November 6th, Training Begins!

On Tuesday November 6th, we began my training process, so I worked with Courtney in the laboratory.  I began the first few steps to cultivating mushrooms.  The first step is preparation and pouring of agar media into petri dishes.  Agar media is essentially the food for the mushrooms (mycelium) that we cultivate.  Courtney prepared two agar medias ahead of time because it needed to be put into a pressure cooker for sterilization and prevention of contamination.  Then the majority of the time I spent pouring the agar into petri dishes.
This turned out to be the most difficult thing I had done the whole day, but considering it was my first time working in a laboratory and that I had no previous sense of contamination prevention, this was understandable.  I couldn't put my hand or clothing above any opening and I learned to organize my tools in a fashion that would make pouring agar into petri dishes efficient without contaminating them.  Afterwards, we cut out small squares of mycelium from another petri dish to put into my agar medias; thus began the growth of my mushrooms!
I never realized how critical sterilization and contamination prevention could be, especially after reading The Mushroom Cultivator I was was assigned.  It is critical to prevent contamination to produce a pure culture of mushrooms.  Next time I will continue the training process and learning to cultivate mushrooms.