You know I have been wanting to work with agar and test everything before I use it. 20 minutes Thinking about it, I don't even think it's the birdseed. LMAO. I'm thinking it may just be the LC that I'm making. I'm doing everything in a SAB But I don't feel it's good enough. I think the only way I'm really going to get everything narrowed down is If I get a flowhood.
Again, I rarely use my hood. All you need to do is isolate. If it's your lc you could allow some tissue to rise to the surface and wait, if it is contaminated with mold, you will see discoloration as the spores mature. If it's bacteria you will smell it or the liquid gets cloudy.
Let me tell you several stories.
I was using bags, shaking them every few days when all of a sudden, after maybe 40 percent colonization I would get an inky black mold that quickly overcame the mycelium. It happened to maybe 70 percent of my bags, every run.
It took maybe 5 runs before I could isolate it. I checked my grain by cooking it the sane way I always did and left it in the bags. I put some in jars. So there was triangulation for my spawn.
I finally discovered that the contamination was only in the bags I shook.
The contam came from wetting the filter with nute rich water from the grain, the spores were capable of germinating on the outside of the filter, driving hyphae through that filter and then breaking off inside the bag when I shook it the next time. Afterward, all I had to do is bunch the filter in one hand as I shook. It never happened again although I have ever since seen that mold in my food and on my agar.
I started having big problems with bacteria in my spawn. Rotten apple smell, milky exudate. It happened in nearly all of my jars, over and over again. I am kind of bull headed and will do things the same way over and over again believing that THIS time it will all be OK.
It wasn't. Finally I just set up a few jars, pressure cooked them for 2.5 hours and then let them sit. After a second "dry" shake ( no innoculation), they went south.
I cooked for 3 hours. Same thing. 4 hours, same thing. No shaking, same thing.
Then I let the grain soak for 24 hours and cooked for 4.5 hours. Two of the six jars still, STILL failed.
Then I went to popcorn and the problem went away immediately. 2 hour cook, no problem.
It was extremely high bacterial count in the rye I was getting at a feed store. I had gotten it from them for years. I asked them if anything had changed and they told me they had a different supplier.
Weirdest thing. I inoculated a batch of bags of corn, same as always. Nothing happened. NOTHING. No growth. Second time, the same. This time I used agar...spawn was fine. What the hell? A third time only I paid attention to everything, temperatures, water absorption, light, amount of inoculation.
Nothing. I tried it with some spare rye I had laying around. Everything worked perfectly.
In the end, what happened is that months before I had switched from one supplier of popcorn to Sam's club. I didn't log the change and stacked the corn under the older stuff. I unknowingly started in on the Sam's club corn. It turns out that THAT corn is treated with a fungicide. The fungicide works. My worms feasted on over 100 lbs of boiled Sam's club popcorn.
The lesson is that anyone can inoculate a pf tech jar and get a few random fruit. It's dealing with the unknown and resolving complex and nearly always unseen and unseeable problems that makes a micophile. Keep at it, think clearly, be ready to change. ( I know of a least two people who decided to "go big". They simply bought 300 half pint jars and made 300 pucks and harvested what? Two grams dry from each? That does not constitute learning to be one with the mushroom and its environment.
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