hey guys in this video we're going to take you through taking a culture from a
mushroom that you have found in the wild if you want to bring it back and get
that culture onto a petri dish. So it was Christmas for me today I was at my
old man's house, he's got quite a big piece of land and I was I'm having a
hunt around and I found this beautiful patch of shaggy mane, and some of them were
like the height of my head plus some, about that fat, like your thigh
these are big shaggy Mane's and so I took some of the smaller ones which
hadn't started dissolving themselves and I've got them home here and so we're
gonna try and get a culture off them and get that culture onto a petri dish so we
can grow it in the future. These are some nice specimens of shaggy Mane's
you can see the sharpie there for size. The big ones I saw today we're about
probably at five times the size of that some of the went way up to here just
these enormous things but they were already half digested so I got these
ones here so I could get them home yeah they're really they're really quite
something the field I had I saw was really large so we'll definitely be
returning to that field again after a bout of rain to see if we can get some more, but
anyway we're going to try and get some cultures from these so I've got my work
space ready. I've got I've got two pre-made petri dishes of agar which I'm
going to use I've got a sterile scalpel I'm going to
use and I've got my mushrooms which I collected today and we'll get one of
those out and we'll use them now. Now this obviously isn't sterile in any
capacity but the inside of its stem will be sterile so what I'm going to do
and the way you do it is you rip open the stem to exposethat inner flesh
we're going to take a sample from down here and at the top and when you rip
open that steam to expose in the flesh with a sterile
scalpel you want to cut a piece of that flesh out and move that onto the sterile
petri dishes. Now you don't want to use the scalpel and cut because as soon as
the scalpel touches the outside their plates no longer sterile. That's why we
rip it open so you rip it open to expose the sterile flesh and then you get
your sterile scalpel and try and cut out the center. Now it is
tricky obviously because um the mushroom itself
by all means is not
sterile in any capacity. There's actually dirt and garbage all over it, so, so what
I'm going to do it is I'm actually going to try and keep the top off that - perfect -
and that can go a side I feel actually probably eat it for dinner just quietly
There we are
that's one
cool it in the agar
make sure you always working behind your plate
all right there we go. so you can also take a sample from up and inside
here but that's quite difficult with shaggy's because they are predominantly
all gills so there's almost all gill, and a very thin line of the outside wall.
it's been about a week now we'll head inside and we'll see if those samples I
took from the shaggy mane mushroom had started to grow mycelium
you're not going to believe what happened.... It worked!
we have a new shaggy mane culture. You can see the mycelium growing off there
the parts of the stem were cut off and placed in there once that mycelium sas
grown out of it further I'll cut the leading edges off and transfer them
to new petri dishes and that'll hopefully isolate the mycelium away from
any potential bacteria that could be around this stalk or the areas that I've
cut off and placed in the middle there