Oddbean new post about login | logout Yeah - I buy 10-20mls of the liquid culture & then expand it into more liquid culture. I then make grain spawn with the liquid culture by injecting it into a bag/jar of sterilised & cooked grain. Once you have grain spawn, you can inoculate your growing medium with it. A 1.5kg bag of grain spawn can inoculate 2 fruiting blocks
I did take a tissue sample from some white oysters I bought. I put that sample on agar, let it grow, transferred the inoculated agar to fresh agar (twice to remove some contamination). I then used the clean agar sample to inoculate some sterilised sugar-water to grow liquid culture. It can be pretty cheap to do your own bags, but you need a pressure cooker & a lot of patience. There's a learning curve to it all.
I might have to give this a go. It sounds like fun to learn and experiment with and should work out cheaper than the ready to grow bags.
It's definitely fun & interesting. You can keep it pretty cheap but you'd want to be growing a few bags to make it worth it. A huge shortcut would be buying colonised grain spawn bags ready to inoculate your growing medium. At this final stage, contamination is less of a risk because you're dealing with less nutrient rich medium. Cooked grain & sugar water is so easily contaminated.