ghiajake said:

Question for y'all. Do pans prefer a low-nutrient agar or high-nutrient?

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I'm sure they prefer a high nutrient agar with added Nitrogen, but that makes it really hard to see what's going on contamination wise and almost impossible to select the whispier growth to try and avoid an overlaying culture.

So I use 0,5% plates for pans

fahtster said:

Low… er.  I use 1% which is half of what I used for cubes.  Lower than 1% gets a little hard to see any bacterial contamination, ime.  I also do mainly aerial leading edge transfers so a bit thicker edges works better for me.

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Kloakk said:

ghiajake said:

Question for y'all. Do pans prefer a low-nutrient agar or high-nutrient?

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I'm sure they prefer a high nutrient agar with added Nitrogen, but that makes it really hard to see what's going on contamination wise and almost impossible to select the whispier growth to try and avoid an overlaying culture.

So I use 0,5% plates for pans

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ghiajake said:

So wispy culture is what I want to sector, and GSW grows wispier culture? Does that mean that it's harder to find properly wispy culture on GSW agar because all the culture will be wispier? Sorry if I'm asking questions that y'all have answered over and over for years. I'm not sure if 0.25ml of GSW in my 25ml mix would be enough nutes.-

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It depends on the variety as well, I've never had Bisporus overlay and Jambo will overlay no matter what I do, but TTBVI, Mystery SA and Chlorocystis tends to show both denser and thinner growth and then I'll go for the thin growth.

As for grain water I did 3 different ratios.

Boiled 300g of wheat in 1500ml of water, after the boil I was left with about 1000ml of grain water.

Made plates with 100% grain water, 50% grain water and 25% grain water.





As you can see it really didn't make much differens, so if you want to experiment and view different growth I suggest using something with simple sugars and not just complex sugars.

Kloakk said:

ghiajake said:

So wispy culture is what I want to sector, and GSW grows wispier culture? Does that mean that it's harder to find properly wispy culture on GSW agar because all the culture will be wispier? Sorry if I'm asking questions that y'all have answered over and over for years. I'm not sure if 0.25ml of GSW in my 25ml mix would be enough nutes.-

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It depends on the variety as well, I've never had Bisporus overlay and Jambo will overlay no matter what I do, but TTBVI, Mystery SA and Chlorocystis tends to show both denser and thinner growth and then I'll go for the thin growth.

As for grain water I did 3 different ratios.

Boiled 300g of wheat in 1500ml of water, after the boil I was left with about 1000ml of grain water.

Made plates with 100% grain water, 50% grain water and 25% grain water.





As you can see it really didn't make much differens, so if you want to experiment and view different growth I suggest using something with simple sugars and not just complex sugars.

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ghiajake said:

Oh, damn. The GSW I've been using all these years is just the water I poured off grains I was soaking. Never boiled... I assume when boiling it, more nutes are released into the water. Since you used 100% boiled grain water and it still worked fine, I decided to double what I normally use and went with 20%. The GSW I have is YEARS old, I've just kept it in a milk jug in the freezer and thaw a bit out when needed. I'll be working with the Estero, Nightcap, and Peace River cyans for a while, but I did get a bonus chlorocystis print from arlo that I'll work with later.

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I don't think you will have much, if any, starches in the soak water Unless you rinced the grains well before the soak you'll have a pretty big bioload though

Now when I do grain water, I'll take 2L of thoroughly rinsed wheat grains(no soak) in a pot and fill it to 7L total. Boil until the grains are hydrated and pour about 2 liters into an erlenmeyer flask while it's still almost boiling. Put foil on it and let it come down close to room temperature before I put it in the fridge for several days to clear up.

Then mix 50/50 with RO water, filter it and make my agar. Like I wrote, grain water will have very low to non simple sugars, meaning that the mycelium will have to use digestive enzymes to break up the complex sugars into simpler sugars before they can use it as energy, so if you want to have better visuals of how the mycelium will look later down the road something with simple sugars might be preferable.

In my opinion I like to do all kinds of plates, Nitrogen plates, water plates, 0,5, 1, 2% plates and grain water plates, hopefully I won't need them all at some point, but right now I'm still learning

Kloakk said:

I don't think you will have much, if any, starches in the soak water Unless you rinced the grains well before the soak you'll have a pretty big bioload though

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ghiajake said:

I have a bunch of Adirondack Blue potatoes left from the garden this year. And some purple carrots in the freezer from last year. Could I boil them and use the purple water to replace my GSW?

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I suppose you could, but no, it seems to have about the same amount of sugars as wheat, or so google tells me

After a member here hooked me up with some Karo light corn sirup I'll be trying that for some plates soon, depending on where you live that should be easy enough to get your hands on and are all simple sugars.

Generic said:

but grain simmer water works great... no need to buy anything (especially GMO corn syrup)

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Right? That's why I haven't used anything else in a decade.

Generic said:

and i bet water from steamed beets, potatoes, carrots, would work, but i prefer a standardized process that happens when i simmer my grains.

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Generic said:

i also keep GSW frozen in jars.  If it's not strong enough, then dilute it less

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Generic said:

I never filter any of it, I just exclude that last gritty bit in the bottom of the jar when pouring, or not.

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Generic said:

I think the main thing to change would be to use Grain simmer water, not grain rinse water.

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Generic said:

but maybe it could be beneficial to train the pans to eat the kind of food they're going to be eating soon enough (i.e. grain), rather than fast food (simple sugars)

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That's what I've thought for years with all species myc.

Generic said:

but grain simmer water works great... no need to buy anything (especially GMO corn syrup)

and i bet water from steamed beets, potatoes, carrots, would work, but i prefer a standardized process that happens when i simmer my grains.

i also keep GSW frozen in jars.  If it's not strong enough, then dilute it less

I never filter any of it, I just exclude that last gritty bit in the bottom of the jar when pouring, or not.

I think the main thing to change would be to use Grain simmer water, not grain rinse water.

Edit*:  corn simmer water is my favorite, it is the clearest (compared to rye), and probably more simple sugar-y.  but maybe it could be beneficial to train the pans to eat the kind of food they're going to be eating soon enough (i.e. grain), rather than fast food (simple sugars)

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Yeah, I know yeast will get "lazy" if they are given a lot of simple sugars, but if it matters in a transfer or five I'm not sure, DME which most use is 75-85% simple sugars.

GW is great and I have heard others say it makes the mycelium jump faster to grains, but again, I'm not sure.

Corn has 4-6% sugars while grains and potato have 1-2%

Kloakk said:

After a member here hooked me up with some Karo light corn sirup I'll be trying that for some plates soon, depending on where you live that should be easy enough to get your hands on and are all simple sugars.

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I live a 4-hour drive from where they process and package Karo, it's pretty available here. The availability of corn syrup is why us Americans are so fat, especially in the Midwest where we grow the corn!

ghiajake said:

I live a 4-hour drive from where they process and package Karo, it's pretty available here. The availability of corn syrup is why us Americans are so fat, especially in the Midwest where we grow the corn!

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Got it

Well, could always add a drop or five to your GW recipe and see how it plays out

ghiajake said:

Generic said:

and i bet water from steamed beets, potatoes, carrots, would work, but i prefer a standardized process that happens when i simmer my grains.

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By standardized, do you mean that it's using a waste product that you already had to make to get your grain prepped?

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no, i'm referring to you using your steamed carrot or potato juice.  that could work fine, but then if it did, when you wanted to repeat the results later, you might not have the same carrots or ratio of carrots to water (or you might not carrot all )

Here's what I do when preparing grains.  I rinse them all a few times, then when i'm ready to soak them, I add enough water so that when the grains soak up the water and simmer, there will be just enough water in the pot to keep stirring them comfortably, no more than 2x the volume of grains, as it appears in the pot (no i dont measure).  After simmering, I pour it all through a sink-sized screen, with a bowl below that in the sink to catch the GSW.  This is all silly to try to get exact, because the myc doesnt care that much, I just don't want to store diluted stuff in the freezer, and if you follow the same procedure everytime, then the strength of the GSW will be standardized (i.e. similar every time)  you can choose how much to dilute the GSW each time you make agar.

Generic said:

i also keep GSW frozen in jars.  If it's not strong enough, then dilute it less

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ghiajake said:

That's what I normally do if I want more nutrients. I just don't know pan myc as well as cubes, woodlovers, and edibles.

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my thinking is that if people here say they use 1% nutes for pans and 2% for cubes, then the pan agar recipe should be 2x diluted compared to what you use for cubes.

ghiajake said:

It's not rinse water, it's soak water. I pour boiling water over the grains and let them soak for around 18 hours. The GSW I have is some I pulled out of the soak pan before rinsing the soaked grains off.

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sounds fine, maybe just keep doing what's easy, I bet the soak water wouldn't be as strong as simmer water, but that could be perfect for pans without as much dilution.

ghiajake said:

I have a bunch of Adirondack Blue potatoes left from the garden this year. And some purple carrots in the freezer from last year. Could I boil them and use the purple water to replace my GSW?

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