Well its taken a while and the last six months have been pretty crazy with the arrival of our new little one, but we now have 35 spawn bags of King Stropharia just about ready to go.
At Selby Shrooms we test all our strains before sale and with King Stropharia we’ve had some interesting experiences but we have now whittled our strains down to two outstanding strains, one of which pins on agar and may even fruit without casing.
We will now be selling only these two strains in petri dish cultures for $25, 1/2 pint spawn jars for $25, small spawn bags for $30 and large spawn bags for $40.
In terms of flavour this mushroom is best described as being earthy and somewhere near potatoes or deb potatoes – fruit bodies can grow very large although when commonly found in New South Wales in the wild they tend to be of the smaller stature.
While most online instructions suggest fruiting this mushroom outdoors by planting in Spring, we suggest that in Victoria or Tasmania that you set up the bed in Autumn with fruit bodies forming in Spring when warmer weather arrives.
In terms of our other products we’ve had some problems with a few of our strains.
Thank you to some of our customers who had to wait on our ‘Dont Feed After Midnight’ strain. We attempted to run this strain on an experimental agar media and it stalled out completely. When we went to a backup strain results have been ok but not as vigorous as previously – infact in some cases its been downright poor. We are in the process of getting an early backup of this strain off a friend to ‘reload’ and its funny that we’ve been fastidious with keeping backups of all our strains and this was the one time that we didn’t and its cost us a lot of annoyance. 🙂
More recently we have decided to abandon our Agaricus bitorquis strain due to lack of interest and our Coprinus comatus strain due to it constantly needing transferring to new media. With the Torq its a bit of a shame as its an incredible strain but its going on ice from now on.
We are very happy with the health of our King Stropharia, King Oyster and Turkey tail strains and we are in the process of re-invigorating our Lepista nuda strains.
So to reiterate – King Stropharia is ready to rumble, our Turkey tails and King Oysters are still going gangbusters, we are looking at re-invigorating our Lepista nuda strain and our ‘Dont Feed After Midnight’ strains and are excited about soon adding a cracking Pioppino strain to our culture catalog.
thanks for all your patience! We hope things run smoother from now on!
And a grow by one of our customers, Brett:
Great article mate, but for multiple pics you should choose “insert media” and then click “create gallery” on the left. That will look awesome. Way better than clicking on each pic and having it load in a new page then having to go back.