A Mushroom Farm Laboratory
All right, so today I'm, uh, going to be doing a few or some inoculations with, uh, some of the liquid cultures. So this is just a liquid culture that I prepared yesterday, and it consists of light malt, dextrose, and 500 milliliters of water, and we're gonna just take simple transfers or just slight tissue transfers and place them into these jars and allow them to to grow out and use that for spawn production here at our at our farm. All right, so yeah, I just have a stack of peachy plates. So this is just, uh, everyone is its own own strain or species that I want to kind of propagate and grow out throughout the liquid culture. So yeah, we have like an HE zero, and which is a lion's mane, that'll stand for Hericium erenasius, and we have actually four lions main strains that we're going to grow throughout today.
So we'll see what that looks like. So just take the plate, throw some alcohol on it, make sure that it's nice and clean. Then I'll simply remove the peripheral, just put it right in front of a HEPA filter. I'm just going to heat up a scalpel really quick to kill off any kind of bacteria or anything that we don't want making its way into our liquid culture. It would just be a nightmare to, you know, ruin that.
So also what I want to do is kind of loosen up the lid. I'll just cover that plate back up and put it in the stack. Just make sure we label it so we know what strain it is, and kind of just prepping myself up, removing the moving the lid, uh, the ring at least, before I, uh, start using my scalpel. That way I don't make a mistake or drop anything. And then yeah, when I, uh, remove the lid of the plate or put it back on, I really try to keep my fingers right around the top edge of the blade and just basically minimize the chance of my.
Fingers getting any kind of contamination, uh, on the agar as I, uh, move it on and off, uh, on and off the plate. So yeah, the lab at this point is basically 10 foot of HEPA filtration, so it's just a few HEPA filters that are built into these cabinets. Then there's a housing atop each of the cabinets that has a blower attached that basically pulls air in and pushes it through the help of a HEPA at a rate that basically make sure that air coming out of the filter is sterile and free of any kind of airborne particulates or any contaminants, and it also basically pushes any kind of dust that could land on your work or in your area of work, basically ensuring a sterile work area. So that's utilized in this lab, and then we also have air coming in from outside of the lab to create more of a positive pressure in here, so that keeps any dust from from coming into the room or any kind of contaminants that we don't want, as well as it really, uh, helps keep the temperature in here where I want it to be, because I noticed without, you know, air circulating in from outside of the laboratory, we'd have the lab heat up to well above 100 degrees, so that would add on to cool down times and basically delay the process of getting in here to to get work done.
Written protocol
Southwest Mushrooms Genetic Library
The strains themselves, the same cultures used in this footage.
Read the guide
So that was, uh, basically one of the reasons why I went for having both sides or two flow heads bringing in air from outside, because it does get pretty hot in here when, uh, we unload our substrate. We usually have about two thousand pounds of substrate cooling in here at a time. So anything to do with making your own cultures or growing out grain spawn or to the production of your mycelium and culture form is the most important part of your mushroom growing journey or part of the process, just because this is going to be the future of Of your growing, um, as far as what kind of production you can do, this is going to be the life of uh whatever you're doing, whether you're producing for food or for medicine or for your, you know, your own production, uh, for for clients, this is going to be the the life of your business, uh, or whatever, you know, life of you grow. So it's super important to basically ensure that you don't really try to cut any corners, and uh, but for the most part, it's really simple and really easy to understand.
Just do some research and experiment really for the most part, and it'd be good to go. But yeah, it is the most important part of the process. Each of these jars is 500 milliliters, so we'll turn this into 500 milliliters of my ciliated liquid culture, and with that, I mean, we can inoculate one pound of grain spawn per milliliter. So with that, that's 50 pounds of grains or 500 pounds of grain spawn, and then that can actually be turned uh into another inoculation of ten times its uh original inoculant. So we're looking at five thousand pounds of grain spawn from just one jar.
That five thousand pounds can be used to inoculate tons of sawdust substrate, so it's just super important to get this right because it's gonna eventually be used to grow over a hundred thousand pounds of mushrooms. So you get bacteria that blooms in the matter of hours compared to the the rate that the mycelium grows out at, so it's very important to make sure that if you're like listening to some music, uh, you're not like singing in the, you know, during the course of your transfers, because, you know, I mean, I've even read where a researcher was doing some singing while they were working in front of their plates, and they were getting a lot of contamination, uh, and once they kind of noticed that, they stopped, and the contamination went away. It's really important to just know when when the right time to to talk or breathe, and if you don't understand like any of that, just wear a mask until you kind of get the hang of it.
So when I make up my liquid culture, I don't do any kind of boiling of the water or anything, so I just add room temperature water to the jar. Then I measure out the right amount of nutrient. It, once it's sterilized, there is a little bit of color change to the solution, and you do see a little bit of sediment floating around, so it's just from the additives that have been added to the water, which is in this case just like a light malt dextrose. In other cases, people use like a honey or corn syrup. All kinds of stuff can be used to make it.
You can do like a grain water liquid. Some people use like coconut water, um, all kinds of stuff, so that's nothing to be really worried about. These were just removed from the sterilizers. Once the mycelium runs through it, that sediment will actually disappear, and we're basically just trying to back up the whole uh the whole library. This is basically the majority of the strains we grow, not all of them, but we're just turning it all into a liquid culture reserve to just have on hand as well, because sometimes it's really nice just having that liquid culture available.
Yeah, I just put some extra gloves on because I had a hole at the tip of my glove, so instead of taking off the glove and putting on new ones, um, whenever I take the gloves off, my hands are usually kind of sweaty, so it gets really hard to put on gloves. So I guess a tip is I just put on gloves on top of those gloves, and they just slide right on, and then that way I don't have to break a pair of gloves trying to try to put it on my hands. So that's really it. You know, these aren't the ideal gloves. That I even like to use, these are like the vinyl exam gloves, so they tend to crack and break easily.
So when you're kind of working through your jars or your plates or anything, I've noticed that like, especially at the fingernail fingernail area, they rip. So, but, you know, with what's going on every, you know, currently with the state of events, I'll take uh, whatever glove I can get, and you know, that way I'm wearing gloves too, because I'm constantly, you know, dousing my hands with this alcohol or isopropyl to, you know, sanitize them or, you know, disinfect them between uh, transfers or movements, and that happens repeatedly throughout the day. So without gloves, I've tried it before, you end up with a severely cracked hands, uh, you know, and they'll start bleeding and stuff like that. So yeah, gloves do come in handy for for doing this kind of stuff. And I just have some pre-sterilized bags of spawn, so we'll just be taking some Petri plates and using that to create a bag of spawn that will be called the G1 or generation one bag, and then that will be used to produce ten more generation two bags, and then from there we can move those into production bags and move to fruiting.
So I'll just heat our scalpel up again. We have our Petri dish uh, waiting to be transferred. Then we have a bag of sterilized grain. In this case, I believe this is our sorghum. Yep, this is a sorghum grain.
Just prop that bag open just like that. So usually you'll use a Petri plate, or I will, and I use it to inoculate two bags or 12 pounds of spawn, but in this case, I'm just using it to make one bag. It'll speed up the colonization times and just make it quicker, and I don't really need two bags right now, so I just again seal it until it's properly sealed. In this case, this spawn bag is a mix, or this one is just straight soft red winter wheat. Then we're growing out Reishi mushrooms or Reishi mushroom mycelium on this uh, grain.
One of the things I do with the bags is uh, break the agar wedge up through the bag as you mix it. That kind of creates more inoculation points for the mycelium to run through your grain spawn. So we have the spawn inoculated, and we have six bags here. This will turn into 60 more bags of grain spawn here in about two weeks. We'll start that, and from there we can uh, just move it to the next part of the life cycle or the prop process you.