This is awesome! Something I do when putting lichen under the scope is take a small section and smash it up against a stainless steel tray with the back of a scalpel handle, kind of like a mortar and pestle. I just do this because I’m lazy but it actually dislodges a decent amount of the algae from the hyphae. I wonder if you could then do something similar to spore isolation under the microscope with a capillary tube (I’ve never tried but here’s a video ). This is really cool and I’m so glad you shared this. There is a section in Lichen Biology by Thomas Nash on cultivating lichens in the lab.

Thanks!

That’s fine, no experience needed. I am actually not all that great at ID either, I just know the most common species in my area.

Very nice pic, here’s the link: https://mander.xyz/c/Lichen

You’re welcome! I never expected to love lichens as much as I do. So much to learn about them and sometimes it takes a quite a bit of digging which is always keeps me searching and learning.

Should be up now, I kept it simple and just called it ‘Lichen’

Awesome, will do! Thanks

I wasn’t sure if it was kosher to just start a community or if it had to be approved and whatnot.

We could do with a lichen community, just saying. Definitely fits within mycology but lichenology can easily stand on its own.

Nice, they sort of grow around my area but are very elusive

We have a fruiting chamber set up, its an old grow tent with ventilation, lights and a fogger. Honestly, if I wasn’t for the heavy spore load I would say this would grow well on a counter top. This is my first reishi grow so I am not very experienced with this species so take that with a grain of salt.

They absolutely do hahah

Not yet, I do regularly have reishi powder or extract in my coffee though but I’ve never had homegrown.

These take a bit of getting used to for sure and quite some time before the mycelium matures. I thought they’d never get there. Substrate is straight hardwood fuel pellets. I inoculated these in November and they colonised within a few weeks but I left them until they began to sort of grow antlers (actually left them longer because I got busy with work). I started fruiting them 4 weeks ago give or take. Temps were probably around 16-20°C normally. I bumped the humidity down to 60 or 70%.

They look almost identical to each other but I believe G. tsugae tends to favour conifer, I grew this on hardwood.

Lichens take a very long time to regenerate, most only grow a few mm a year. Some are protected or endangered on top of that. A good example is Lobaria pulmonaria, highly sought after by dyers because it produces a rich orange/brown dye in wool and other fibres. L. pulmonaria takes a considerable amount of time to grow, the thallus (body) only begins to reproduce after 25 years so is mainly found in older growth forests. Depending on the area, a person could come through and decimate a population just trying to collect enough material to dye a sweater. I’m not saying you should never harvest any lichen (its often unavoidable for ID purposes) but it is always a good idea to be conscious of your impact on a population of very slow growing organisms. The best way to harvest lichens is to salvage it off the ground after a wind storm or something like that, when lichens detach from the substrate they are rarely able adapt to the new environment and eventually die so its not as big a deal if you take that home because its going to decompose anyway. I have also seen where folks harvest no more than 1/10th of the population or harvest the outer edges of the thallus so that most of the colony remains. Really just depends.

Very cool, Cladonia always make me happy

Nice. Patiently waiting to find one of these baddies in the wild.

They really are. Alan Rockefeller has an awesome talk on mushroom photography that’s been uploaded to yt and man it has me stepping up my game this season.

This is perfect