Everything About Agar: How to Capture and Propagate Mushrooms

For the second Bay Area Applied Mycology and Counter Culture Labs Joint Mycology workshop of 2023, we will focus on a technique that is central to the field of mycology: culturing fungi on agar.

This workshop will also be livestreamed on YouTube

We will cover everything from the preparation of agar using simple techniques and minimal equipment to the preparation of different types of agar and exotic media using more advanced equipment and techniques. Bring fresh mushrooms to identify and culture! (Don't bring psychedelic mushrooms or any other federally illegal substances, you will be asked to leave.)

If you plan on cultivating mushrooms or studying fungi in the lab, this skill is absolutely necessary. It's also super fun to be able to keep the mushrooms you find in the forest as pets at home.

This workshop is extra long to allow time for media to be sterilized.

In order to ensure we have time to pour the media that we prepare, it is essential that we get things going early. If you want to learn the entire process, please arrive no later than 5pm. If you arrive after that, you will still get to learn how to culture fungi and how to pour agar, but you will miss out on the part where we measure ingredients and sterilize the media.

At the end of this class you will have learned how to prepare media, pour media, and culture fungi in both a home environment with minimal equipment and in a lab setting. You will go home with a stack of petri dishes filled with agar so you can practice these methods at home!

Masks required at all times in the Omni Commons

Here is the tentative schedule:

4:00PM - Intro, Q&A, Mushroom Identification

5:00PM - Low Tech and Lab preparation of agar and other media.

5:30PM - Low Tech and Lab sterile culture methods

7:00PM - Pouring media - No Tech - Low Tech - and Lab methods

8:00PM - Cleanup