Thank you, I was so pleased to see this transfer grow out so vigorously, knew I had to share!

For starters, I do all my work under a laminar flow hood. This is from a liquid culture syringe, it took about two weeks for the first blob of mycelium to grow out on the agar and was a bit sporadic but with sections of nice rhizomorphic growth. Once I had enough good sections to choose from, I transferred a few wedges to fresh plates. From there it was about 12 days until I had the plate above, but it was very consistent growth across all transfers (took 3, this is just the one I ended up turning into LC).

For agar, I make my own using this video by Fungaia as a general recipe base. It’s more involved to make because it calls for more than just water/agar/sugar/peptone, but rather all that plus a mix of pulverised grains, straw, hardwoods, and other trace minerals. I strongly believe in it, though, I feel like the industry standard recipe for agar is easier to make but lacks complex nutrition. In the video, it is equated to a person drinking nothing but soda. Sure, there’s calories there that our bodies are capable of processing, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be healthy, especially when compared to a person eating full balanced meals.

For capturing and storing genetics, I like using a tube like this to drop some of the best agar wedges into, top that up with sterilized water, cap, wrap the cap with parafilm, then fridge.