full day of grind

site design on pfunct.com is coming along nicely (there’s still so much to do/learn) and today was nutrient medium day – in preparation for liquid culture (LC)

A quick explanation of why NM/LC, and an even quicker rundown of the process.

First, The What:
NM is basically a nutrient dense broth, filled with carbohydrates, amino acids, vitamins and minerals.
After you inoculate the broth with spores > they germinate, hyphae grow, and the liquid becomes cloudy with mycelium.

Then it’s called Liquid Culture (living, growing fungal cells suspended in the nutrient broth)

The Why?
Anyone can buy spores in a syringe on the internet. $25. It’s a simple purchase. You can use that syringe to inoculate grain or wood (dependingon the mushroom). Keep it in the right conditions long enough.. and mushrooms will grow.

OR.. you can inject that syringe into the broth and grow mycilium. This expands a10ml spore syringe to 1,800ml liquid culture. A 17,900% (180x) expansion. We’ll use this to inoculate grain/wood with
Basically creating an endless suply of life.
So.. that’s exactly what I did.

The How:
To prepare the liquid culture we use 600g distilled water, 18g of corn syrup, 1.2g. malt extract powder and 1g. soy peptone.
Once that’s all properly mixed, each jar needs to go into a pressure cooker at 15 psi for 30 min.
Once it’s been sterilized, the LC jar can my inoculated with a couple cc of the spore liquid.

Suffice to say, we’re making progress over here.

Next post: inoculation of spores into nutrient broth.