Oddbean new post about login | logout GM! Looking good!
I'm off to palm cove for the bash tomorrow. I hope they wait until I return.
I haven’t tried growing the king oysters before but I think they are a bit slower than some of the other oysters which grow really quickly? Hopefully you will be right.
They seem to be going pretty slowly, putting on those big fat stems. I think they still have a week on them until harvest but who knows? It's my first time with them. I have another bag that's a little further behind them. I like that they're a top fruiter & so don't need a fruiting tent - can fruit in the bag.
Are they king trumpets? I tried side fruiting them and they didn’t like it. They do great off the top
King Oyster was what the liquid culture was called. There are so many crosses of king oysters getting around though. Definitely better from the top. Unlike most oysters their stems are tender & so they do well with less FAE.
Are you just getting the liquid culture and making up the bags yourself? I’ve been getting ready to grow bags from the farmer’s market here which have been pretty successful but they seem to be a fair bit more expensive than just buying the culture from what I have seen.
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.