Inoculating Grow Master with Liquid Culture

You will need: Liquid culture syringe with stopper, two sterile 18g needles and two alcohol wipes. Lighter (or butane torch), gloves, mask and disinfectant.

 

Step 1

Use sterile technique. We recommend you use gloves and wear a mask, wipe down your hands and forearms with disinfectant, and wipe down the inoculation port as well as your workbench. Then, uncap the syringe tip stopper and replace it with an 18G needle. 

  • Do this swiftly. Do not open the wrapper and leave it lying around. Ideally, you would open up sterilely packaged items in front of a laminar flow hood. Likely that is not an option for most home growers. It is possible to get great results without a flow hood if you are cautious. 
  • Once the needle is in place it is time to inoculate. Flame the needle until it is red-hot then cool it with the provided alcohol wipe.
Step 2

Immediately after sterilization, plunge the needle into the self-healing inoculation port. USE ONLY 1-2CC OF CULTURE for a 3.5-5lb bag of sterile grain. Too much liquid culture can cause the grain to be soggy and may actually hinder mycelium growth. 

Step 3

After inoculating, if using a Grow Master Sterile Grain bag or any other mushroom growing bag, pull apart the sides of the bag. Do this without opening the bag. The goal is to maximize airflow to the mycelium by unsticking the sides of the bag so the filter patch is more accessible to the culture.

Step 4

Now the hard work is done! It is time to watch your mycelium grow.

  • Place your grain spawn in a room temperature area, away from direct sunlight. It is best not to refrigerate your spawn. However, if it is fully colonized and you cannot inoculate it right away the spawn will stay dormant in the fridge. Never refrigerate pink oyster spawn.
  • You can store your liquid culture syringe in a refrigerator for future use, unless the species is Pink Oyster.
  • Healthy mycelium is white (although pink oyster has a pink hue) and will spread throughout your sterile grain. When the grain is fully covered in white you can consider your spawn colonized. This means it is time to inoculate into a hardwood fruiting block, more grain, etc.

 

 

FORIJ Liquid Culture has been tested and is guaranteed contamination-free. However, contamination can still occur during the inoculation process. Please be as clean as possible when handling!