Brock Samson wrote:Are you you keeping them around 80 degrees fahrenheit? I have noticed that with my jars if the temperature is below 75 or above 85 they are slow to colonize. Another thing I do is keep them in the dark. I never had great results with BRF. I currently use rye berries and have a lot more luck.
agreed keep the brf cakes at 80f idealy and make sure there is gas exchange (poke some holes in the first layer of foil)
Sometimes if you keep your jars in cold environments under 75c it can take upto a month to see growth.
You could be working with old spores and they are just not that viable,
Often though the spores sold online and in head shops are not that viable and may have sat around for months, this is my exp anyhow.
So i am going to give you my method that may be able to help you get the most out of your old spores and get you started with what you have got at the moment i would also like to get you to a position where you have fresh new spores without buying anything new or trusting the spores you do buy are fresh. When people ask me and have a similar problem to yourself, this is what I say to do, I could be over complicating things but it works ....
1) Acquire some potato agar from ebay and some petri dishes
2) Make up the agar (mix per ratio on packet and bring to a boil)
3) Pour the hot agar into the petri dishes it in a sterile glove box, put the lid on the dish immediately and let cool.
4) Squirt a little spore water (I am assuming you are working from a spore syringe ) onto the agar on each dish, you could make a few ml go across many agar dishes (this is what I recommend, many dishes makes the odds in your favor so you have a viable culture with no contams on at least one dish).
5) Place agar dishes in a 80 - 84f environment, ideally in a sterile sealed tub in an incubation chamber so you can regulate your temperature.
6) Assuming they will grow (you should get some growth), try to find the most rhizomorphic growth like in this pic (looks the most stringy / reaching strands)
if you have a choice, if not use whatever growth you have.
7) with a sterile scalpel or other sterile knife cut out a square.
now you can drop this onto an un-topped (no dry verm on the top) brf cake or several cakes in a glove box or you could (recommended) drop this into some rye you have presoaked over night then pressured cooked for 90 mins at 15psi then let cool.
9) If you do this with BRF cakes thats it, keep them at the right temp then when fully colonized, birth them by removing the cakes from the jars, soaking the cakes for 24 hours submerged in water in your fridge then expose them to fruiting conditions, thats it, shrooms will grow if the conditions are right!
10) If you have done this with rye, let the mycelium grow through the rye
11) let the rye fully colonize but shake it up a couple of times before its complete to ensure full colonization, but dont shake it to hard, this fully colonized rye is now called spawn.
12) Make a small tray of 1:1 spawn rye and straw (1:1 is a high ratio of spawn to straw to prevent contams) to prepare the straw cut it up small with scissors then pasteurize the straw by putting it into a pillowcase and then putting into a pan and bringing to the boil then cover the pan and let it cool, so you just get a small say 8" by 5" tray or similar, wipe it with bleach, peroxide then IPA, then you can line it or not but make sure you clean the lining in the same way, mix the cut up pasteurized straw equally with the rye spawn and cover it all with sterile plastic but poke holes through it to allow gas exchange. some people like to layer the straw and spawn but with this high ratio it wont make much of a difference.
11) keep that tray at 80f for about a week
12) remove the covering and expose the tray to fruiting conditions, meaning first put in the fridge for 24 hours, then put it in a place where the humidity is about 90-95% rh (relative humidity) for trays the rh is lower, for BRF cakes its higher more like 99% rh. allow good air movement but not too much, a tub with 1/2 " holes in a room with indirect air flow will suffice, mist them daily. You could just use a big storage tub with about 4" of perlite pre-soaked with water, place your cakes on some foil and your trays can sit directly on the wet perlite.
13) you will get shrooms in about 2 weeks and bulk subs / trays in this case produce a lot more than BRF cakes, BUT the important thing here is to make some spore prints, can be done in many ways check out online.
now you can make more syringes from the spore prints ( a bit print can make 50 syringes) and these new fresh spores will be much more viable, they will produce more aggressive mycelium and the new syringes can be used for BRF cakes an you should have 100% growth from your new spores.
but with these new syringes i recommend doing steps 2 - 4 again and try to isolate a rysomorphic strand and put that onto a fresh agar dish, doing it this way you have an isolate on a dish, and with a bit of testing you can get fantastic results, full tubs with 100% of the tub covered in shrooms. you can store your agar cultures in the fridge and they will keep for months some say years!
well i hope this helps, just my 2c worth, works for me
Peace
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