Saving spores

For purpose of saving and transporting large volumes of spores:

Can one cut the spores out of a mushrooms - dry them and then powder them, later to be mixed with water and sprayed where they are desired?

Sometimes, you don't have to do all that, you don't have to do anything. Like for puffballs. They are already dried out bags of spores, so if you gently put them in a dry container, the spores will stay viable.

When you take a spore print of a mushroom, those are viable, and the mushroom was hoping for the wind to come up and disperse them. If you have them on a piece of paper, you can save the piece of paper and bring them out of dormancy later.

Spores are meant to be dormant, little packets of DNA sent out into the elements to come alive and grow later when the conditions are right. Unless you cook them in the process of drying them out, they will reconstitute later when mixed with water and sprayed.

Good luck distributing them 'where they are desired'... Depending on how much you desire them you may want to think of innoculating with actual spawn. Spores are very unpredictable and(depending on the species and the substrate) I would suggest they are unlikely to pretty grow.

Not to rain on anyone's parade though, by all means try it out; you won't be losing anything but a bit of time. Just don't bet on huge harvests or anything...

Christopher G Williams wrote:Good luck distributing them 'where they are desired'... Depending on how much you desire them you may want to think of innoculating with actual spawn. Spores are very unpredictable and(depending on the species and the substrate) I would suggest they are unlikely to pretty grow.

Not to rain on anyone's parade though, by all means try it out; you won't be losing anything but a bit of time. Just don't bet on huge harvests or anything...

yes, spores are unpredictable even in the best case scenario. In the worst case you will get a big ball of spores in the water and bacterial will just eat them.

a stem butt slurry would be better since it is living mycelium. Proven culture grown out on sawdust or grain would be best. Or a super soaker full of liquid culture, but making sterile liquid culture is difficult unless you have a Cat 100 clean room.

I'm not really worried about having a sterile culture anyway. Mushroom certainly have a mind of their own but I'm interested in playing around a bit more with my shaggy manes and parasols as well as experimenting more with store bought portabellas - and some king strapharia if I can get my hands on some. I've heard Stamets mention having pretty good luck with spore slurries from time to time - I was just wondering about going through the added step of drying them first so I could hang onto them for a bit if I didn't want to use them at the time I was collecting them. Cutting out the gills with a pen knife seems like less of a pain in the ass than spore printing on know varieties that one wants to eat fresh for dinner. I'll keep tinkering with it.

drake schutt wrote: ... unless you have a Cat 100 clean room.

You are going from one extreme end of the scale to the other extreme end of the scale. Blowing spores into the wind is almost guaranteed to fail. But you don't need a "cat 100 clean room" to give yourself a reasonable chance of success. A glove box isn't hard to make. A pressure cooker, hepa air cleaner and a little knowledge of sterile technique bring this within the abilities of most people without breaking the bank. Pick up a copy of The Mushroom Cultivator by Stamets and Chilton.

I've got a copy. I've done the glove box thing. Made a fridge into a grow room to control temp and humidity. I'm getting more into the idea of lazy wild culture. Find a environment that may be suitable - tweek environment to favor the species I'm going for, dump a fuckton of spore and cross my fingers. I've got a pretty good handle on oysters in wood - so now I'm going for lots of edible lawn shrooms if I can swing it.

You are already ahead of most Landon. I was recently wondering what would happen if you inoculated freshly cut hay or maybe hay that had been cut a day or two earlier with spawn. Trying to inoculate it after the plants defenses started to die off while it still has significant moisture but before other creatures take over.

Your odds with spores would be much lower. These things haven't been written about.

*edit to add-- The folks who sell spores for magic mushrooms now sell them in a water solution in a syringe, with instructions to inject into a sterilized substrate. This sounds similar to what you are considering.

Landon Sunrich wrote:Cutting out the gills with a pen knife seems like less of a pain in the ass than spore printing on know varieties

really? hmm. FWIW, ports are notoriusly difficult from spore, rather ironically for how pervasive they are in the grocery. Oysters and reishi would be way easier. Stropharia and shaggy mane could be easy from spore to straw or compost, as well.

"
You are going from one extreme end of the scale to the other extreme end of the scale. Blowing spores into the wind is almost guaranteed to fail. But you don't need a "cat 100 clean room" to give yourself a reasonable chance of success. A glove box isn't hard to make. A pressure cooker, hepa air cleaner and a little knowledge of sterile technique bring this within the abilities of most people without breaking the bank. Pick up a copy of The Mushroom Cultivator by Stamets and Chilton."

I was talking about liquid culture, which may have been a little off topic. I am a mushroom farmer and I started out with that book, a still air box, a pressure cooker, a wing and a prayer.

In my opinion your idea is great, Landon. And you also picked exactly the right species to work with. Shaggy manes and parasol are both quite efficient when it comes to reproduction from spores. I took home shaggy manes that have been to old to eat sometimes and just put them in places with nutrient rich soil around my garden and in the area around my compost heaps they seem to have found a fitting habitat. I don't get big amounts until now, but there are growing more every year. Last year I got my first ones on a hugelkultur where I added compost to the top soil.

Also there are reports dating back over 1000 years of cultivation of Flammulina velutipes in china. The method used there was simple as it can be. They just used ripe caps and smeared them on freshly cut stumps with a good possibility of harvests in the next years. I wanted to tell you about this in your thread about the ones you have found this winter, but I just remembered when I was reading this.

To save bigger amounts I wouldn't even cut out the gills. It is even more easy to dry whole mushrooms, and because you don't want to make anything sterile out of it, it doesn't really make a difference. Just be sure to use old fruiting bodies where the spores are ripe already.
Also I don't think it makes sense to make a solution you can spray. It just makes more work and distributing such solutions is quite difficult, because it will gum up any regular spraying bottles within seconds. Just grinding them to powder and scatter this when it's raining will have the same effect.

I was talking about liquid culture, which may have been a little off topic. I am a mushroom farmer and I started out with that book, a still air box, a pressure cooker, a wing and a prayer.

I disagree! Making liquid cultures is just as easy as making spawn jars, you just use a different growing medium. This year I got a success rate of over 98% (4 contaminations on 236 spawn jars) with just a pressure cooker for substrate sterilisation an a spraying bottle filled with water to make a cleanroom out of my bathroom.

Florian Kogseder wrote: Making liquid cultures is just as easy as making spawn jars, you just use a different growing medium. This year I got a success rate of over 98% (4 contaminations on 236 spawn jars) with just a pressure cooker for substrate sterilisation an a spraying bottle filled with water to make a cleanroom out of my bathroom.

More dedication to the art of mycoculture than I have!

John Elliott wrote:

Florian Kogseder wrote: Making liquid cultures is just as easy as making spawn jars, you just use a different growing medium. This year I got a success rate of over 98% (4 contaminations on 236 spawn jars) with just a pressure cooker for substrate sterilisation an a spraying bottle filled with water to make a cleanroom out of my bathroom.

More dedication to the art of mycoculture than I have!

yes that is very impressive! I would like to see what all you grew with that amount of spawn! The problem I ran into was growing yeast, probably because of brewing beer and kombucha in the same room. Mycelium will run it over but it's still not good. You cannot see it in LC but you can smell it. I agar petri dishes because you can see the contamination most of the time. I blend them up with sterile water and pour that into big bags of sterile grain, much the same way you would start a liquid culture. It's called liquid inoculation instead.

To keep things on topic I will share a video of a variation on spore slurry and stem butts;



I'm curious about the blewits because I have 25 pounds of blewit grain spawn ready, yikes! it's totally the wrong season for them by the time the substrate will be colonized....

I was fascinated by mushrooms since I was a boy and almost ten years ago, when I was still in school, I first read about the possibility of growing mushrooms at home and I just had to do this. I didn't have any money back than so I was reading anything I found about it on the internet and used the cheapest and easiest ways of growing I could find.
I did stuff like that mostly for fund for some years and didn't even really care about harvests because I find more than enough wild ones around here for me and my family. Over time I perfected these low-tec methods and about two years ago I came to a point where making this on a commercial scale within some years became an interesting possibility. I infected about 7000 kg of logs over the first two years, mostly to test inoculation methods and compatibility of mushroom and tree species and this year I finally started with my first larger scaled operation still using these easy methods because large investments really didn't seem necessary until now.


The logs were just put up, so I'm not expecting first results for some more months, but hopefully during fall and winter I'll get the first harvests. You can read about my progress until now in here
https://permies.com/t/30779/fungi/Outdoor-mushroom-cultivation