We’ve been preparing and shipping sterilized mushroom media for a good many years now. Experience is an invaluable teacher when it comes to this sort of thing, even with the guidance of wonderfully crafted manuals, mushroom resource books, and other references. One thing we have learned through the years, especially when it comes to the preparation and utilization of rye berries as a spawning media: FRESH is king. Forr this reason we have enacted the following policy in regards to the prepping and shipping of the Sterilized Rye Mushroom Grow and Spawn Bag w/ injection site – 2lb:
All sterilized rye is prepared to order and shipped early each week. As a result, sterile rye only moves through our sterilizers early in the week to ensure we can ship requested orders between Monday and Tuesday. Most orders will make delivery by the end of the week, providing you with the freshest possible sterilized product for spawn preperation. We do not hold this product on our shelves. Customers will experience a related delay in shipping. The cut-off for submitting orders to be included in the weekly sterilizing run is Sunday noon EST. Orders placed later in the week will be delayed until the next run of sterilized rye. Sterilized rye is prerpared every week, so you will wait no longer than 7 days before receiving shipment notification (worst case scenario).
So basically, any order we receive before noon EST on Sunday will be prepared for shipping Monday-Tuesday. If your order comes in after Sunday, it is likely your request will be delayed until the next weekly run of rye the following week. Customers should not experience any delay longer than 5-7 days for rye to be prepped for shipping. The preparation and shipping schedule ensures all our customers will receive the freshest possible product for their mycological endeavors, with no product lingering on the shelves or being held up during weekend transit. Many of our substrates are prepared to order, including our popular Supplemented Sawdust Block w/ Rye Grain Pocket, Mushroom Grow Bag w/ injection site – 3lb. However, we have found the PF Tek Mushroom Cake Substrate Jars – half pint wide mouth , sterilized to be a bit more shelf stable and will generally have these stocked for immediate shipping, as we prepare them often throughout the week.
We have also suspended preparation and shipping of the quart jars containing 500ml of pre-sterilized agar media. These were quite honestly a pain in the rear. They were heavy, unstable in shipping, and not easy to use. The goal of this product was to provide the home/hobby mycologist with access to easy materials for tissue culturing on nutrient rich agar petri dishes. So to tackle this problem we extensively tested preparation, storage, and shipping of pre-poured nutrient agar petri dishes and found we could supply this more suitable and easier to use product for an attractive and reasonable price. We use our in house Malt Extract Agar Light – MEA to prepare, seal, and vacuum pack these dishes in our sterile lab. The Pre-poured malt extract agar petri dishes, pack of four are supplied in sealed packs of four, allowing you to only expose four dishes at a time for quick tissue culture, cloning, inocuation with culture in syringes syringes, streaking spore prints, etc. We’ve also modified the Agar Culturing Kit – Basic to now include two packs of these pre-poured dishes, that’s eight pre-poured dishes. Adding these, and removing the previously supplied sleeve of petri dishes and jar of pre-sterilized agar has allowed us to reduce the shipping weight of the Basic Kit… and make it a few bucks cheaper!