Storing spores in the refrigerator have been know to last for 18 years. Then you take a small portion of your spore print, mix it with some distilled water (same as sterile water) and suck into a syringe to make a spore syringe to use to inject into your substrate with a needle for the syringe. You can get your own spores by cutting the cap off a mushroom, putting it gill side down on a piece of foil and covering it with a glass for 12-24 hours. Then you can transfer the mycelium multiple times after that to other plates. The advantage of using an agar plate or agar liquid is to easily see if there is any contamination. Most of the time people will use rye grain, popcorn grain or saw dust in a small bag and wait for that bag to completely fill with mushroom mycelium which is called mushroom spawn. Or they will put the small piece into an agar plate or liquid culture mixture. Now we will cover 5 different mushrooms source options when dealing with spores, cultures and spawn… 1) Clone a mushroom that you buy from the store or find it in the wildĬloning a mushroom basically means to cut a small piece from that mushroom and putting it into a substrate (like dirt to plant seeds) to grow out. Some people do like to experiment with creating new strains so they prefer spores.ĥ Mushroom Sources Using Spores & Mycelium Unless you want to create you own strain most people prefer to use mycelium since it is further along in the growing process and more predictable. If you use spores then you will be creating your own strain of that type of mushroom however if you are using mycelium you are essentially cloning a mushroom that already exists. Now when you want to grow mushrooms you can either use spores or mycelium to start it off.
If you grow from spores you will need 2 spores to come together (almost like a sperm and egg) to start to grow the mycelium (mushrooms are made from mycelium).
You might think it would be as easy as just getting the spores… While that is one option to do that, there are other options as well. Let’s take a look at the difference in more detail now…Ĭhoosing your mushroom source is kinda like deciding where to get the ‘seed’ (if you will) to grow it… Spawn is just a lot more of it than in culture.
Whether you are growing mushrooms from spores, culture or spawn you will find that the process is much the same with each having its own separate advantage.Ĭultures and spawn are very similar in a sense that they are both mycelium.