Another Day, Another Setup...

My Golden Teacher setup did not go exactly as planned. A few things went wrong: I did not use enough spore solution in the original culture, I did not wait long enough for the mycelium to spread, and, most importantly, I did not keep it at the correct temperature.

This doesn't mean the Golden Teacher experiment is a total failure, it just means that is has stalled for now. There is a chance I can bring it back to life. I placed it over a forced-air vent so it can get warm air on a regular basis, and I insulated it with a fleece blanket. It has some surface mycelium  coming up in one corner of the box. It's squishy and white, like a marshmallow.

Golden Teachers

There is also some fluffy white stuff coming up fairly evenly in the rest of the soil, which I am hoping is productive mush and not mold. It's too early to tell right now.

Since this experiment has been proceeding extremely slowly, I ordered a new type of growing kit and some new spores. The spores are the same species, and the variety is called John Allan.

The setup is quite a bit different. It's a mishmash of plastic buckets and aquarium tubing along with the organic stuff, and it look like this when I unpacked it.

Mycodome kit

Yes. Confusing. However, the first steps are pretty much the same as the Golden Teacher steps, so I inoculated the jar of grain and placed it in the white bucket, which was placed into the blue bucket, which has some water and an immersion heater in the bottom. This should keep it at an even temperature. To aid this, I placed it on top of a folded yoga mat and wrapped the whole thing in a fleece blanket to minimize temperature fluctuations.

John Allan spores incubating

The rectangular white device in the upper right corner of the photo is a temperature/humidity monitor. The monitor normally sits on my computer table so I can keep an eye on it and make sure it stays at ~80°F. The temperature may need to be raised in the future.

Fruiting process?

There are some signs that the fruiting process is still in the works. Fluffy white bits of mycelium are poking out of the soil. We'll see how this goes.