Steps to Gourmet Mushrooms Cultivation:

The first step in mushroom cultivation is to obtain a mycelium culture for the strain of mushroom that you are looking to cultivate. Mushroom mycelium is available from many online sellers and we are one such supplier. We make available for purchase the same cultures that we use in our commercial production.

Types of cultures:

There are many types of culture types that are available and one that has come into favor as of late is the use of liquid culture. This is a culture that is grown out in a sterilized water suspension consisting of different formulas that provide nutrients (primarily sugars) that the mycelium will consume as it expands. This method of expansion has many benefits and a couple of drawbacks.

Benefits of liquid culture include, large volume of culture to work with in a condensed form. The solutions are usually made in various sizes of mason jars depending upon the quantity needed. Liquid culture is easy to draw up in syringes which will contain the mycelium and can be used to inoculate whatever grain spawn formulation you choose to use. The mycelium is able to expand and grow out faster in a three dimensional environment versus a two dimensional environment, such as a petri dish.

Some of the drawbacks with liquid culture is that it is very difficult to know if it is contaminated until you use it for grain inoculation. Seeing as how both liquid culture and grain spawn can be quite expensive and valuable to your grow, buying quality samples is of the utmost importance. Additionally, each time you want to use the culture you have to insert a sterilized needle into the jar (or open the jar for direct pour; not recommended unless you have a very sterile work environment). This action creates a possible contamination point each time you go to use it. In order to test a liquid culture you will need to inoculate a small amount into a small jar of sterilized grain to allow it to grow out or test a few drops on an agar plate.

Mycelium Cultures can also be obtained in the form of inoculated petri dishes that contain a living culture that is growing out on an agar formula poured into the plate. There are benefits and drawbacks for this method as well.

Benefits include very fast results which are visible within an average of one to three days. This is a good way to identify if contamination may be present in the culture, and if you are working with a isolate (one culture) or multi culture. More on petri dishes and culture sectoring in a future post. Grown out plates can be cut up and used to inoculate jars of liquid culture, grain spawn, even direct to fruiting substrate as well as to additional plates to expand.

Drawbacks include, limited expansion room, and limited nutrients for the culture to absorb. Plates can dry out rather quickly and this will affect the viability of the culture you are or are planning to grow out. Many people struggle when working with agar and petri dishes. It can be difficult to work with when making and pouring your own plates. It takes practice and patience to develop the skills needed for consistent results.

Grain spawn is also another way to obtain cultures:

For many hobbyists, it is much easier to purchase grain spawn that has already been inoculated with a mushroom species that they want to work with. Benefits of this approach are that you do not need to have all the equipment and tools needed to create the sterilized grain and to inoculate. You receive a bag that is ready to go into your bulk substrate for colonization and fruiting. By working with cultured grain you get to bypass a lot of the work involved in the initial steps of cultivation. Drawbacks can include the fact that you do still require a sterile environment in which to conduct transfers or you will still most likely experience contamination. This can be accomplished by working with a laminar flow hood or at the least, a still air box. Purchasing grain spawn (inoculating on your own) or inoculated grain spawn can be pretty expensive especially with shipping.

We have all the methods above available for our customers and you can purchase grain bags, liquid cultures, and petri dishes along with other cultivation supplies through our site as they become available. There are a couple of other methods for obtaining cultures and I will touch on them briefly below.

Other options for obtaining cultures:

Spore prints and spore syringes are another option for obtaining mycelium cultures. Making your own spore print from a fresh mushroom or growing out a spore print / syringe from a supplier can be another good source. This practice involve obtaining spores (print / syringe) and then growing it out on a petri dish and observing the characteristics of the multiple sectors that will develop. From those sectors, you will need to do multiple transfers to new petri dishes to finally end up with a culture isolate (single strain/specimen) that exhibits the traits you are hoping to isolate. For example, type and speed of growth, colonization rates, production capacity and many other traits that help to determine their use and consistency desired from commercial strains.

Spore prints are a good way to be able to obtain genetics from wild or cultivated mushrooms. They require clean up however as the mycelium will be the result of several (hundreds or thousands) spores germinating and the resulting quality of the mushroom will be a multi spore colony that will require further transfers.

An additional option for obtaining a culture if from cloning. This process includes taking a tissue sample from a mushroom (usually wild found) and then growing out that tissue either on a petri dish or in liquid culture. Depending on how good your sterile techniques are you may not have any issues with contamination. What you will be growing out is a exact duplicate of the mushroom that was cloned. The genetics will be the same but you may be able to further improve the strain by growing the culture out and then taking a spore print and working with the spores as indicated above. This will allow you to look for and isolate the traits that you want to identify in the culture.

There are numerous variations on the methods listed above as far as techniques for each type of tissue sampling, these are just quick overviews to give you some information for a baseline into some of the culture options available and a few of the benefits and drawbacks involved with each. Feel free to reach out to us with questions, comments and we will do our best to help answer them for you.

Here's to cultivating awesomeness!