>>1882860I attempted to innoculate oyster mushroom spawn again. This time I use grains of pearl barley. I boiled them and then set them aside in a sterilized container to cool them. Then I drained the grains with a hairdryer to remove excess moisture as to prevent growth of various unwanted molds. For the first 3 or 4 days I couldn't see any sort of activity. The batch was kept in a dark room with a lid partially on, in a somewhat cold and dry envoirenment. From what I can observe these appear to be molds. In the last 2 days whatever mycelium has spread rapidly. Some are white as I think proper oyster mycelium should appear, but some others are anything from blackish-grey to orange-red hues. Clearly most of the batch has been contaminated. Is there any hope for using these as spawn for a first batch of growth? I could use the pure mycelium I've brought, but I want to grow my own as buying 100 grammes of mycelium is somewhat expensive and a small quanity when trying to grow things in 10 litre buckets or bags, which to my estimates, would require large amounts of mycelium to grow effectively and without interruption from molds, etc. Why is my grain becoming contaminated?
