Basics: Malt Extract Agar (MEA) Plates For Mushroom Mycelium Cultivation

Requirements : SAB/Flow Unit 

It’s the MycoPunks Basics range! “Every little helps”, a giant corporation (that posts record profits yet still manages to underpay their staff) say, and on that one singular point we agree: so we’ve knocked the price down on some of our products by either haggling like heck to get the wholesale cost to shift a bit, or by making the selections a bit simpler so we can produce more in one run. This is that.

Whaddaya get? You get the same excellent malt extract agar that we sell, same lab-grade ingredients, same amount of care put into it. You get ten of them, for a smidge under a tenner. Bargain.

Whaddaya not get? You don’t get any funky colours, you don’t get to choose the pack size, it’s ten.

At a tenner this is an absolute bargain, and here’s why we’re doing it:

Everyone should be using agar. It’s basically the biggest jump in everyone’s mycology journey because it makes everything a million times more consistent, and it isn’t very difficult to use. However, people are sometimes still intimidated by it, or don’t want to spend any ‘extra’ cash when times are hard and they’d rather gamble their success than spend a little more, or it’s just seen as something a bit “extra”. 

But! It’s none of those things, agar is awesome and it’s your friend and now it’s cheap as all fuck - if you want to grow lots of massive mushrooms and have repeatable, predictable results, or even grow some of your own mushrooms from ones you’ve shoplifted from Tesco, then agar is for you! Want to make liquid culture? Buy some agar. 

Yes, in an ideal world you’d be using a flow unit to do your agar work, but you can get by with a still air box if you need to (and that’s a clear box with two holes in so that’s not expensive either). You’d have a few more losses than if you had a flow unit, but even so your odds of success will be so much better with agar. Don’t do it without at least one of these things though otherwise you’ll be growing all the stuff that’s floating around in the air, this is also a fun experiment but you don’t want to be doing it every time.

If you’ve tried this, liked it, and want to experiment with some other mixes (or just have some colours in your plate), we’ve also got:

Fancy Coloured MEA

High Nutrient MEA

High Nutrient + Soy Peptone (MEPA) 

PDA (boil ‘em, mash ‘em, stick ‘em in a stew)

PDYA (potato but with added yeast)

Organic Sorghum

Pre-poured in our 90mm triple vented plates, ready for use in an aseptic environment.

All of our agar products are covered by our 60 Day Returns Policy, same as our grain and substrate!

If you want to have a look at the rest of the agar products, then simply click or mash your finger right here!