Liquid Cultured

To give a better idea of what I'm talking about with the trash bag technique as I just got around to picking my flush of oysters. The reason you can generally use new egg flats without sterilizing or pasteurization with chemicals because the medium is pretty inert and doesn't aid much in bacterial growth. But since the material is paper pulp and paper is made from trees the mushrooms can create enzymes to break down and use it for nutrients. I also imagine it uses whatever energy was stored in the fruit itself that was used to inoculate these blocks. Had been making dripper bottles of the main chemicals used in testing mushrooms so the label cuttings etc make it look dirty in there. I figured I might as well grab spores while I'm at it since I've gotten a microscope and slides. I like using sterile petri over foil or card stock and once the caps are removed I will cook them or dehydrate. To the reason why I do this is because they will get wrapped with parafilm and put onto a shelf in the hood room. But also, its so when I want to make a spore swab (don't need to fill with water but I suppose you could) or syringes I can fill the petri up with water, swirl it around and then suck a ml or two up in several syringes. I've also found that when you are finished up with doing a bunch of petri work I will empty the agar discs left in the petris, clean them with isopropyl, and then reused for spore prints. Of course you can do this in a ziplock bag, filling with water and all that which is how most store their spore prints but I have an excess of petri. I've also spore printed a few judas ears and will be trying to grow it out on agar this weekend. Anyone can request spores from things I collect and grow for free if we meet or cover shipping. Same goes with the chemical tester solutions.

Created a proton email for anyone who wishes to communicate with me outside the forum without giving out personal numbers etc or those who dont use telegram/messaging apps. LiquidCultured at protonmail dot com. Replace "at" with @ and "dot" with . Helps reduce crawler bots reading the email address and sending me spam.

Supposed to be king oysters but thinking that was not the case, must have mixed up liquid cultures. Had a contamination/moisture issues with the rest of the buckets as I got lazy so only 4 of 10 2gallon buckets fruited. Going to try cloning chanterelles with 12" egg crates as the medium like I'm doing with these oysters. Some of you may know the trash bag method and that's basically what I'm doing. Straw logs work great, straw buckets... not so much. TLDR trash bag tek you'd take either grain spawn or the raw fresh fruit and place in the center of a stack of egg crates or news paper/books after saturating the egg cardboard with RO/distilled sterile water while in the trash bag. Tie off bag, wait 3 or 4 weeks then take the now solid block of mycelium out and put into a fruiting chamber or just open the bag enough for decent air exchange. Done

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These came after the forage but will have them ready to use if my dropper bottles get here before this weekend for the Shade park foray. If anyone wants 5ml droppers of these once I can make up a batch of each let me know and ill bring them free to the next meetup.

All images from my phone. I do have a lot of these on the DSLR in macro in the field but those need processed as I shoot in RAW format, then get the photos from over 30mb each to under 2mb so I can post here. I've also put them up on my telegram chat I link to in another post. When I have them all tidy and clean photos I'll upload to my flickr account so you guys can see full resolution and very close details. I'm dehydrating all the things I forage. Don't plan to eat any until I can get into mycologist led forays from the HMS and know a lot more. Not sure if true chanterelle but not quite smooth and not a jack o lantern. Smell like apricots, well, at least smells like the nasal snuff I have that's apricot. I promise I'm not a hipster haha looked edible, type of button? but haven't started trying to ID. Probably should spend more time reading my books as I feel bad getting home and feeling overwhelmed taking multiple species and not getting to them all or skipping some for whatever reason. Gathered these but from google lens AI guess its not a safe mushroom (Orange mycena or start of jack o lanterns?) I'm not dehydrating This red shelf poly smells amazing, rather soft but firm Found on dead log, no bark Varnish mush? Thought I'd lift the tree stump out of the ground before this came off. This one also smelt good, found near the white polypore 2 picture's up Jelly/wood/judas ear. Found some pristine samples, maybe 10-15 total. Nearly impossible to remove from the downed tree trunk but also smells quite nice

Highly highly recommend that park

Found a bunch more today at another park. Easily a meal worth. Dehydrating ruins them for cooking later?

Forgot to add the bolete cross section. Instantly blues

I havent eaten anything I've found and probably wont for some time, but these did seem tempting after reading about them. I guess drying them ruins them then, will keep fresh next time. I may try cloning them on agar and see if they are cultivatable.

I haven't tried identifying these yet as I just took them. Well, the bolete I have a clue. I have a nice new macro lens coming this week and its a NIKKOR Z MC 105mm f/2.8 VR S. I have its smaller 50mm brother which is what I used on these images. Camera is a Nikon z7 ii if anyone is interested. Female wolf spider eating her hubby after mating was among the tiny little mushrooms I was trying to get pictures of. Next mushroom up Found this pair of mushrooms one with what appears to be a parasitic fungi on it? Then these pretty guys The boletes

Planning to visit this park august 11th to look for mushrooms as there isn't rain in the forecast for a while after what we just had and i havent been there before. if anyone wanted to tag along or would also be in the area let me know. It will be in the afternoon. Southeastway Park https://maps.app.goo.gl/14xNWcXRyG8AFf4dA

I mentioned green spores as the gills in the photo appeared to have green staining. But that could be from the touch not the spores collecting on the gills. Finding them in multiple ages also helps because some gills might be pink when young then change to black as they mature etc. There are a handful of mushrooms that will fairy ring some in the Amanita genus etc. See my profile for a list of books that come highly recommended in assisting identification and lookalikes. It's best to use multiple book sources to identify. Mushroomexpert.com run by mycologist Michael Kuo has keys for must mushrooms used for identification and is another great source. He is an author of multiple books in my list. The HMS is doing DNA sequencing for mushrooms found during the summer and fall forays. I'm not sure if they offer a paid service for collected elsewhere or otherwise.