this is just a cut and paste from a similar question somebody asked me in a PM, specifically regarding large fruitbody and high yielding strains. Hope it helps:
There are two main schools in strain isolation. I call them front-end and rear-end (although I don't think anybody else does). The front-end school germinates spores on agar, transfering to new plates until a pure strain is reached. In this regard, a single starting plate can yield several isolated strains. Most people do several plates to start with, and end up with up to 25-50 isolates. Each one of these isolates is tested to determine the strain's performance. I'm definitely not of this school, although it does have some benefits. Using this method, strains are isolated which may well not have bee selected for cloning from a multi-spore grow. Also, many strains may be great by themselves, but aren't that impressive in a multi-spore grow. Cultivators of the rear-end school would rarely see the potential hidden in these fruits and would pass them by on cloning day.
Obviously, the rear-end school uses multi-spore grows to actually see the fruitbodies in action, and chooses one of these to clone. This is the way I almost always isolated strains. I never really cloned with a particular goal in mind, and I always took multiple clones from each multi-spore grow. In other words, I never really sat down and said, my goal for this cloning is a large fruit-body strain, or my goal for this grow is an early pinning strain. Rather I cloned all the fruits that seemed to have potential, plus a few mediocre fruits, and tested each one. The reason I did this is to me a strain's overal performance includes factors of size, speed, shape etc. I never really focused on just one thing. In general I used a blanket approach. I would clone one of the earliest maturing mushrooms regardless of it's size. I would clone the largest mushrooms. I would clone fruits from clusters and clone lone fruits. I would clone a few mushrooms from each flush. In the end, I'd have a dozen clones, all from one multi-spore tray. To be honest, I rarely tested all of these clones. Most eventually died of neglect. A few were past on to an apprentice. I was too busy growing to focus too much time on strain selection. I would usually use maybe 4 of the dozen clones for the next grow. I was rarely disappointed.
Cloning for yield isn't something I can shed much light on. I can't look at a single mushroom and have much of a guess on what it might yield like as a pure culture. The one thing that stands out is that I cloned a smallish sized HA from a large cluster once. The resulting strain was just like the one I cloned, small sized, and fruiting in dense clusters. It threw yields like I couldn't believe. But I hated that strain. It took more work to harvest, clean and dry those things than I cared to do. So I guess you could try that approach if you are looking for yield, not sure if it will consistently work, just know it did once.
Now, for size. I think the largest isolates I had came from large fruits. A few came from the sleepers, mediocre fruits cloned not because they were themselves outstanding, but just to see what they would do if isolated. But most of them came from 3rd 4th or 5th flush monsters. A couple of giant strains I grew were cloned from "border breaks" those fruits that come from the side of the casing, usually on a 2nd or later flush, and tend to be huge. I never really encouraged them, but always cloned them. See This thread
I always cloned from the substrate and setup I wanted the strain to perform on, but often found that strains that were mediocre on say cased grain would be very good bulk susbstrate strains. In general though, it's more foolproof to clone from the same setup as you will use to grow the strain. This can be limiting for folks who do just a big tub or two at a time. In this case, smaller trays should probably be used as a proving ground, allowing the cultivator to test several strains in the space they would normally only have one strain.
So far as cloning method, I used them all. Never really had one I always used. I like peroxidated agar alot. I cloned to liquid many times when I had no agar or didn't want to bother with it. I used 9er's liquid inoculate cloning method several times. I've cloned straight to grain or to peroxidated grain many times. About the only constant was that I always took my sample from the base of the stem, near the center. I guess it depends on what you are doing. Agar is about the only reasonable way to handle and store many isolates, although cloning straigt to grain can be a great way to get a dozen qt's of different strains for testing in a dozen different casings.
That's about all I can think of re: cloning for size and yield.
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And oh yeah, I didn't really specify it above, but you sounded like you are looking for a strain like the hawaiians I had that would form huge pins which wouldn't open until the fruit was 6 inches or higher. Well that was cloned from a border break. The pin formed on the BOTTOM of the substrate, just about a 1/2 inch in from the side. The sides of the tray were loosely filled with moist casing between flushes, so this thing had to grow up through about 5 inches of loose casing before it was even at the casing surface. I would guess that this environment favors genetics that will allow the fruit to grow nice and tall before opening the cap. Once those genetics were isolated, the fruits behaved the same way, even from the middle of a casing. Loved it. There really is nothing like having dozens of 5 gram dry, closed cap, hero dose fruits. They also store great, being closed, they are very durable.
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"From a certain point of view"
-Jedi Master Obi Wan Kenobi
PM me with any cultivation questions.
I just looked at my profile and realized I had a website at one point in time on geocities, it's not there anymore and I have no idea what I had on it. Anybody remember my website from several years aga? PM if so please.
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