How To Save Your Contaminated Grain Spawn

Indexed: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]This jar is heavily contaminated. In a recent experiment, the grains inside this jar were very poorly dried during preparation.

[00:00:08]Dormant microbes that survived the pressure cooking cycle were able to germinate inside the overly humid and anaerobic environment.

[00:00:15]Now, at first, the mycelium was able to colonize the grain, but before too long it stalled, refusing to grow any further as the contamination began to assert itself, corrupting and deforming the mycelium. So, in today's video, I want to see if I can take a few samples from this jar to see what's going on and maybe salvage and clean up the culture.

[00:00:33]But, before we do that, if you get any use from these videos, please feel free to hit the like and subscribe buttons.

[00:00:38]Your support really does help out the channel. All right, with that said, let's take some samples.

[00:00:44]All right.

[00:00:46]It's time to take some samples from this filthy jar.

[00:00:54]Just going through and wiping everything down.

[00:00:58]Cleaning my tools.

[00:01:00]Making sure my surfaces are nice and clean with some isopropyl alcohol.

[00:01:06]I really want to give myself the best chance I can to take some clean uh transfers without making anything any worse. This jar is pretty filthy.

[00:01:22]You see, I'm really not taking any chances here.

[00:01:26]All right. It's time to take a sample.

[00:01:31]And it is stuck to the forceps.

[00:01:37]Uh, it's all right.

[00:01:40]I'll go and get some tweezers.

[00:01:42]The importance of being prepared. There we go.

[00:01:46]Some new petri dishes and I'm going to go through and re-sterilize everything.

[00:01:53]Flame sterilize my tweezers, wipe down the petri dishes, my hands, my tools.

[00:02:03]Fantastic.

[00:02:04]Okay.

[00:02:07]I'm just taking some bits of mycelium that look nice and healthy and transferring them to these agar dishes.

[00:02:18]And hopefully they'll grow.

[00:02:22]There you go, the tweezers already proving themselves useful.

[00:02:29]Excellent.

[00:02:32]Another couple of samples here.

[00:02:36]And then we'll check in and watch them colonize over the course of about a week.

[00:02:45]Beautiful.

[00:02:50]Going to seal the petri dishes now.

[00:02:56]Put some uh wax tape.

[00:03:02]Just so nothing gets in there while they're incubating.

[00:03:06]All right, let's look at uh these dishes the next day.

[00:03:13]There they all are.

[00:03:18]And we can see some signs of growth.

[00:03:24]Lovely.

[00:03:28]Just what I hoped to see.

[00:03:36]No sign of that contamination yet at this very early stage.

[00:03:42]I'm sure it'll arrive uh fairly soon.

[00:03:51]But everything's looking pretty nice so far.

[00:04:00]That one though looks a little bit weird, but no matter.

[00:04:08]We can deal with it if we need to.

[00:04:13]All right.

[00:04:14]They're looking good. Let's check in in another 5 days.

[00:04:21]And everything seems to be growing really well.

[00:04:29]We can see the nice rhizomorphic mycelium radiating out away from the the samples we took.

[00:04:42]That one looks excellent.

[00:04:46]They seem to be fairly clean, but uh we'll have a closer look.

[00:04:55]This one looks pretty good.

[00:04:57]This one however the mycelium on that kind of upper right-hand side looks a bit funny.

[00:05:04]Looks a bit spiky and gray.

[00:05:08]I suspect that's the contamination we had in our jar.

[00:05:14]Everything else looks really nice.

[00:05:17]Uh this one too, the bottom bottom left a little bit weird also.

[00:05:28]Mhm.

[00:05:30]It's okay.

[00:05:33]This one looks uh really nice and clean.

[00:05:36]I can't see that gray weird mycelium there.

[00:05:41]Very nice.

[00:05:42]Maybe a clean plate. And this one looks really clean, too. Fantastic. All right, I'm going to wrap this video up there.

[00:05:51]Yeah, everything seems to be nice and clean so far.

[00:05:54]I'm going to let these grow out for another another week or so and see see where it's at. And then I might take some transfers of those contaminated plates and see if I can clean those up.

[00:06:04]Stay tuned. I'll do that in a in an upcoming video. And we'll see if we can grow some mushrooms from this salvaged culture from that filthy wet jar.

[00:06:14]All right, guys. I hope everything's going really well and your growing's good and not contaminated.

[00:06:19]Thanks so much for sticking around if you've made it this far. I'll see you all in the next video.

[00:06:23]Happy growing, legends.