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grams. 4 cups is approximately a liter. Therefore,
a single petri dish culture can generate
from 1 to 5 liters of spawn, utilizing the traditional
wedge transfer technique. These
techniques are described next.
First Generation
Grain-Spawn Masters
The first time mushroom mycelium is transferred
onto grain, that container of spawn is
called a Grain Master, or G The preferred containers
for incubating Grain Masters are
traditionally small glass jars or bottles, with
narrow mouths to limit contaminant exposure.
Since the Grain Master is used to generate 100
to 1000 times its mass, special attention is given
to its purity. Otherwise, the slightest amount of
contamination is exponentially expanded with
each step, not by a factor of 10, but by a factor
of thousands! Molds have advantages over
Figure 105. Grain-filled 1/2 gallon jars ready for
loading into a commercial autoclave.
GENERATING GRAIN SPAWN 133
Figure 106. Sterilization indicator test strips are
placed into a few grain filled jars to test effectiveness
of sterilization cycle. Note the letter "K"
appears when sterilization has been achieved.
mushrooms in that within two to four days every
spore can send up hundreds of microscopic
tree-like structures called conidiophores on
whose branches are dozens more mold spores.
(See The Mushroom Cultivator (1983) Chapter
13, pp. 233-317). Mushroom mycelium, on the
other hand, typically expands as a linear extension
of cells. In a jar holding thousands of
kernels of grain, a single kernel of grain contaminated
with a mold such as Penicillium,
surrounded by tens of thousands of kernels impregnated
with pure mushroom mycelium
makes that entire container of spawn useless for
mushroom culture.
A single 100 x 15 mm. petri dish culture can
inoculate 4-20 cups of sterilized grain. The traditional
transfer method calls for cutting the
mushroom mycelium into wedges or squares us-
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