Recommendations for first time fungi growers

Corn spawn?
I thought that was just me🤔

My excuse was that I was required to pull all the open pollenated ears from our research plots so volunteers didn’t wreck the research.

What’s yours?

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You cant work with dishes in a glovebox. If you start out with the PF jars the glovebox is fine. But when your ready to stop wasting time with contamination …you will want to get a flow hood

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Is it literally just a box to work in with an air filter mounted on it?

Literally…you got it

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I would definitely agree with using a tissue sample to create liquid culture way easier. I was thinking about how I would get started with some basic supplies and a syringe of spores. Tissue sampling is super easy. I’ve had my best luck just using a syringe.

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I once had the homeboy shopping network (guy pushing a shopping cart in West Oakland CA) ring my doorbell with a couple of large hepa filters. Paid him $10 for the pair. Gave them to a buddy to build a hood with when I left dogtown for the emerald city about a year later. The shit this guy bought by was just mind boggling sometimes…

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Do you think my plywood flow hood will pass the GMP?
:cowboy_hat_face:

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KISS … Learned this acronym when i was training to become a pilot… very helpful!!.. yes after you fruit and get some experience you will want to clone the nicest fruits in your tubs. Do the easy stuff first… there will be no need for laminar flow hood if you use the technique i described earlier to get your very high probability successful first time flushes…

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This s where to get your Rye grains. I would buy hundreds of pounds at a time. So yea a flow hood(edit: was) is a must have item for me.

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Those shrooms do actually grow outside, which is far from sterile. Right after psilocybe fanatacus, the next mushroom internet hero of the 90s was a guy in Arizona who went by the name of ryche hawk, I believe. He pioneered taking those colonized pf cakes and applying a casing over them, which was I think peat, vermiculite, and he liked oyster shells in it as well. There is no sterile tek to it after the cakes come out of the jar. The casing is an oxygen rich environment that discourages anaerobic growth, which include the molds that ruin the fun guys. If you live in florida, you can just set that outside and it grows fine…or so I have heard :slight_smile:

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That’s a pretty good excuse to use corn and a good usage, @cyclopath. As good as any really.

I’ve never been asked why. I guess I use corn because I find it’s cheap and readily available. I now have a familiarity with it. Nothing more than that really. I guess I find it’s also multipurpose. I love pop corn, tortillas,corn whiskey and corn grown fungus.

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Are you suggesting that spores with quart jars can’t be done effectively in a still air box that cost 5$ at Walmart

No…I’m suggesting you cant work with petri dishes in a glovebox…if you are working with spores and if that’s all your working with. The glovebox will do. Why would you use a flow hood if your using dirty prints on a daily basis. I like my monotubs to flush for months on end.

Edit: just for clarity…for new myco peeps…glovebox and still air box…is the same thing

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#1 petri dishes (stops wasted time in contamination)
#2 flow hood (stop wasted time in contamination and saves 80% of your time during inoculations)
#3 slurry tech coupled with myco bags (this is where you save the 80% time to inoculate) plus a bonus of being 2x to 4x as fast to colonize.

Edit: I just droped the microphone with my hands up. :cowboy_hat_face:

Edit 2: at that time in my life, I had 20 years experience doing sterile techniques…I freaking pulled my hair out trying to figure out why I could not get better than 50% to 2ed flush (with PF cakes). It’s so obvious now. But I tried every way to get CLEAN spores. And I’m not referring to prints.
#1 dishes with a flow hood

3rd edit: it all boils down to what you intend or expect to accomplish with your given effort. $200 DIY flow hood = 100% flushes for 4 or 5 times …way beyond their value or expected life span :wink:

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I knew the guy who did the inner reservoir technique from psilocybin fanaticus, that was an awesome website back in the day. Migjt have to get back to it

that’s a freshly opened Mason jar…that over 4 years ago was poured in front of my flow hood. I still have 24 to 30 examples of the same time period shit. CAN YOUR STILL AIR BOX do that??? Shit flows down hill

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If your serious about growing and want to save yourself a lot of time and frustration I’d have to also say buying or building a flowhood is totally worh it.

I had only limited success until I got mine.

My method was to start with spore prints, use innoculation loop to put them on agar plates then to rye grain jars.

From there do grain to grain transfers from jars into unicorn bags of rye grain (myco filter patch bag)

Once I had enough colonized grain grown out I would transfer into sterilized substrate filter patch bags. My mix was coir, straw and wild bird seed.

I then would just fruit right in the bags on 48”
5 tier wire racks. I’d cut open the bags then just fold over the top and hold with one center clothes pin so they get some air exchange from the sides of the bags.

I’d then take a tissue samples from the mushrooms I’d like and use that to start new agar plates for the next round.

I will say I quickly got away from using pasteurized substrate in monotubs and changed to the sterilized substrate bags as they were always a sure thing with no fear of contamination that would sometimes happen with pasteurized substrate.

Also growing in the bags on racks makes life much easier, no monotubs to clean out. You just throw the bag away after you get a few flushes.

I did play around with liquid cultures and it was a good way to innoculate many bags but down side is if it gets contaminated everything you used with it would be too.

Has this happen once and that’s why I prefer grain to grain transfers in front of the flowhood.

Also I’d recommend downloading the “let’s grow mushrooms” videos by roger rabbit off the Pirate Bay. It has tons of good info and will help with prepping grain and procedures for agar work and grain to grain transfers in front of a flowhood.

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That is on the cheap side. I think my filter cost $150, and the blower was around $300.

I’ve only grown shrooms for personal use., so never needed huge volume. I was able to do pretty well with a ghetto glove box.

I didn’t make the jump to a flow hood until I started playing with plant tissue cultures.

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THANK YOU for all the feedback, you guys are the shit. Y’all never disappoint.
I think I’m gonna try some sterilized rye bags, get some spores from online, and try the monotub tek… I am going to try to get a few flushes under my belt before I start messing with petri dishes, tissue cultures, and a flowbox. I’ll get there tho.

It might be a few weeks before I get everything and get started, but I’ll keep y’all updated with pictures.

Any/all advice is welcome :cowboy_hat_face:

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I went to the local grocery store and picked up every grain they had… The only thing that seemed to colonize faster was black rice.

Rye was the hardest to sterilize, even 45min in the autoclave often resulted bacterial growth.

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