King Blue is certainly a popular strain but goddamn is it unstable! Genetically speaking the way Andrew makes crosses doesn't promote for any DNA sequenced traits, just strange and cool mutations by chance. This has been apparent in the majority of the strains we have experimented with from his collection and now he has a warning on his site that all of his strains are in early stage development and wont offer much consistency...luckily Blotch and King Blue can be solved a few different ways. I was talking to another farm last week who was more or less creating continual air flow in their environment creating a steady level of humidification and evaporation. This is a great environment for blotch and one thing I tried to get across to him among several other growers is the use of a modulation system (ebb and flow with fans turning on and off controlled by co2 meters/termostates) is the need for the complete fogging of a room and the fast exhaust of co2 rich air...

So ive personally seen lions knocked slightly smaller logs than shiitake but interestingnly enough the first time i was ever around a bunch of Maine cultivators, I believe North Spore was there, we did a lions totem knock and if i rememeber correctly the dude whose property the gathering was on, had lions for years popping off of that block! So it certainly does work, i can say that much. Id probably go for dowel knocking over totem stacking though...

Man, wells are rough!!! A lot of folks have issues will well water as well as reservoirs of water, especially if those containers of water storage are being used to humidify grow rooms. Its best to filter the air and the water and then go the treatment route. Glad you are getting it all figured out and that video is a really good one!!! Thanks for sharing! -E

For our Blues, PO-CNS is the Jam, but for other oysters we have them all listed at www.capnstem.com in the store section!

While leading edge is always ideal, its not always possible unless you are doing daily production so what we try to do is refrigerate cultures at the halfway point when necessary for scheduling but wrapping the plates in parafilm and sealing in a small sterile filter patch bag. This slows growth a bit more than just the parafilm and it gives us a little bit of time for expansion onto GM's. If you are working with cultures that are filling up the whole dish its best to cut close to the edge but not all the way to avoid any growth thats gotten too close to the parafilm. IF colonizing dishes are left in front of a flow hood its a bit less of a worry, but if stores outside of laminar flow, contamination can be present. Hope that helps

Super kind of you to say! Thank you so much for join us and being a part of this myco-wizards community! 

Neil from Columbia Mushrooms makes a pretty radical bag tumbler, but at the end of the day the 10lb blocks need some straight up hand mixing love for even spawn distribution. We have thought of adding an addition step in the lab that is essentially a clamp sealer without the heating element so that bags can be shaken in the clamped state and then sealed on the bad sealer...but we have yet to try that. One sweet little trick to getting more air in the bag prior to vertical sealing is just push in on the sides of the bag after spawning and right before sealing...its allows the xls bags to balloon out and make room for easier shaking once sealed. 

Benn talking to the team about these two suggestions! We are on them!

I feel this for sure, it is largely due to over humidification in a fruiting room without proper air ventilation. I've seen it with numerous species and the fix for most folks is a redesign using something like a Hart Nozzle. Those lions soak up a shit ton of water and need a lot of evaporation in air exchanges to keep them form bruising, that's for sure!

Hey George, so after endless amounts of transfers in a day sterilizing tweezers or a scalpel in the red hot ceramic sterilizer, agar goop gets all gummed up on the transfer utensils, so after each transfer we dunk our tools in alcohol to get the agar goop off the utensils before putting them into the ceramic sterilizer again. This way we don't bake sticky, crusty agar goop onto the transfer tools, because that would be a contamination vector without a doubt. Also having done that dance without the alcohol when you cool the transfer tools in the agar and it is covered is blacked agar goop, it splatters all over the top of the agar dish causing a gnarly splattering of black debris.  Maybe we should do a Lab protocol video?! bring back some old school Roger Rabbit style goodness to the channel?!