The first time I made potato-dextrose agar, It turned out to be a total mess. The main reason being is that after I had boiled either cut, sliced or grated potatoes in water for 30 minutes - it produced a very cloudy solution suspended with tons of small starchy molecules that did not really did not fall out of this semi-goopy liquid.

After reading this from sciencemadness...

I did a funny little experiment with p-dichlorobenzene. I took approximately 2 grams of the solid and put this in a test tube. I heated this material, such that it became a colorless mobile liquid (I didn't measure the temperature, but it was not really hot, at most 75 C or so). To this liquid I added a tiny speck of solid iodine. This dissolves with a beautiful purple color. Next, I let the liquid cool down slowly. At a certain point in time, it solidifies, but when this happens a peculiar effect can be observed. The liquid first solidifies at the glass walls (which is expected, heat is lost through the glass walls of the test tube), but the solidified material is colorless! Slowly the solidification goes more inwards and the colorless layer reaches a thickness of well over 3 mm. Finally, when all of the material has solidified, a dark core is in the middle of the sample and a colorless/transparent layer is around the core.

So, two remarkable effects can be observed:
1) The freezing process removes the impurity of the iodine to quite a large extent.
2) The color of the dissolved iodine changes from purple to brown when the liquid solidifies.

I thought that it would probably also work with freezing water pushing the soluble and insoluble impurities out of the forming ice crystals. Than later when dissolved, the smaller starch particles will fall to the bottom and allow for the soluble items, such as the nutrients, and minerals to go or stay in solution.

***This would also work very well for other things I assume, such anything that can freeze and has particles suspended in it -- likely water based plant extractions would help kick out all of the tannins, etc. I could be wrong, however.


The PDA made out of this solution grows bacteria, mycelium, and whatever else that grows on PDA just as well as the not-so clear stuff. However, you can see and spot contamination, the structure of the growing organisms and droplets of water. So this makes doing various projects a lot easier.

This works really well - however pouring the clear solution off of the light particulate matter was really difficult since it just loved getting kicked back up into solution and messing everything up again. so I came up with this trick to fix that problem.

Here are some really crappy pictures to show the process I used to over come this problem. Leaving the solution in a pop bottle than poking a small hole in the side just a centimeter or so above the potato-junk layer allows for it to slowly drain off and not kick up any particulates. I used a jar and a ring stand and a clamp to set it up. Pretty simple and easy -- almost pointless pictures since its easy to understand and they really are only good as thumbnails and not as the fully expanded version.

Additionally here are some pictures of shiitake mycelium growing on the clear PDA.

You are seeing the back side of the agar, its not super thick, but this was done in a polypropylene 8oz deli cup - so it had to be at least deep enough to make fill the raised rim and cover the center area with enough agar to be usable.

PS. The square shadow on both pictures is from the tyvek filter patch that is glued onto the lid where a hole was melted through using a chemistry ring stand -- these prove to be effective, cheap and reusable petri dish substitutes - I got 250 8oz PP deli cups for 4 dollars.

I believe they will also work in place of mason jars for PF's Tek though, I have not personally done this yet I will start tomorrow using a modified PF tek of brown rice flour and sawdust for growing mycelium as has been done by Roger Rabbit on the shroomery.

wouldn't work I'm pretty sure. I think the ergot spores need to infect the wheat at the same time of pollination?

I would like to see the source?
It might work, but it would likely not produce alkaloids properly - though, I could be wrong. I don't know.

I find saprophytic production of Claviceps a remote possibility if any.

The fungus needs to infect a growing flower spike, at the right time of its life cycle, when the anthers are beginning to come out and the flower begins to open up, they infect by dissolving cell walls of the plant enzymatically to gain purchase, they then spread down towards the ovary, siphoning off sugars and trace elements as they do, it is once they reach the ovary then they take over, warping the growing grain into a sclerotium.

Taken from my reading of The Genus Claviceps.

As it seems the sclerotia are formed from the growing seed itself, I fail to see how it can do so if the seed is already formed, dried and not actively growing.

Ergot doesn't grow ON seed, it takes over it and BECOMES the seed.

That isn't to say that sphaecelial  growth is impossible, but the parasitic lifecycle cannot take place without living grass.

paul stamets wrote some good books on that kind of mycology he's world renowned

http://www.google.com/#q=paul+stamets&hl=en&prmd=ivnbo&source=univ&tbs=vid:1&tbo=u&ei=6sKrTNXvFcL78Aak_sCGBw&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=3&sqi=2&ved=0CDkQqwQwAg&fp=fdfb9c54bdf6e14b