Inoculating Our First Substrate

Inoculating sawdust and straw substrates with oyster mushrooms.

We started the day off by inoculating the substrate bags that we steamed yesterday. The bags appeared a bit moist inside and slightly dark at the bottom, but overall seemed like they could still be viable subjects for testing our MPS. We sterilized a nail and used it to break up the mycelium inside our grain jar from the US. This jar has been cultivating for a month now and we very overgrown with mycelium.

After this, we checked up on the grain we inoculated a few days ago. The jar didn’t show any growth two days ago but now had a lot of green mold. This contamination renders the jar unusable, but we noticed there was also fluffy white mycelium, which indicates our plugs are still viable. We boiled and dried more grains today, which will hopefully not experience the same contamination as the first jar.

Cleaning sludge out of steel drum.

Due to technical difficulties, we weren’t able to work online on some paperwork as we had intended, so instead we took the time to better clean out the sludge in the steel drum. We rinsed the pasteurization drum but the steaming drum does not have removable lid and is not as easy to clean.