LightningSpore

Made some Ube agar (purple yam) and then did some transfers. It’s pretty chunky consistency, next time if I ever make this recipe again I’d filter it. But usually it is not worth the effort to play around with different agar recipes. Will post some pics in a week or two with the progress.

#science #mushrooms #lab

Black King Oyster harvest today. Some stats about this harvest:

I spawned 1lb of colonized grain to 10 lb bags of sawdust/soy hull gourmet substrate (thanks

for supplying!) on 02/19/2025. That means it took 37 days for these. Probably half of that time it was colonizing, half it was in the fruiting tent.

After pulling the mushrooms off of the block the total weight was: 4.716kg

I trimmed up these mushrooms to remove less desirable parts: Good looking mushrooms: 3.506kg Compost pieces: 1.21kg

So about 75% yield there. Which could definitely be improved by me harvesting at a better time, and maintaining better environmental conditions.

There is something in mushroom growing called "biological efficiency" (BE) which tells you how well you did. Each species of mushrooms has a range of acceptable values here.

Biological Efficiency = (Fresh Mushroom Weight / Dry Substrate Weight) × 100% Biological Efficiency

-> (3.506 kg / 5.443 kg) × 100% Biological Efficiency = 64.4%

I did the calculations based on a couple of difference dry substrate weights, which gave me a BE of 48.3% to 77.3%.

This is lower than the ideal (100-150%), but also my execution wasn't really ideal either. Its good to get this all written down so that next time around I have a goal to beat!

https://learn.freshcap.com/growing/mushroom-yield-and-biological-efficiency/

#mushrooms #mushstr #grownostr #science #math

New blog post available on the site! This time about storing your cultures in "stasis".

Similar to storing your private keys on a metal backup device, storing your cultures in stasis is the most secure and high-fidelity way to store genetic information for the long term.

It is really simple, it is just storing your culture in sterilized distilled water!

See full post here: https://lightningspore.com/index.php/2024/01/17/storing-cultures-for-the-long-term-using-stasis/

With the 3 I made today, excited to now have 20 cultures stored in this way!

#growstr #mushstr #science

The start of something big! Took a clone of the hardest mushroom I’ve ever grown.

Hopefully the cloned mycelium will be more consistent and easier to fruit.

#science #mushroom #bigiftrue https://image.nostr.build/9623092e2b9757959db3400fa0ad2be278b692fe8d505fe5f33313e3d38719cb.jpg