I'm currently in the process of beginning to grow mushrooms again and since money is currently an issue I'm trying to do this on a shoestring. Buying a spore syringe was totally out of the question so I went looking for alternative ways to obtain either spores or a culture.

I still had a bit of dried mushrooms in the freezer and really wondered(perhaps I heard or read it somewhere before) if I could grow a culture from the dried mushrooms. So I did some googling and found reports on Shroomery where people placed dried wedges of the cap in agar or a malt/dextrose liquid culture and had success.

Since I don't have any of that, I found that liquid cultures can also be made with honey dissolved in water. I read that between 2% and 4% is enough to grow a culture. Too much honey(10% or more perhaps, don't know) and the sugar will kill the mycelium(That's why jam can be preserved for a long time). For 5.95 euros I bought five little jars meant to be used for jam from a store around the corner.

I mixed 750ml of luke warm water with 21g of honey, which is slightly above 3% due to the density of honey and gave it a good stir.


I spread the liquid over the three jars and filled them up for about 2/3rds and loosely placed the cap on. Screwing the tops on could result in shattering glass during sterilization! I placed the jars in a big pot, filled it with water so that it came to around halfway of the jars and boiled it for 30 minutes. After letting it all cool down to a comfortable room temperature again I started to prep my work space.

Cleaned my dining table, washed my hands thoroughly and wiped all my equipment with some alcohol and then burned them clean with a torch. As you can see, I didn't have a scalpel so I used my survival knife. It works but as soon as I have some money to spare I'll get some proper equipment because it's far from ideal. The whole process was overseen by my mushroom mascotte.


I selected three different donors, each would receive their own jar. I used the sterilized knife to cut open the stem of a mushroom and use the pliers to remove parts on the inside of the stem. This ensures that the transplanted material is sterile as well and greatly enhances results. After extracting a few pieces I lifted the lid of a jar, inserted the pieces and screwed the top back on. For the other two jars I cut wedges out of the caps and used those. I wiped all my equipment and my workspace(the big plate) with alcohol and burned my tools clean after wiping between each transplant. Cross-contamination between samples is unlikely.

The jars were placed in a shoebox behind my refrigerator next to the pump unit(where the most heat is produced).


When I checked after two days, the two jars with transplanted cap material showed quite some activity. The water has gone cloudy, I could see white trails in the water and one of the caps showed mycelium activity. The stem material jar showed no activity.

Today I checked again, 6.5 days after transplanting the mushroom material. This is the result:

Both jars with mushroom caps show lots of mycelium floating in the liquid and there is definitely growing white mycelium on the cap.

And the big surprise from the stem material:


It shows activity as well. Not as much as the cap jars but this does look a lot like Psilocybe Cubensis mycelium. This surprised mel especially since I had been told by a lot of people that you cannot grow new cultures from dried stem material. The stem material was significantly less than the amount of hood material, but I'd say the chances are quite big that the caps still contained spores.

Mind you: I extract the stem material first with completely sterile tools from the inside of the stem. It could be possible that I contaminated the sterile insides of the stem with spores when I cut the stem open, but I'm leaning towards saying that it is possible to grow mycelium from dried stem.

I'm no mycologist, just an amateur that's drawing conclusions based on observation.

Seems like a contam bonanza, but good luck


also


cheep spores abound! ($2)

http://fsre.nl/

Healthy lc should not look cloudy. There should be obviously discernible mycellium floating in a clear, if slightly colored, solution. In some cases, it will start out somewhat cloudy and then go clear if bacteria is present and gets beaten back by mycelium. However, with cloudiness like that after 6.5 days, I would be willing to bet that they are contaminated with bacteria. You'll know for sure once you start inoculating jars. Hope I'm wrong and props for testing out the road less travelled

that looks contaminated to me.

I think you are going to have to use agar. Your dried mushrooms are going to be far from sterile, and it is likely to take a lot of effort and multiple agar plates to get the contams separated from the mushroom growth. Not saying it can't be done - but it is far from trivial. Some specialty food stores do sell a type of agar. You should sterilize your agar, preferably in a pressure cooker but at least in boiling water.

Without agar, the contams and mushroom growth are hopelessly mixed. You can only (successfully) use liquid culture when starting with sterile spores or growth.

I highly doubt it will work.....

A lot of people say it won't work, so now I'm quite skeptic. A request for spores from the fsre was already planned and I already have an envelop prepared until they open up.

However, I was incredibly curious if this was possible in my environment. I'm waiting for the jars to breed for a bit longer and then compare the results with pictures of other liquid cultures. If they don't match I'll ditch the cultures. Regardless of the outcome, I believe it was worth doing the experiment. Gave me something to do on quiet evenings .

Agreed! It's always cool to experiment in my book!

LC's are generally very sensitive to contamination , Some extra steps you could use to cut down on contams would be to dip the dried mushroom tissue into a 3% hydrogen peroxide sollution before adding it to the lc , if you can get agar an antibiotic that survives the pressure cooking process such as gentamicin sulphate can be used to avoid the tissue contaminating.Also sterilising some swabs (ear buds) and then swabbing the gills might make for a more succesfull culture than the mushroom tissue itself.after swabbing cut the tip off the swab into the lc.

You should of washed the dried fruit body multiple times in 4-5 jars of sterilized water, then taken a small section from the interior and placed that inside the LC or even better, on Agar.