Four days ago I added some purchased oyster spawn to five jars containing popcorn or rye (after sterilizing of course). The next day I noticed these white spots on the kernels of only one jar. For reference, the pink oyster spawn in this jar was also added to a jar of rye, and there is no sign of these spots in that jar, so I believe the spawn itself was fine. Transfer was done in a still-air box, and this wasn’t even the last jar I did, so I’m not really sure if it is contam or not?
One thing that strikes me (and I’m not sure if you can see the detail in this pic), I have seen white spots like this on sweet corn, which I believe is also a fungus, but the popcorn kernels were boiled for 20 minutes, dried for a couple hours, then put in a pressure cooker for 90 minutes at 15psi, so I don’t know how any fungus would have remained in the jars?
Regardless, I was wondering if anyone had seen something like this before, and if the jar is likely a loss? The oyster spawn is actually growing growing, you can see one cluster starting right in the center, and it seems like it’s cleaning the kernels that it expands to? This is my first time trying to expand spawn so I thought I’d ask for opinions on this…
Haha yeah I’m pretty happy with my current NAS setup. I like to collect movies and TV shows but my previous storage was getting full and the drives were starting to fail. I picked up a set of eight refurbished 18TB Seagate Exos drives from Amazon a few months ago plus built a newer server that could handle SAS3 speeds. Made a huge difference all around. I have about 71TB of free space remaining but that should last awhile.
I’m sure using your own storage space would be quite a bit cheaper. If you’re on a linux system, go with zfs and set up a small array. Redundancy is king and zfs is geared towards reliability, although it is difficult to increase the storage unless you are replacing all the drives with larger models (so choose your initial drive count wisely).