More work for me today! I like to keep busy and now i’ve spawned my jars, I can start staggering them and get back into making agar dishes to have a continuous cycle
I have a good system going at the moment, will see how well it works.
Day 1 - wash grain and soak in water + coffee + gypsum for 24 hours
Day 2 - Simmer grain for 15 mins, steam dry, and collect boiled water for use later. Add grain to jar and pressure cook for 90 mins. Leave for 12-24 hours (usually next day)
Day 3 - Use grain water to make agar. I did grain water agar before but for some reason it didnt solidify properly, so I did another test and it worked (although it wasnt pressure cooked). Gambling to try it again to see if it works out this time, hopefully, if not that’ll be 20 dishes I’ll have to throw away
Agar solidifies fairly quickly - about an hour or so after taken out of the pressure cooker so during that time I clean out the room, spray everything down and wait for it to cool enough to use. I use glass bottles of a drink “Fentimans cola” its botanically brewed and tastes awesome albeit quite expensive, but they fit perfectly in my pressure cooker and I can put in about 200ml each bottle which can fill about 5 dishes each (4 x 5 = 20)
Today I poured 20 dishes (plus about 5 more as I had a bit left over), made spore syringes, and inoculated 4 more grain jars.
Once the dishes are poured, they need to sit for a few hours to cool, I usually leave it a day to help reduce condensation.
Made 4 more spore syringes from the spores collected the other day
The 2 either side was made from my original Fiji grow - I did have 3 but one of them was used for my current BRF grow. Apparently I used way too much water last time, and way too little water this time These new syringes will last forever, water is supposed to be clear(ish)
4 more jars inoculated with the dishes used under. They are all different plates, will hope to see if there’s any growth speed differences but my ultimate goal is to have 1 dish of monoculture for all 4 jars
Incubator currently. Top 4 were made 3 days ago and are already showing great signs of growth