Week Three: Inoculation

Rye grain inoculated with oyster mushroom mycelium.

Hello World,

We had an eventful week full of presentation and inoculation.  The first half of our week was spent preparing for our press conference on Tuesday.   We gave a ten minute long presentation overviewing our project and then answered fifty minutes of questions.  It was a good opportunity to reflect on what has been done in the past and focus in on what we want to accomplish this summer.

We also inoculated our first grain spawn this week.  On monday we successively used our pressure cooker to sterilize jars of rye grain.  We used about 1.5” of water, which was enough water that the cooker did not run dry during the 90 minutes.  We also used smaller jars so that we could put the tray back in the bottom of the cooker. After sterilizing, we put two oyster mushroom plug spawns in two of the jars, and scraped oyster mushroom off of plugs and put that in the third jar.  We placed all three jars in the incubator and over the course of the week, we noticed fuzzy, white mycelial growth in all three of the jars. Our agar plates displayed healthy growth as well. This is exciting progress towards the successful cultivation of spawn!

This week we started creating our liquid culture medium.  We did this by mixing one quart of distilled water, two tablespoons of dextrose sugar and two tablespoons of malt extract. When mixed we let the pot simmer on a low heat setting so that the sugar and malt would dissolve, forming a broth for our cultures.  We scratched our first attempt after pressure cooking the jars for 90 minutes, because the sugar caramelized and was unusable. During our second attempt we pressure cooked the jars for only 20 minutes. The result was still a liquid with some sugar settlement at the bottom of the jar, but we decided to try inoculating one jar with approximately 3 mL of culture using our liquid syringe of V.volvacea mycelium to see if it would result in healthy growth.  We then placed it in an incubator at about 25 degrees celsius.

Hopefully we will continue to see growth in our spawn cultures throughout next week.