How to Grow Mushrooms: Using Liquid Culture to Make Grain Spawn

While liquid culture is great for bonus materials, it’s best to not rely on it for your primary means of generating grain spawn. For consistency, buying from a reputable seller or creating your own are the better options. Liquid culture often grows well, but contamination takes hold easily, and there’s a large risk of losing an entire batch of grow bags if it’s your main source of spawn. However, for a one time grow or trial run, the inexpensiveness of liquid culture helps equalize the risk.

Needed materials:

• Sterilized grain
• A syringe with the liquid culture inside. We use myceliumemporium.com for ours. If you use code “Mossy” you’ll get 10% off all future orders.
• Spray bottle with alcohol in it
• Gloves

To inoculate the grain:

1. Clean your work surface.
2. Sanitize syringe, bag, and hands. Once the syringe is sanitized, don’t set it back down.
3. Open needle, connective side up, with it leaning toward the airstream from the HEPA filter.
4. Pull cap off the syringe, spray syringe and needle with alcohol, then attach the needle while it is still in the package.
5. After carefully making sure all the alcohol has dried off your hands, take a lighter (can be a propane torch, lighter, or alcohol lamp), pull the cap off the syringe, and get the end of the needle red hot.
6. Open the bag using the side folds, avoiding touching the top folds.
7. Spray contents of the needle into the bag. Spraying some down the sides of the bag and allowing it to run down into the edges of the grain enables you to see the mycelium beginning to grow in. 
8. Fold the top of the bag down, then lay it down across the sealer and seal the top.
9. Spray your hands once more with alcohol, then label the bag and write up your production notes.
10. Once there is a solid block of mycelium, usually, a couple of days after inoculating, bust the bag up and shake it around. This will spread the mycelium colonization. 

Liquid culture grows in quickly and has many great uses. We use it often for one-off grows and trying new things, but not for large projects.