Condemned jar with myc & contam ... what fun experimental options ?

[RichShroom]

Hi,

Say I've got a small jar (whisky tumbler 250ml) of PF cake - Rye Flour & Verm - which is showing signs of mycelium losing a battle to colonise over the jar.

No horrendous green growing enemy mould, just some general subs blackening, and my myc losing vigour & white brightness.

I've read that tossing the jar into some poo / soil outdoors & playing the odds is worthwhile.

Do I just toss into a hole & forget about it ?
Or di I cut away the dodgy areas from the cake and toss into a hole & forget about it ?
Or di I cut away the good myc from the cake and crumble this a hole & forget about it ?

If the good myc survives and shroomies do pop their heads above the soil, is there any health risk from the contam that accompanied its burial ?

Even if it's not safe to eat the results of any experiment, let me know what might be useful for observation / learning purposes only. I'm a week or so away from my 1st ever cake-in-a-terrarium fruit, and will then be crumbling 8 or more cakes to h-poo. Practical experience right now in any form will be useful & appreciated.

Shot
Rich

[Om shanti]

Black mold, AFAIK, is a potentially serious health hazard - depending on which black mold it is, but that might be impossible to ID without a laboratory. I personally wouldn't toss the jar until I was absolutely positive it's some mold. It sounds as if it could also just be a bit of less vital growth? Maybe post some photos of what it looks like?

I've seen many people on the forum write they just toss their contamed cakes on their compost pile without starting to mess with separating the good from the bad parts. I don't have a compost so haven't tried it, but I wouldn't do it if there was black mold on the cakes, then I might just take the whole jar and throw it into garbage( without even salvaging the jar).

I think most people assume that eating mushrooms from green mold infested substrates is not hazardous to health. It certainly isn't if it's trichoderma. If it was a penicillin species instead, or something else, then I don't know. Problem is it's difficult to get a positive ID without a personal assistant sitting to look at spores in a lab.

Personally I follow a "no risk" policy to just toss out everything that has any mold, for health security as well as to not risk infection of other grows. I'm sure these precautions are totally exaggerated and would cause any professional mushroom growing operation to have to close down in a few months. As a microscopic scale hobby grower I can afford the luxury of such probably irrational actions. :-)

Just my 0.02. :-)

[Hippie3]

the most useful act
would be to attempt
to snag a few tiny fragments
of decent mycellia
for transfer to agar / cardboard
to grow out a clean isolate for
further research.

[Hippie3]

btw
your description
is symptomatic of
bacteria.
generally bacteria die easily
once their microclimate is altered
you want to expose it to moving air,
fresh if possible,
to dry and kill the bacteria.

[RichShroom]

Originally Posted by Hippie3

you want to expose it to moving air,
fresh if possible,
to dry and kill the bacteria.

Hippie ... a coupla +1 follow up questions:

1. would that mean taking it out of its little glass home, I presume ?
2. how harmful (to me) is the bacteria ?
3. would it make any sense to start a mini-tub with the good bits mixed in a little h-poo ?
- say taking a 2 litre plastic milk/coke bottle, and making a poor-mans'-pod

As I said earlier, even if it is a watch-and-learn-and-then-destroy educative lesson ?

And I was wondering about this:

the most useful act
would be to attempt
to snag a few tiny fragments
of decent mycellia
for transfer to agar / cardboard
to grow out a clean isolate for
further research.

In general, is it possible/advisable to gently cut away some nice ropey rhizoid myc from a birthed cake to transfer to agar or say to start a LC ?

I'm aiming to do an agar plate / LC from a needle biopsy of my bestest fruit from a healthy cake in the terrarium ... so this is just an "in theory question" for now.

Thanks

[Hippie3]

In general, is it possible/advisable to gently cut away some nice ropey rhizoid myc from a birthed cake to transfer to agar or say to start a LC ?

no lc yet,
just agar or cardboard

[RichShroom]

I've taken some pics ... to assist better advice.

One set from the healthy side & the dodgy side from the same jar.

One pic of the dodgiest dark area.

One pic of the healthy mycelium converging around a slightly dodgy area.

General comments welcome.

My primary question is if the mycelium overruns the dark areas, and successfully colonises the entire surface, is is okay for me to:
1. fruit the cakes in a terrarium, and eat the resulting 'shrooms
2. crumble the cakes to a composted H-Poo tub, and eat the resulting 'shrooms

Or expressed in another way, what danger signs should I be aware of w.r.t. this darkening/blackening of rye subs, bearing in mind that there is no visible mould or growth contam, just (as Hippie speculated before these visual pics) what sounds like bacteria.

[Soliver]

That's not a bad contam YET... if that was my jar, I'd isolate it from my other jars and
see what happens. Sometimes the myc overtakes contams, sometimes not (actually,
usually not), but if it wins the war, you can use it for spawn / cakes, etc., although
I'd keep it isolated from other projects just in case.



soliver