The Craft of Cultivation | The Mushroom Grower Vol. I : Part II
Southwest Mushrooms didn't start in a lab. It started with a folding table and a few baskets of oyster mushrooms, showing people one at a time what a fresh mushroom could really be. Everything you're about to see grew from that. So, yeah, I have some liquid cultures that I've been working on here. Um, we have some lion's mane and a couple oyster species.
Um, these have already been used to create spawn, of course. Um, so yeah, I'm examining some of the spawn that I have here, and this is one of our blue oyster strains. Uh, this was inoculated uh just 10 days ago, and it's looking amazing. Then we have some lion's mane that was just inoculated 10 days ago as well. So, these will be getting in to the lab and being used for um to inoculate our production blocks.
Uh shout out to Ryan Paul Gates from Terrestrial Fungi. I got some new Cortisep strains in here that I'm actually experimenting with. I haven't grown Cortiseps yet, but um I'm really excited to start growing it. Um so, yeah, I have seven different strains that I've plated out here from some liquid cultures. Um, today I will be taking little pieces of tissue from these plates and dropping them into nutrient media broths to basically expand the mycelium and uh inoculate some substrates here soon to get cortiseps mushrooms.
So yeah, I'm just going to be looking at each strain that I have. Uh, everything's labeled on the back. Um, the actual species or or genetic lineage to the strain. So I have a couple plates for each one. Right now we're using a soft red winter wheat or wheat berries.
And you can use a variety of grains. A lot of people have their own preferences. And my preference is the whole wheat berries, sorghum or white proo millet really, but you hear people using oats, corn, popcorn, stuff like that. So it'll all get you to the same uh get you to the same destination. But yeah, personally I think that the soft red winter wheat, the sorghum, and the millet are my three favorites.
Also, rye when it's available. Since these are sterilized, it's still important to maintain like a sterile technique, especially for me right now since I'm opening them up. I want to make sure I'm doing this in front of my uh in front of my flow hood. So right now I'm just shaking up the redistributing the grains to make sure that all the moisture is redistributed throughout the the grain spawn. And then I'm just kind of just refolding up all the creases, pushing out all any excess air and then just sealing it up.
So yeah, somebody could take like a liquid culture syringe or um you know put it in front of flow hood, cut it, cut off the top and inoculate. Basically these were made by measuring out the proper amount of grain and moisture and adding it into this filter patch bag. From there we load these into a sterilizer and these are sterilized at a very high temperature for a prolonged period of time. And after the sterilization cycle is complete, they're moved directly into the laboratory to start the cool down process which is uh takes takes place right in front of the hepoiltration. Uh after cooling down for about a day, I come back in here and then I you know proceed with inoculations whether it be liquid cultures, grain to grains or inoculation street from a petri dish.
And then also like right now I'm basically just getting these ready to go out for for another grower and they can just inoculate their own grain spawn and inoculate their own bulk substrate or whatever they please. So buying this pre-sterilized grain spawn really comes in handy for some of my clients that uh just don't have time to make this stuff at home cuz making spawn kind of takes a little bit of planning and infrastructure, you know. So this is the autoclave that connects into the newer lab. So this will be used to sterilize grain spawn. And yeah, it's a horizontal autoclave.
Written protocol
Southwest Mushrooms Genetic Library
The strains themselves, the same cultures used in this footage.
Read the guide
So this is the dirty end. You can load your materials right here. So in this case, we have some spawn and it just sits right in these baskets. Just like that. And then we'll just slide it in.
And uh basically I keep doing that until it's full. And this is the door. So, I'll just set this in. And yeah, it locks on really good really high pressures in here, so you don't want any steam escaping and getting any burn. And uh yeah, works really well.
I actually got really lucky with this um and some an old grower was kind of getting rid of it, so I got this and a lot of some other equipment for under a,000 bucks. So, really just the work was just setting it up, getting it hooked up to electricity, stuff like that. But, yeah, really, really excited to actually have an autoclave. Um, just as a kid, this is one of those things that I didn't ever think that I'd be able to get or, you know, just seems so far out of reach, but now that it's here, I feel really happy. So, after sterilization's complete and we're ready to unload it, it actually gets unloaded in the laboratory.
There's another door just like this that's built into the wall of the lab. So I can open it up and pull the spawn out directly into a clean clean room. So they the spawn is as clean as possible at that point. It can be inoculated and moved on to production. So with uh pressure sterilization, you're able to sterilize uh much more efficiently.
You can reach temperatures that you can't get to normally at atmospheric levels. So, in this sterilizer, we can get to temperatures around 250 to 270° during the sterilization process. And without the pressure, we're usually at around 212°. So, this will sterilize spawn in a matter of 4 hours compared to 20 hours. So, it's 1/5 of the sterilization time.
And it's just much more efficient. You can, it's kind of like an insurance policy or whatnot. You just really feel safe about using the spawn. Um, I do like atmospheric sterilization of spawn, but uh, it works really well when you can do pressure sterilization, inoculate the grain spawn, and then utilize that as a generation one and then inoculate that into generation two bags. So, uh, let's say I do like a round of 80 spawn bags in this autoclave.
We can turn that into 800 bags of spawn within six weeks. So, it really works well from my process. So, It's like a white malt uh dextrose with about 6 to 800 ml of water. Uh it's been pressure sterilized uh to basically rid it of any contamination or mold spores. At this point, it's completely clean.
We'll drop pieces of tissue into each of these jars. They're all equipped with a magnetic stir bar. So, I can put it on a stir stir plate. And uh this will spin and break up any of the mycelium. Uh basically further expanding it through the liquid.
And then once it's expanded to a point that I'm satisfied with, uh, I can pour it directly into my substrates or suck it up into syringes through these, uh, self-healing, uh, injection ports. These lids are equipped with a self-healing injection port and also a syringe filter to basically give the liquid culture adequate gas exchange as the grows throughout the liquid. Then also self-healing injection port so you can take syringes or whatnot and suck your liquid out and uh it'll heal right back up that hole. So it's really cool and very useful for propagating my celium. And after I kind of wrap my uh jars in a paraffilm, make sure that they're clean when I don't have my flow heads running.
And sometimes it can be a pain to to pull off on things, but it definitely aids in preventing that we just did the transfer with. Then also we'll also wrap up the rim of our jar lid. Um, that's just because right now I don't have any gaskets underneath my lid. So, I'm just using the paraffilm. We'll take our freshly inoculated jar.
We'll just turn on the stir bar, start agitating the mcelium. Hopefully little fragments of mcelium fall off and get spread throughout the water and form like a chain of uh growth that we'll see over the next few days. We'll keep monitoring our cultures and actually coming in here and stirring them up um for 30 seconds, 15 to 30 seconds per jar every day until we get a really nice growth of nice mycelium. So, we'll let that stir. As that's doing that, I'll reststerilize my tool.
Put the transfer jar uh plate right there. And we'll just continue the process of inoculating our c our uh liquid culture. That way we can kind of break up any mycelium that is in our syringe. And honestly, you don't really have to use the needle when you're inoculating into the bag. Sometimes I usually just take this off and just squirt it in there.
But just to kind of show you that's ready to go. And then the the needle already comes pre-sterile. So we really don't need to flame sterilize that at this point. Just inoculate the whole 10 cc's into our grain bag. Give it a nice seal.
Wait about 10 seconds for that seal to to really get uh get on there. Just check it to make sure that's sealed. Now we can kind of just shake it. Mix the liquid culture throughout the grain. Getting everything situated.
Trying to pack the mix cases as carefully as possible. And then once it's packed, I'll just cover with a piece of this wax paper. This helps lock in the moisture and uh just keep the mushrooms as fresh as All right. Layer the bottom of my cases with some uh this wax paper as well. Kind of just keeps the mushrooms nice and protected.
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