Parafilm - for sealing agar plates after inoculation

This is another one that I found curious when I started growing mushrooms. By this point, I wasn’t using agar myself (that would come later), so in my head when I read that you’d need to seal your agar plates, I thought “fuck it I’ll seal them with sellotape or micropore tape”.

Turns out that’s not the best idea; the sticky part of the sellotape or micropore tape has a chance of getting contaminants adhered to it (watch the sunlight shine through your room and see all those contaminant-harbouring dust particles floating around even when it’s clean), so that’s already less good. It’s also a pain in the ass messing with rolls of sticky tape when you’re in front of a flowhood and you’re wearing gloves.

And then obviously the train of thought pulled into For Fuck’s Sake station and I realised that someone had already invented and perfected a specific kind of sealing tape for agar plates for these exact reasons.

If the idea of using agar plates is new to you, Parafilm is like a cross between clingfilm and sellotape. It’ll stretch to 200% of it’s original length, and instead of being sticky it adheres to itself. This means you can put a bit on your agar plate, stretch it round, and seal the whole thing. It’s air-permeable so your growing mycelium can breathe, but it won’t let anything else in. If you’re using agar to up your mushroom growing game, you want to be using Parafilm. 

We no longer cut Parafilm into individual pieces, your order will arrive as a long strip for you to cut to measure. This increases the shelf life of the product and helps prevent drying/cracking. The strips are sold in amounts that correspond to the amount of agar plates they’ll seal, so 25 will do 25 plates etc etc. You can figure out the other numbers I’m sure.

Usage: