Cover your mushroom with a glass or container as this will keep your mushroom from drying out while eliminating airflow.

To help the mushroom release its spores, put a drop of water on top of the cap.

Then slide the stem of your mushroom through the hole until the underside is resting on the index card.

If you want to keep the stem intact while making a print, cut a hole in an index card, put the card on a cup.

Then lay the mushroom cap - gill side down - on an index card, or a piece of aluminum foil, white paper, or glass.

Use a sterilized tool, such as a scalpel or a very sharp knife. To collect spores from your freshly picked mushroom, cut off the stalk at the highest point that you can without touching the gills. For mushrooms with gills, the spores are on the surface of the gills.Making Your Spore Print Spore Prints From Mushroom with Gills This will decrease the chance of contamination with unwanted spores, microbes, and bacteria. Also, wear powder-free gloves while you work. So, before you start your spore print, make sure that you wipe down and sterilize all surfaces in your work area with 70% isopropyl alcohol. Other materials like plastic or cling wrap trap moisture too easily and may invite unwanted contaminations like mold.Īs a rule of thumb when working with mushrooms, you should try to keep things as sterile and safe as possible. This will protect the mushroom without disturbing the gills. If you find a mushroom that you wish to make a spore print with, the best way to carry it home is to wrap it in wax paper. The mushroom that you wish to make the spore print with must be mature, since young mushrooms may not have gills and mature spores yet. You can also make them from mushrooms that you buy at the grocery store or farmer’s market.īut there are some steps you need to take first, to ensure success. You can make spore prints of mushrooms that you find in the wild. It’s actually quite easy to make a spore print. Spore prints are living records of mushrooms created by carefully collecting, preserving, and protecting these mushroom spores for cultivation or identification. The color of spores can range from white to many different shades, including black. Fully grown mushrooms have thousands of spores on just one gill. Spores usually grow under the caps of mushrooms, in what are called the gills. These spores are the DNA carrier of mushrooms, so think of them as like the seeds of a plant, or the sperm of an animal. Spore prints are powdery deposits that you get when you allow spores to fall from a mushroom onto a surface, like a piece of paper. Ready to become a master spore printmaker? Let’s dive into it! In a few days, we will post an article about creating and using spore prints for mushroom identification. In this post, we will cover all the basics of spore prints for cultivation: from making to storing, to germinating.

One is to help you identify a mushroom, and the other is to save mushroom spores for future cultivation. There are two reasons why you would want to make a mushroom spore print.

Growing from spore print