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Question for hobbyist mushroom growers: how essential are all those steps he took to ensure a pure culture? Is it common for wild harvested mushrooms to have co

by goda90 5y ago

Question for hobbyist mushroom growers: how essential are all those steps he took to ensure a pure culture? Is it common for wild harvested mushrooms to have competing organisms that would overwhelm them?

pvaldes 5y ago
Is very common, yes. Sterilization and clean working space are required. The main problem here would be the economics of the system, but the man in the video knows what is doing. He has probably been trained in lab techniques. Can be seen in clever details like taking the second sample far away from the first triangle sampled (to avoid contamination never returning to a part visited yet). Another smart trick is to avoid picking the spores from the lamella. Some fungus are parasitic of edible fungus and live over its host lamella.
s1artibartfast 5y ago
Most of the steps can be skipped with some added risk. Most critical is clean samples and the initial substrate. I have a friend with 20x5gal buckets of Oysters he keeps in rotation in a greenhouse. He preps the first growth in his kitchen using sterile substrate in jars. He discards bad samples before transfer to the 5 gallon buckets. For the 5 gallon buckets, he uses nonsterile bulk from a woodchipper. Mold is the big competitor for soggy wood, and come in at any part of the process. Here is a much easier build: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45b2t7fqhjA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45b2t7fqhjA
- tartoran 5y ago
  Good video. I was wondering if you know how many harvests/flushes can one get out of a bucket? Then should one discard the remaining stuff in the bucket or can they be used for something else? Or can the woodchips be revitalized with some more fresh mycelium?
oceanghost 5y ago
You will be met with nothing but sorrow until you get some sort of sterile procedure in place. Yes, there are many organisms that would overwhelm the mushrooms you "want". There are mushroom spores covering every inch of earth. Mushrooms have a very specific lifecycle and your job as the mushroom grower is to make those chance occurrences a regular thing. The good news is its really pretty easy to do on a small scale.
betwixthewires 5y ago
The trick while working with microorganisms (which mushroom producing fungus are) is sterile technique. Any work you do in preparation needs to be controlled in a sterile environment. Basically all the parts where he worked under the hood are what you care about. Building a hood like that is expensive. I used a cheap approach, a plastic tub with holes cut in it and kitchen gloves taped in, inserted all my working tools and materials and sprayed it with rubbing alcohol and worked in it sealed. It is less effective than a positive pressure hood like the one built in the video, but it is reasonably effective. I know someone that doesn't even do this, she turns all fans and air conditioners off for an hour (to stop air currents), then walks deliberately, prepares her workspace which is a countertop sanitized with alcohol, and uses technique surgeons use. She also gets good results. In the wild, mushrooms send billions of spores, but you don't see the same species dominate a landscape, because they're all always competing and where one colony is successful is luck of the draw. Of course what you are going for is a 1:1 chance that you're growing what you want, so you cannot have any competition at all.

by goda90 5y ago

pvaldes 5y ago

Is very common, yes. Sterilization and clean working space are required. The main problem here would be the economics of the system, but the man in the video knows what is doing. He has probably been trained in lab techniques. Can be seen in clever details like taking the second sample far away from the first triangle sampled (to avoid contamination never returning to a part visited yet). Another smart trick is to avoid picking the spores from the lamella. Some fungus are parasitic of edible fungus and live over its host lamella.

s1artibartfast 5y ago

Most of the steps can be skipped with some added risk. Most critical is clean samples and the initial substrate. I have a friend with 20x5gal buckets of Oysters he keeps in rotation in a greenhouse. He preps the first growth in his kitchen using sterile substrate in jars. He discards bad samples before transfer to the 5 gallon buckets. For the 5 gallon buckets, he uses nonsterile bulk from a woodchipper. Mold is the big competitor for soggy wood, and come in at any part of the process. Here is a much easier build: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45b2t7fqhjA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45b2t7fqhjA

tartoran 5y ago
Good video. I was wondering if you know how many harvests/flushes can one get out of a bucket? Then should one discard the remaining stuff in the bucket or can they be used for something else? Or can the woodchips be revitalized with some more fresh mycelium?

oceanghost 5y ago

You will be met with nothing but sorrow until you get some sort of sterile procedure in place. Yes, there are many organisms that would overwhelm the mushrooms you "want". There are mushroom spores covering every inch of earth. Mushrooms have a very specific lifecycle and your job as the mushroom grower is to make those chance occurrences a regular thing. The good news is its really pretty easy to do on a small scale.

betwixthewires 5y ago

The trick while working with microorganisms (which mushroom producing fungus are) is sterile technique. Any work you do in preparation needs to be controlled in a sterile environment. Basically all the parts where he worked under the hood are what you care about. Building a hood like that is expensive. I used a cheap approach, a plastic tub with holes cut in it and kitchen gloves taped in, inserted all my working tools and materials and sprayed it with rubbing alcohol and worked in it sealed. It is less effective than a positive pressure hood like the one built in the video, but it is reasonably effective. I know someone that doesn't even do this, she turns all fans and air conditioners off for an hour (to stop air currents), then walks deliberately, prepares her workspace which is a countertop sanitized with alcohol, and uses technique surgeons use. She also gets good results. In the wild, mushrooms send billions of spores, but you don't see the same species dominate a landscape, because they're all always competing and where one colony is successful is luck of the draw. Of course what you are going for is a 1:1 chance that you're growing what you want, so you cannot have any competition at all.