GymnCarrey said:

I'm back and I've been following a new policy of confidence lately. Instead of worrying that I'm cultivating mold and doing nothing, I've decided to embrace potentially growing mold and just do things. At the very least I'll gain some experience isolating cultures, even if the cultures I'm isolating are mold.

I took some transfers from my old plates in the last post and for the most part they all looked really nice to me. I had a couple go bacterial, and learned a valuable lesson about pouring my plates below the filter holes. I also noticed that my modified plates with filter holes were growing a lot faster than my plates without them. It was an admittedly small sample size, but the correlation with plates that were getting fresh air and plates that were growing fast was 100%. I had swapped to mostly running my plates unmodified because it was a pain to change the filters each time, but now I'm all in on the modified plates. Anyway, I decided that in the spirit of confidence, I was just going to take my best plates and make some new transfers last night. Those new transfers are already starting to reach out onto the fresh agar just a little, which is exciting. Both the last set of transfers and these new ones seem to be growing with a lot more vigor than the initial spore plates and I'm taking that as a good sign.

Excited to share my progress so here's a pic of one of the plates I took transfers from last night. The new one's aren't very photogenic at the moment, but I made a slight adjustment to my agar prep that should make them a lot nicer to photograph once the condensation clears and the cultures expand. I realized that the layer of potato flakes at the bottom of every plate were probably hurting the fidelity of my pictures, and saw milkboy's clear agar tek float to the top of the forum which gave me some ideas for my own process.

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PhenoDreamers said:

Good on you for sending cultures if you're not sure if they're good or not.

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PhenoDreamers said:

One thing I wish I knew from them beginning is that most, if not all known active genera fall under Basidiamycota. Whats great about this is that the hyphae produce clamp connections when they are dikaryotic. No clamps = No fruits. Get a good second hand microscope off Facebook marketplace for cheap dude. Fuck buying a brand new amscope. They'll work, but they're shit.

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