the lid from the bottom and put the sab down directly on the counter top.  Just wipe the counter with a little iso and a paper towel first and you’re good.

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DV8DUG said:

jee3apha said:

So I decided to try some transfers, all of them using the trench method (first attempt). I basically transferred from 3 of the previous plates:



Follows pictures of the used donor plates.

From one of the first row, I tried to transfer just the halo:



From one of the second row I tried to transfer just a wedge of the border:



From one of the third row I tried to transfer just some ropes of mycelium using a pair of tweezers:



Notice how in the meantime, the halo started looking less organized, as if it started to turn into the tomentose white mycelium on top...

I also kept one of the plates as is, just to see what happens, and how the halo will evolve.

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How did this work out?

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So here is the followup of that post. You may have lost it since this thread is now completely a mess...

Basically, I kept transferring the most promising stuff from whatever made past the trench, with just one exception since the mycelium looked pretty strong in one section before the trench. Here's the transfer as of today, despite the mycelium looks strong it still displays the original halo (from the picture it might not seem, but the halo is made of some thin tendrils):



Similarly looking, in terms of halo, is a transfer of an agar wedge from another plate, but this time past the trench. As you can see, this time the non uniform growth is very apparent, and not justified by the shape of the transfer (as opposed as the one above):



Instead, another agar wedge past the trench from another plate seems much more promising, no halo and uniform growth pattern. I will transfer this in several other plates tomorrow, it's maybe a bit early but I'll be away a few days since Thursday:



I also, tried inoculating some plates using sterilized swabs and the same spore print, here's a detail, there's for sure some contamination, but the two more dense cultures seems legit, will transfer those as well:



Finally, I'm still keeping the plate in the above linked post, just to see how it goes. While it has grown a bit, it's pretty similar to the aforementioned picture, and that's what this mysterious halo looks like when it grows.

Awfullotofshrooms said:

I agree about the halo. I’ve transferred from the halo and it turned into clean white mycelium every time. It used to really worry me until o transferred from it

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Thanks for chiming in, and glad to hear that! But did you also experience uneven growth like these? I guess I'm OK with the halo, even though I've never seen that before, is this uneven growth that worries me the most.

jee3apha said:

So I tried to transfer from these two plates (the middle denser spot of the latter), which in the meantime, they too started developing the halo as well:

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Some updates about the transfers.

Those from the former yielded the same pattern, that is, some thin rizomorphic halo that grows quite fast and that increasingly becomes whiter and tomentose, and in the middle some seemingly fine cubensis mycelium, yet very uneven as if disturbed by the underlying halo. I just trashed all of them, I could live with the halo, but the uneven growth really worried me. This is a picture from before that illustrates this:



The latter picture of the above quote instead was the result of a new inoculation, this time performed with a sterile swab. At the time of transferring, the upper right spot started developing the usual halo, so I focused on the one in the middle, trying my best to only transfer the good stuff. I did 3 transfers, out of which, one was completely contaminated (mixed good mycelium with some very fast growing reticulated halo, possibly different than the usual, interspersed with some other contamination possibly also bacterial ones).

Another was some mild but seemingly clean mycelium, while the last one was this very strong, white and tomentose mycelium:



This is the first time I see something like this, but looks legit, what do you guys think? I plan to transfer from this shortly.