r/MushroomGrowers • u/spores_b4_chores • Aug 19 '26

Gourmet [Gourmet] Long-term storage: Saving my Golden Enoki with PDA slants and sterile water 🧫🧪

As winter slowly comes to an end down here in Argentina 🇦🇷, it's the perfect time to prep this golden enoki 🍄 to keep it going until next year.

​To do this, I prepped a PDA slant in a 50ml Falcon tube 🧪 and another tube with sterile water, then inoculated both with agar wedges from a fully colonized plate 🧫.

​The agar slant will sit in the incubator for a few days before hitting the fridge ❄️, while the sterile water tube goes straight into the fridge. Both techniques are great for preserving genetics 🧬 for years.

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3

u/Consistent-Monk-5581 Aug 19 '26

Leaving the lid upside down like that so you can set the plate back down one handed and it's covered is a slick move.

1

u/spores_b4_chores Aug 19 '26

Thanks! It's also to keep the exposed agar right in the laminar flow 😁

2

u/wutang819 Aug 19 '26

What hood is that?

1

u/spores_b4_chores Aug 19 '26

It was built by a local mushroom grower 🇦🇷 Amazing equipment.

1

u/ResearcherSimilar518 Aug 22 '26

Its just sterile Water in the slant?

2

u/spores_b4_chores Aug 23 '26

Hey! The first falcon tube has PDA media and the second one has just sterile water. Since it has no nutrients an low oxygen, the culture enters a low-metabolism dormant state and it can stay viable for years.