By Hippie3 (Hippie3) on Tuesday, May 29, 2001 - 02:29 pm: Edit

Captain's Oven Technique

Here is a method I've been using for over 15 years. If you follow it correctly you can open/close jars, do innoculations etc all while staying sterile. First you need an expensive peice of equipment, an oven. Lucky for most we have already made that investment. If you don't have a oven, don't buy one, go get a HEPA filter instead. Now for thoes of you with ovens. Turn your oven on the lowest heat setting. Pull one of the racks out far enough that you can set stuff on it and also work on it. Place your jar/sporeprint/agar on the rack and open it, only after the oven has heated up and there is a steady flow of warm air rising. The steady flow of air will keep anything from dropping on the jars. As long as you use a breather, or don't breath close to the jars. Of course everything else needs to be sterile, knives/loops/hands so that you don't contaimate things that way. Basically this will stop all Airborne particles. Anything else needs to be clean. If you don't have an oven, or your racks don't pull out nicely, you can build a rack above a range and turn it on, same principle. I've tested this many times over, even have won bets after leaving jars open for 30mins + on the rack and not having any of them continmated. In theory, a fan should work the same way, say a fan underneath a rack, but it doesn't, I've also tested that. Any jar open more than 10mins with a fan under it has been continimated, shrug. I figured I'd post this since I've been doing this for 20 years and never heard/read about anyone using this technique, but it works quite well. I don't see many people innoculating jars with live mycellium either, but using this technique you can innoculate all you like with mycellium and it cuts colonization time down by 4-5 days. In terms you all would understand I get fully colonized 1/2pint PF cakes in 4-5 days. Slightly different mixture than the PF cakes tho. I guess I just need to post my whole method, since I can constantly get mushrooms from spores to fruit in 3 weeks, and anything I've read on the internet has said 6 weeks +. Also, I belive the dosage of PC shown on the internet is a very poor representation of how much you should take. I've seen recommended starting dosages at 2 dried grams. I don't know anyone who thinks 2 dried grams is a good place to start, most people I trip with never do more than 1.5. But this may just be a potency issue? Or it may just be we are old. But even when I was young I never did more than 3 dried grams. I don't even know anyone in 20 years that has done more than 5 dried grams. Anyone that ever wanted to do that much I made them do 3 dried grams first, then asked them if they wanted to do 5. No one has taken me up on it yet;). Ok I guess I'm just rambling now. I'll get bored and type up an entire 3 week method, or at least the good parts.