I started with the potato agar first because I didn't have my malt agar in yet and by buddy gave me some agar agar to use.
Surorisingly enough this last batch of 21 jars has no contam yet and the only noticable thing I changed was buying a big ass house hepa air filter.
Yeah. Your house HEPA systems will work....kinda. They aren't laminar flow so they don't bathe your work process in sterile air. But they will reduce your total airborn particulate count. For maybe three months per filter. Because they are not professional, they do not fill progressivly. The professional ones have deep, close pleats. These preserve flow and have a surface area the home units lack.
Two things. First. Remember they stir up the air and you cannot presume that air is sterile. Try shutting the unit down an hour before for you work.
Second... Fuck those designers. Those companies issue a new design a year just because they can and often they will not accept the carbon prefilter or even the HEPA of the previous model. Take it from your old friend canndo... Buy like 10 cabin filters and five HEPA inserts with the new device. And change the pre filter every three months and the HEPA filters every six. You can actually rinse th pre filter but it tends to strech it. Rinsing it gives you a good idea of what is actually happening in the atmosphere of your home.
Get to the point where you can "see" spores in the air, on surfaces, hovering around people...know, as I said, your biome and that of the house and even your significant other and friends.
You will have mastered this very interesting craft when, rather than using brute force, lab coats, filters, sterilizing needle tips (a silly notion unless you are doing field work or operating on original specimens).
This of course extends to contamination of spawn or substrate or casing.
The POINT is that your particular focus species lives in the wild in competition with everything else. Certainly you need sterility to isolate what you want but thereafter, offering your selection that which is most conducive to it and least to its competitors is not only the surest way to go but also demonstrative of your true self understanding of that species.
Anyone can squirt some spores into a sterile jar of generaly rich food.
Oh, to those who squirt spores into a jar.. I am not trying to insult you. You aren't steping into agar, you want some mushrooms in the simplest way possible.
No problem. I expect you would have ffer me the same sort of opinion were I to say. "What's the big deal? I drop
drop a seed into some dirt, feed it miracle grow once a week and I'm good.