HOW TO MAKE LIQUID CULTURE FOR MUSHROOM GROWING, Non-Vented Lid Jars from Start to Finish

hey guys welcome we're back here in the grow room under the glow of the 6500k fluorescence uh we got our reishi buddies keeping us company there they're looking good but this video is going to be all about liquid culture again and in my first liquid culture video i mostly focused on using vented lids or lids that have these synthetic filter discs in them and the advantage to those is they allow the pressure to equalize automatically when you pressure cook your liquid culture in these jars and uh but there definitely are some times when you're going to want to use a non-vented lid and so i'm going to talk to you about in what situations you want to use a non-vented lid and i'm going to show you a couple different uh styles of injection ports that i use that are highly effective this is another one here and i highly recommend you use the two styles i'm going to show you today i've used a lot of injection ports and believe me some of them are just bad but the catch with a non-vented lid is that you don't have a filter disc to equalize the pressure for you so you have to do it manually and that's an extra step it's a little bit more difficult but i'm going to show you how to do that today step by step and once you guys do it a few times you'll have it all figured out so i'm going to flip the camera around here and we'll get rolling okay so this is one of the vented jar lids that we made in our first liquid culture video if you guys haven't watched that yet i would highly recommend it it's going to give you some background that's relevant to this video this was made with a micro pose injection port and filter disc they're self adhesive they work awesome and you can use them in all kinds of applications for mushroom growing i will put a link to micro pose in the description of this video but uh there's some advantages to the vented lid and some disadvantages so obviously the filter disc allows the pressure to equalize automatically on your jar so you don't have to do it yourself so as this cools it's going to draw a sterile air right through this filter disc into your jar and the pressure will equalize and that's important because with your liquid culture jars you can't have them in a state of vacuum so if you don't have a filter disk on them you need to vent them yourself which is what i'm going to show you today the drawbacks to the vented lid is you're going to get super chunky mycelium because you're going to get lots of fresh air exchange your mycelium is going to go crazy in your nutrient broth and if you're not using really large gauge syringes you can get clogs because your mycelium is so chunky so that can be a disadvantage also when you go to draw syringes out you can't turn this right upside down because you can't keep getting this filter disc wet or else it's going to contaminate and the mold will go grow actually right through this filter disc what i use these for primarily is you know if you need a bunch of mycelium really quickly or uh you're doing like the mycelium flood method like we did in our cordyceps growing video you want to as much mycelium as you can get out of this jar that's when you want to do a vented lid but if you're going to really get into this hobby you're going to want to start maintaining some cultures yourself so you don't have to keep buying syringes so you're going to want to maintain you know jars of each species that you're growing or strain or whatever so if you're going to looking to make jars that you know you're going to have these around for a year um you don't need super chunky mycelium in here you just need enough to inoculate grain or whatever i recommend going with a non-vented lid and the reason is they're just easier to work with in terms of pulling syringes in front of the flow hood you can turn this thing right upside down you don't have to worry about a filter disc getting contaminated you can do basically whatever you want with them and because there's a limited amount of fresh air in here your mycelium isn't going to go crazy and get super chunky so i use typically 18 gauge syringes with these non-vented lids and it works fine these are going to be master jars basically that i'm just going to store in a in a tub in the refrigerator and whenever i need to inoculate grain or if i want to start another liquid culture jar i'm going to pull from my master jars and and go from there so there's two types of uh injection ports that i've had a lot of luck with and i'm trying to save you guys some headaches here because i've tried a lot of different products in terms of injection ports and there's two only two that i found that really work well and this is the first one here um this is basically a high temp rtv silicone and you can get rtv silicone at any hardware store or auto parts store usually and uh so what you do to make these lids is um you just drill a hole drill a hole in your lid and then you get some of this rtv silicone and you just goop some on the top side make a glob there and then you goop some on the bottom side and you just kind of let that cure overnight because it does take a little while to cure and but what you get is a nice flexible uh injection port like you see here and usually i i mean i'll run these you know i'll do hundreds of syringes through these things and uh they'll still work they won't lose their integrity so that's the first option is using high temp rtv silicone again you'll just punch a hole or drill a hole through your canning jar lid and spread some silicone try to be a little neat because it can get messy um but spread some on the top surface some on the bottom surface let it adhere and cure overnight and then they're ready to use the second method which is even easier if you don't want to use our tv is using these micro pose injection ports so these are self-adhesive you just peel them off and again you punch your drill hole in your canning jar lid and you stick these guys right on now i just started using these this year i've run them several times and they're still working great i don't know if they're going to last as long as the rtv does like i said you can do hundreds and hundreds of syringes through this rtv uh the the micro pose injection port seems to work really well too uh so if you don't want to mess with stinky messy rtv just go with these guys and stick them right on i'm using the same liquid culture recipe i used in the first video i'm using light caro syrup as my sugar source and we also have some of this powdered soy peptone in there so basically you're going for a four percent sugar solution i have about 300 mils of distilled water in each jar and i also have about half a gram of the peptone in each jar so you can use a lot of different sources of sugar some people use honey dextrose malt extract lots of different things but you just have to make sure you get your math right because you want to end up with a four percent sugar solution that's the key and again if you have more questions on that i go over that in more detail on the first liquid culture video so check that out so i have seven jars here ready to go i'm actually gonna rejuvenate uh six strains of mushrooms here i'm doing an extra jar just in case one doesn't seal right or something goes wrong so we're gonna put these in the pc i'm gonna cover each one with my little foil lids i like to use here and they're going to go right in the pc like that and we're going to get the pc up to uh 15 psi once it hits 15 psi and starts rocking we're going to run them for about 25 minutes and then shutter down we have the presto 23 quart set up on our 1300 watt electric side burner all set up ready to go again make sure your base of your pc is nice and centered on your burner that's pretty important for getting good pressurization also as always i told you guys before don't go crazy with your water i have two quarts of water here that's all you're going to need you don't want to put a ton of water in here because it's going to take it forever to pressurize or it won't pressurize for you you can see our seven pint jars fit about perfectly in there across the bottom of the pc and we're gonna fire it up to about um we're gonna go about four and a half for starters and uh once it gets rolling i might kick it up to five here but we'll see how it does while our pc is heating up over there uh i wanted to mention something about the uh the canning jar lids as well um so obviously these come with a lid and a ring now if you're into canning uh you know a lot of times when you put stuff in the canner you don't tighten these rings down all the way you just kind of go finger tight and that allows a little gas to vent from the inside of the jar um when i do these liquid culture jars i just go ahead and tighten these rings right down the reason is i'm reusing these lids multiple times which they're not really designed for to seal that many times again i'm using a pint jar 300 mils of liquid culture in there and i have never had one of these fail or break or explode or anything in the pressure cooker and i've done these probably i could probably say thousands of times a lot a lot of times so if you're gonna use reuse these lids multiple times which you should be doing there's no reason not to go ahead and you know tighten those rings right down with pint jars 300 milliliters of nutrient broth and these rings snug right down and i have never had any issues just hit 15 psi we're rocking and rolling i'm gonna go ahead and set my timer for 25 minutes and once the timer goes off i'll just pull the plug shut her down and let her cool it takes quite a while for these lc jars to cool um obviously we're getting them up to 252 which is pretty warm and uh it's gonna take several hours for them to cool down before we can work with them obviously never squirt any living culture into something that's hot uh you gotta let it cool down to room temperature or else you're just gonna kill your culture all right our pc is all cooled down we have the flow hood running and i have a propane torch and a sharpie all set up here for labeling our jars and everything's been sprayed down with rubbing alcohol and sanitized so we're ready to go on to the next step here i'm going to pull the lid off the pc and i'll set the camera up so you guys can watch me work but when i pull the lid off the first thing i'm going to do is check the rings on those jars because typically the rings will loosen up during the sterilization process so as i pull the jars out one by one i'm just going to you don't have to pull the foil lid off just leave it on and you can just snug those rings back down make sure they're nice and tight as you move your jars in front of the flow hood [Music] okay i gotta say first of all i'm doing this in front of my flow hood but you don't have to do this in front of a flow hood you could easily do this in a glove box or just in a clean room uh this step i'm going to show you here is the the most difficult part of doing non-vented lids for all their advantages this step's a little tricky and you don't probably want to try this until you're pretty comfortable working with jars and syringes and flame and alcohol and all that because uh we're going to be working with rubbing alcohol which is highly flammable and we're going to have the propane torch going so you can see the uh the potential danger there so if you're a beginner i recommend using the vented lids so you can skip this step but if you're a little more experienced we can go ahead and get this rolling here i'm going to show you guys how to vent these now we need to let some fresh air into these jars these jars because they don't have a filtered disc they're in a state of vacuum so we need to let some fresh air in there but we need to let sterile fresh air in there and that's the trick so the way we're going to do this is we're going to use a syringe now let me say first too that uh this this air we're just gonna let just enough air in to equalize the pressure in these jars and this is gonna be that's gonna be enough air for your mycelium to colonize and for these jars to stay viable for at least a year i've had these jars go for 18 months two years with with no air exchange so in jars size air exchange is not necessary there's a lot of debate out there on the internet about that but i'm telling you i've done this hundreds of times if you're doing pint jars uh you do not need air exchange to have viable jars for at least a year maybe two okay so this is what we're gonna use to aspirate our jars um you guys will have the camera set up you can watch me do it step by step but uh what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna this is just a 10cc syringe and i have it about half stuffed with polyfill up to about the six cc mark has a good heavy bd needle on it and i'm gonna go ahead and i'm gonna fill this syringe right up with isopropyl and i'm just using 70 isopropyl and i'm going to fill that right up and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to depress the syringe and i'm going to basically shoot all that isopropyl through the polyfill out the needle and i'm just gonna depress it right into a paper towel and i'm gonna squeeze all of that isopropyl out so it sterilizes the entire needle so once i have it all the way depressed i'm going to hold it you don't want to let any air back in okay because then it's going to it could potentially suck in contaminated air so once i squeeze all the alcohol out i'm going to keep it depressed and i'm going to let air back into it slowly by retracting the syringe but i'm going to do that while i have the needle basically flaming hot while i'm holding it in the propane torch okay so we're gonna have this full alcohol i'm gonna depress it squeeze all the alcohol out the syringe keep it nice and depressed down tight don't let any air back in then i'm gonna hold the needle in front of the propane torch get the needle nice and flaming hot and i'm going to draw air back in as that needle's nice and hot and that's going to ensure that we have sterile air flowing back in our syringe okay and at that point uh we'll cool down the needle we'll pull the uh the depressor out completely and i'll just uh insert this needle in front of the flow hood here we'll insert the needle right into those injection ports in the top of the jars and that's going to allow sterile air to flow through the syringe through the sterilized polyfill right into the jars [Music] perfect [Music] [Music] just want to jump in and mention a couple things here quickly you want to make sure you're using a good hypodermic needle on the syringe you're going to equalize your pressure with uh the reason is that a good quality needle will stand up to this kind of heat where a cheaper one-time use needle won't here i'm using a heavy-duty bd 12 gauge needle and you can see i'm retracting the plunger in several intervals and allowing it to cool in between and this will keep you from melting your needle and deforming the tip but the key with this process is to make sure that that needle is always flaming hot when you retract the plunger and that ensures that you won't draw any contamination into your syringe [Music] [Music] [Music] hopefully you guys could see that okay as i went through the process i might have made it sound more difficult than it actually is hopefully not so now we're all equalized and i'm gonna now i'm gonna pull out our syringes and we'll knock them up label them and they should be ready to go here's our six syringes with our six strains that we're gonna be knocking up in these jars these were pulled from jars that were made the exact same way as these a little over a year ago [Music] [Music] all knocked up and labeled one thing i wanted to mention too is uh i've used this uh same syringe polyfill setup now this exact same one for probably 10 or 12 times now it hasn't hasn't caused any contamination on me yet i just store it in a ziploc bag and go ahead and reuse it when i do another batch so you don't have to like make up a new polyfill syringe every time you do this you can use the same one several times all right so we have them all in our storage tote and i'm just gonna cover that up and just don't want them in any direct light mycelium does not need complete darkness to grow normally that's a myth you just don't want them in any direct you know really direct bright light sunlight whatever so uh i'm just going to leave them in this tub cover them up i'll probably just lay like a towel over the top to keep them kind of shaded and in two to three weeks we should have nice viable jars and if you do have any questions just uh hit me up in comments

Channel: Renegade Mushrooms

Views: 66,134

Keywords: mushroom liquid culture, grow liquid culture, liquid culture vlog, liquid culture recipe, how make liquid culture, how to liquid culture, how liquid culture syringe, liquid culture jar, liquid culture jar lid, how make LC, mushroom LC, home mushroom growing, liquid culture vented lid, how vent liquid culture, mushroom growing, mushroom growing vlog, how mushroom culture, liquid culture ingredients, liquid culture injection port, mushroom injection port, mushroom filter disc

Id: l071Dq4MI7g

Length: 21min 4sec (1264 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 30 2021