Another way is if one were to constantly clone the "best looking mushroom" of each crop they produced. Here's an example: You fruit a nice tray of cubensis, see a 10"er with a 4" cap, and clone it. Then using the cloned mushrooms mycelium produced on a petri, you grow another tray of cubensis from that clone. You see another nice mushroom in the new crop that is 11" tall, and clone it and use that for another crop. You continue doing this, and eventually, your strain will become degenerated showing the signs mentioned above.

You can stop this by keeping a strain library in test tube slants, or petris in your refridgerator. This slows mycelial growth down to a halt where you can have your strains as good as they are now in 50 years. I reccomend making 3 slants/petris of any given strains just in case 1 or 2 have any problems in the fridge.

Hope i helped.

peace
camel

Club99: If you take prints from every crop, you will not have the exact strain that you started with if you grow those spores out. It will be some new substrain of the original cloned mushroom. That is why when you buy a print/syringe from a spore provider you are NOT actually getting that strain, but thousands of substrains that is relative to the number of spores in your print/syringe. So you don't actually have the pure Equador hybrid, but a combination of substrains unless you get the original mycelium from the first cloned wild mushroom, which I would think not even our spore providers have.

Noisecode: I have written up the basic method(s) to create both petris and slants on my site www.shroomery.org/~PMAA/sos.html

But the backround seems to be messing up, so i'll post the whole tek in another reply below.

peace
camel

Pressure Cooker/Canner
A glass bottle with a narrow neck (like a Mrs. Butterworth bottle, or an autoclavable flask)
Light Powdered malt (Home Brew store)
Agar Agar (health food store)
Yeast
Scalpel
Inoculation loop
A supply of 20 mm x 100 mm test tubes
Petri Dish(es)
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First things first. The main workings of this have been made possible by the book, The Mushroom Cultivator, by Paul Stamets. I highly recommend purchasing it (money VERY well spent) from Fungi Perfecti. Now let us save strains, shall we?

First Mix your dry ingredients together (Yeast, Malt Powder, and Agar). Add aproximately 50 grams of this mixture to 1 liter of water (the liter is already in your glass bottle). Make sure that the bottle doesn't get filled within 3/4 of its capacity. Shake the bottle (with the water and dry ingredients within) to mix the water and dry ingredients evenly. Plug the hole of the bottle with a cotton ball, and then cover the top with aluminum foil. Then place the bottle in the pressure cooker/canner and sterilize at 15 psi for 30 minutes (follow the instructions included with the cooker). Let the pressure go back down to 0 before opening the cooker/canner. Remove the bottle from the cooker/canner, and the tin foil. When ready to pour, unplug the cotton ball and pour the liquid into the petri dish(es) and test tubes. Fill the test tubes only 1/3 of the way up, and let the test tubes rest on something (piece of wood, book, etc) at a 15 to 30 degree angle. Also, cover the petri dishes with their lids. Let the agar solidify in the test tubes and petri dishes. When cool, and solidifies, rub the inoculation loop across a spore print, and then across the surface of the agar in the petri dish. Let the spores germinate, which will take several days. Do NOT let the mycelium cover the entire petri. Flame sterilize (lighter, or other alchohal flame are good for this) your scalpel. Cut a small square of mycelium from the petri (small enough to fit into the test tube). Then transfer the square to one of the test tubes. Let the mycelium grow across the top of the agar inside of the test tube. This will only take a couple days. Do not let the mycelium go to far deep into the agar (ie, no more than a cm or so). Then plug the top of the test tube with a cotton ball, and screw the cap on (if your test tubes do not have caps use tin foil to cover them). Mark the strain and date on the test tube, and refrigerate until needed! Take the test tube out every couple of months, and transfer (with a sterile scalpel) some mycelium to a petri, then start the whole process over if necessary. If not, put the test tube back in the fridge! And remember... DON'T BE AFRAID OF AGAR!!! It will speed up your colonization times, and make your life a lot easier in the long run!!!

Have fun!

that was what was on that page... I think i hit everything in that write-up...

peace
camel