For an experienced cultivator, cloning your mushrooms is an exciting challenge in the next stage of the mushroom cultivation journey. Growing your own food—which is what mushroom cloning allows you to do—is like making your own money. Luckily, it’s not a very complicated process, so cloning them should be a cinch. Read on for our step-by-step guide to cloning your mushrooms below.
What Is Mushroom Cloning
Cloning mushrooms is an alternate way of generating more mushrooms outside of foraging and growing them from grow kits. During the cloning process, you create a copy of the mushroom by removing a piece of living tissue from the mushroom’s fruiting body. When we talk about “cloning,” we’re describing the various processes that you use to create copies of fungi that are genetically identical. People call these copies “clones.”
Is It Possible To Grow From Fresh Mushrooms?
It sure is. Mushrooms are made of tightly packed mycelium. Mycelium is the body of the mushroom. This is often confused with the fruiting body, composed of the gills and stems you find above the ground. Even after you pick mushrooms as you forage, the mycelium is still alive and well. This means it can reproduce. You can take the tissue from the mycelium, put it in a nutrient-rich medium comparable to a mushroom substrate, and watch it grow into new mycelium. After that, you can use the mycelium you grew to make even more mushrooms.
Why Clone Mushrooms?
As stated earlier, cloning lets you make an identical copy of a mushroom. This allows you to breed mushrooms with certain traits. You can breed different strains that vary in growth speed, color, yield, and disease resistance. You can even clone famous medicinal and wild mushrooms you might have in your area to make more of them. Even better, imagine only going out to forage once or twice, getting a good harvest, and never going out again because you keep cloning and growing the ones you have.
Which Mushrooms Are Ideal Cloning Specimens?
If you’ve ever seen mushrooms growing on a dead tree, you likely saw a saprophytic mushroom, which is ideal for cloning. We typically classify mushrooms by how they take in nutrition. Mushrooms that are easy to care for, fast-growing, and hardy are perfect for cloning. This includes lion’s mane, shitake, and oyster mushrooms, which are thick and fleshy, making them easy to clone. Use mushrooms in their “pin” growth stage regardless of your choice. The pin stage is when the mushrooms begin to “sprout.” During this stage of the growth process, mushrooms virtually double in size.
The Cloning Process
The cloning process is incredibly easy. We’ll give you the full step-by-step guide to mushroom cloning below, but the general process is as follows: remove a piece of tissue from the mushroom, and place it in a growing medium rich in nutrients. The greatest challenge in cloning is ensuring the tissue, growing medium, and mycelium remain uncontaminated.
Don’t Start With Spores
You should never clone mushrooms using spores. There are a few reasons for this. For one thing, spores are unreliable. If you dump them onto an agar plate, they’ll grow hyphae—individual filaments of mycelium that are required to form a fruitbody. To adequately form a full body of mycelium, you need two hyphae to meet. When they do this, they create new strains, but the results are unpredictable, so most growers start from actual strains, not the spores. Control is the name of the game for mushroom cultivation, and you don’t want to leave anything to chance. Therefore, take from the body of the mushrooms and not the spores themselves.
Where To Harvest
You can take tissue from any part of the fruit body, including the stem, cap, or mycelium. However, some sites are better than others. The stem butt has remnants of mycelium inside it, and the middle of the stem, or the area close to the gills under the cap, is a wonderful place to harvest. However, while you can do so, try to avoid harvesting the tissue on the gills. If you do choose this area, it’s difficult to keep sterile. Also, the germinating germs might create a strain you didn’t expect. Because of this, try taking tissue from inside the stem. You’ll get the cleanest sample from that area.
Select the Fruit and Sterilize It
You’ll want to find a large fruiting body since smaller specimens make it difficult to get clean samples. Thoroughly wipe an alcohol-soaked cloth outside the fruit body before you extract the tissue. It’ll sacrifice the mushroom because it will damage it, but it’s worth the sacrifice. The fruit body is in the open air and likely covered in contaminants, which can transfer to your plate. Make sure you get tools to sterilize your mushroom growing equipment.
Tear the Fruit in Two
Make sure you clean the fruit body thoroughly, and when it’s done, tear it in half. You should do this in front of a flow hood, but you can also do it in a still air box. You want to tear it, rather than cut it, to prevent contaminants from entering the fruiting body. Remember, cleanliness is key in this process. If you’re using a flow hood, keep the body downstream to the flow hood. This is an essential part of our step-by-step guide to cloning mushrooms.
Tissue Transference
Before you tear the fruiting body in half, make sure you sterilize it. Make sure you cool it before it makes contact with the mushroom. If you don’t, the tissue could die. Scrape your scalpel parallel to the fruit and place it in the agar dish. Do this quickly to minimize how long the agar plate is open. Place a few small pieces of tissue on the plate and close it.
Clean, Store, Colonize
Once you’ve inoculated the plates, wrap them in parafilm and store them in a dark, room-temperature room. You could also put them in Ziploc bags so that they stay dust-free. Over the next two to three days, the mycelium will grow from the tissue. Sometimes you get a clean culture on the first try, but this is difficult, so your plate will still be contaminated.
Cloning your mushrooms isn’t simple, but it is a valuable skill and a great challenge for experienced cultivators. If you’re interested in cloning, you can do so with a mushroom grow kit. We have all the mushroom grow kits you need here at Midwest Organics. Shop Midwest Organics today!
