Hola, mis amigos y amigas!

We got all carried away when we were writing this, hence the second part just to sum it all up. Still, it was fun writing it, and we hope it’s useful for you. Agar’s something everyone should be using, and yes we know it looks sciency as fuck but that doesn’t mean you can’t use it at home. Yeah yeah yeah I know we said this would be the blog post immediately following the first one but we forgot to hit the "go" button on it so if you've been waiting in suspense then sorry about that...

Last time we got as far as this: 

• Agar: useful
• Comes from seaweed, secretly makes good jelly
• You can do loads of different things with it, all of them good
• You can tweak it to serve a lot of different purposes by using different additives

Once we pour the agar, we’ve got a useful 2D plane for us to easily see anything that’s growing, and that is your agar plate right there. Food source, 2D plane, we can now work with literally whatever we have in front of us and get results 100% of the time, with a little bit of work. Because it’s 2D it is a piece of piss to remove any bits we like the look of using an agar punch or a scalpel (clean tools, please), and then like we said previously, we can put it somewhere else and grow it out or refine it further, slow it down in the fridge, or even leave it somewhere and completely forget about it until mushrooms literally start growing from it (yes this happens). 

Please don’t use your agar when you’re sitting on your couch in the open air, windows open, cat on your lap (unless you want to see the cool stuff that grows and you know what, that’s fun too, try it). Just like you can produce your own sourdough starter in your kitchen by catching the wild yeasts that are flying through the air all the time, you will be catching stray stuff onto your agar so your testing will be compromised immediately.

Ideally when you're working with agar, you’ll be using a flow unit of some description - this ain’t a sales pitch because we know they’re expensive (we’re working on it!), and they’re bulky, so they’re not for everyone. A flow unit would get you a consistently reliable level of environmental cleanliness (and even that can fail sometimes). However - you can use agar, often with great success, using a still air box. You’ve just got to bear in mind that you are still taking a bit of a gamble, and there is every chance that something floats in through the holes and plonks itself on your plate, so if you’re going to do this, then do a few at a time (of the same thing) to try and give yourself some a control point.

If one looks shady but the others are okay, then it could well be some freeloading bastard that’s ridden in on a bit of house dust. You’re swapping a level of expense for a level of risk, and if that lands somewhere you’re happy with on the sliding scale, then go for it. Will the results be as locked-in as a flow unit? No. But you'll have some success, which is more than you'll have doing it in the open air.

Does using agar add more time to the whole “I want to grow mushrooms now please” process?

Ironically, no, not really, and here's why: You see all those chefs on the TV, and they’ve got everything prepared and waiting for them (mise-en-place) so that when service starts they don’t have to fuck about chopping up chives or peeling garlic? That bit of time spent at the start saves them time during the important processes, and makes sure that if there are any errors they can be fixed or redone without it affecting the final product, because they really want the final product to be perfect, just like you do. This is that. It’s your prep time, chef. Let’s say that you want to make some liquid culture up, and go with two scenarios:

Scenario One - no agar, I’ll scrape some spores from my print/use my spore syringe/throw in a piece of my latest, greatest, biggest mushroom straight into my lovingly prepared liquid culture medium that I spent time making. I now wait a week or so, let’s call it two for the sake of comparison, and then I draw up some liquid culture. I don’t know if this is clean or not because I’m not using agar, and I didn’t check my initial ingredients because again, no agar. I inoculate my grain. I then wait another two weeks, and fuck me something’s gone wrong. Now, I ain’t mad at this, because I took the gamble, but I do need to start again. At this point, I’m about a month in, maybe a bit more, and I’m back to square one. Could be that this all goes well instead though, and then I’m a month and a bit in with colonising grain.

Scenario Two - I test my spore print/syringe/biopsied flesh on a few plates. I wait a week, and yup, we’re looking good to go, so I cut that bit of agar out because it’s nice and clean and I add it to another plate and let it go for a couple of weeks. It’s coming along nicely, so I punch out some of it, and add it to my liquid culture medium. I’ll keep the rest in the fridge so that I slow it down and use it another time. I wait a couple of weeks for my LC, which I know is clean, then I add it to my grain bag and squirt it all over the place because it’s lovely liquid culture. I then wait a couple of weeks like I did above, and then obviously everything’s excellent because I knew it was all excellent. 

Yes, this is a daft example because there are a million other variables that you could apply to speed up or slow things down, but the point still stands - using agar will add on a slight bit more “prep” time at the beginning of your mushroom cultivation process, but it will make sure that you win at mushrooms consistently. I guess that’s the word that matters the most in all this - consistent. Consistency is so (relatively) easily achievable in mycology, even at home, just by stepping out of the comfort zone a little, and learning to work with agar. It is the single biggest leap in everyone’s personal mycology journey so don’t be scared, have a crack at it, and you’ll end up being able to grow mushrooms from almost anything!

We’ve collected up our agar recipes here, if you want to have a crack at making your own as well, have a read, it’s free. We're nice like that.