by Bold Cucumber

Nan's Nook : Archives : Spores : Syringes

Here's what you do. Take a half pint jar, clean it really well and it wouldn't hurt to swab out the inside of it with alcohol and let evaporate. Poke a hole in the lid and put it on seal side up. Cover it with tape, trying to keep the tape on the lid and off the band that screws down. I use one of my lids with 4 holes in it and cover all them. Put it in the oven on 350 for about 20 minutes. Let it cool down, the tape will probably be melty if you use cheap electrical tape like me.

I always do the next part with the oven tek but you may be just as well spraying the hell out of your countertop area with lysol. Wash your hands and arms with antibacterial soap. Cut the cap you want to print off as close to the gills as you can, and put it in a sterile piece of aluminum foil to carry it to the oven. Take the lid off the jar and as quickly as possible put the cap in the jar and replace the lid. Get it oriented gills down and that's it.

Leave it somewhere to drop the spores for about 2 days, you might notice a little condensation in the jar from the cap transpiration, nothing to worry about. The cap will get all upturned and split and get really dark, it's cool. I think the caps are actually pretty after they do that.

When you take the cap out of the jar, just open the lid, quickly dump it out and put the lid back on, you can do this in like a fraction of a second if you try. To make spore solution out of the print stuck to the bottom of the jar, squirt a syringe or two full of sterile water in the jar, and put it back in the oven. Note that the print is nailed to the glass, just swooshing the water around won't get any of it off there. To scrape the print off the bottom of the jar, into the water, I always use a small butter knife that doesn't have any serrations on it, sterilized in PC, although a glass stirring rod would probably be the ideal. In fact if you had something long and poky, you could make the hole in the lid big enough to let it through and not even have to take the lid off. Again be as quick as possible and make sure your hands are clean, and scrape the shit out of the print. Put the lid back on, of course. There will probably be streaks of the print you missed that are still stuck to the bottom, but that's nothing to worry about. Add as much more sterile water as you like and suck the VERY THICK spore solution into a syringe when you're ready to inoculate. Keep the hole(s) covered with tape at all times, except when sucking the solution out or adding more sterile water.

I've had great success with it, even under conditions far less sterile than I described. If you use say half the original solution you can just fill it back up with more sterile water. The solution will be twice as diluted, but still thick enough to kick ass. You can keep doing that. Store it somewhere cool and dry, fridge may even be a good idea.

Shroom Glossary