>>12141281I'd start by reading up on it. Paul Stamets has some good books, but he's kind of a douche. Unless you set up a clean room or a laminar flow hood you won't be able to work with agar cultures because they'll contaminate as soon as you look at them so I'd recommend either cardboard or liquid culture for your inoculum.
For cardboard culture, boil the cardboard for about 20 minutes, delaminate one side, and then inoculate it with cap/stem fragments or spores. I like cap fragments personally, the mycelium making up the cap is cloned, and stimulates any spores left on the gills to germinate so that you get multiple strains in the same culture, which I believe helps to keep the culture healthy and guarantees you at least one good fruiting strain. You can layer this with your substrate to inoculate it,.or continue adding cardboard and fruit directly from it. Pic related was inoculated a few days ago.
For liquid culture, prepare your broth by adding a tablespoon of sugar and 1/4 teaspoon of salt per gallon of tap water. You can use this broth to germinate spores which are best collected from a spore print or by "washing" the mushroom in the broth with a good shake, or to clone a mushroom by blending (for less than 5 seconds) up the stem to isolate the strain, or the whole cap if you want some random strains mixed in. It would be best to keep it on a stirring plate and held at the optimum temperature for the strain, but you can just shake it twice a day if you don't have a stirrer. You can use hydrogen peroxide to disinfect your liquid culture after you've germinated your spores for a day or two. It just takes about 15 mL per liter of liquid culture, otherwise you'll kill the mushroom mycelium as well. If you add some of your substrate to the liquid culture then the mycelium will learn to metabolize it and "leapoff" time will be greatly reduced.
