Culturing Trichoderma

[Clint]

I got my two inoculates today. These are what will be used to start cultures with. Notice my horrific handwriting Those of you who have traded with me know it's miraculous you even get my packages!

It's got a cup of rice in each one, and when I get to the store and the washed perlite dries, will have 2 cups of perlite in each and 2 cups of corn meal in each. Perlite would be so I can have something I can use over and over again to start new batches (instead of recycling old corn meal and rice. YUCK!) and also to loosen up the media a bit.

Air holes

If I get interest in this, I can write up a pictorial how-to and maybe it can be a sticky or something. I'm going to use an autoclave sine my mom has like 3 of them for cooking, but I'd venture to guess that you don't need to sterilize the jars/media with an autoclave since dirt is riddled with contaminates anyway.

After the initial GROSS factor I can see why people think fungi are cool. I was looking up stuff on trichoderma and came across a few sites where people grow mushrooms and they had jars that had been contaminated by trichoderma and OMG! It was HORRIBLE looking! Blah!

 

[Av8tor1]

oh it lovessssss shrooms LOL

 

[Clint]

Yeah it was those kind but I wasn't going to say


All they had was self-rising, and it was raining and I didn't want to go to another store so this kind had to do. It has white flour in it.. damn! Well hopefully it won't hurt the plants. Or maybe I can let the spores settle to the bottom of the liquid when I make a slurry and then just siphon them off. I hope the spores sink... I dunno if they will sink the same way the dry powder did.


My recipe was 2 parts perlite, 2 parts cornmeal (self rising, it had white flour in it.), 1 part rice. I'm really worried about the white-flour that was in the cornmeal. It wont hurt the fungi (it's made from corn afterall) but I'm concerned about the plants. If the spores settle out when I make a solution it should be OK.

Here's the pressure cooker. These things always make me nervous!

And here is a 1cc syringe. I had 4 cc's for each species but a 1 cc syringe was the only size I had.

 

[Av8tor1]

if the pressure cooker stops whistling, then worry.... as long as it is singing youre ok

 

[Clint]

Lmao, yeah the noise combined with the regulator swirling around is unsettling!

 

[Clint]

The T. atroviride is behind the other. I've got a contamination of some club fungi but it shouldn't matter since the trichoderma is supposed to be a hyperparasite right? I forgot to tell you all that I'm allerigic to mold lmao.

Is the brown fluffy mold botrytis? You can see the fluffy ugly brownish mold, the white cottony mold (I think that's trichoderma) and then the green spots are trichoderma with spores.

The last pic is a good example of what I think it thick trichoderma. The bluegreen mold could be breadmold

 

[Cindy]

I have got white fluffy mould growing on dead soggy sphagnum moss...Trichoderma?

 

[Av8tor1]

FWIW, pic of some peat with a very heavy inoculation of Ampac Biotech's granular T. atroviride (way too much BTW, wasteful)

I wanted to get some idea of trich's performance on peat

This is an old pic and I don't remember how long it was after inoculation that the pic was taken, but couldn't have been too long, conidia have yet to form (proper nomenclature?)