Interesting update this time!
The surviving four of the six drinking glasses that I inoculated a month ago have been consolidating for about a week and today I spotted a small mushroom growing against the glass on one of the cakes.
Disregard the green blotch. It must be bacteria or something. Anyway, it wasn't on the cake, but on the glass. The cakes were all a pristine white color.
I proceeded to dunk all four cakes. It's time to dust off the good old shotgun terrarium and bake some perlite!
And now the story of my first ever grain jar that got contaminated with mold. Twice.
I shook it to break it up a couple of weeks back and noticed the mold had grown inwards. No surprise there, really. Still, I had a fucking stupid idea and I went with it. I filled a bowl with water, spiked it with some 12% hydrogen peroxide for good measure and submerged the jar. I then opened the lid ever so slightly to allow the water to flood in and shook it before opening. I took a few big spoonfuls of uncontaminated, colonized grain and mixed it with some wet untreated vermiculite. I didn't even wash my hands.
The 'cased' spawn colonized for a week or so under a foil lid before I moved it to a sammich bag to hopefully fruit since it had no visible mold anywhere. It quickly started forming hyphal knots and now they're all over the place. No fruits, though.
Interestingly, the first pins chose to show up today.
Now I have a slight crisis deciding whether I should 'birth' that shit or let it go as is.
Again, you can disregard any green stuff you see, as the vermiculite had some green bits in it.
...
And there's more!
I made a second grain jar last month. This time I had the good sense to use gypsum while boiling the oats and I paid attention to moisture content based on my earlier attempt. I used the same stuff that had contaminated oh so many of my other inoculations, but for some reason this time everything seems to have worked out.
I have already broken up the grain once when it was about 80% done, to see if it would re-consolidate without a hitch. Apparently it did. Now I just have to master grain-to-grain transfers and I'm golden! The genetics are probably only so-so since I shook the jar right after inoculating but quite frankly I do not care.
That it?
Nope.
I also made seven more BRF 'jars' since I found some suitable drinking glasses. For these I re-sterilized the two previous syringes, used self-distilled water and still had some mold probs. Three of the jars showed mold straight away but it's been several days now and the other four jars are still looking good. Four must be my new lucky number. And the original spore print must be contaminated.
Those black umm... circles? demonstrate where the first signs of growth were. I actually botched every single one of them at first (well, the original syringes were contaminated AF) so it was into the PC once more with them, hence the four inoculation holes.
Phew. Finally we're getting somewhere!
