[WendySHall]

To seed your viv, you could just flood the culture and then use a turkey baster to remove them and place them in the viv.

To start a bigger culture, I don't think there's any way around it...you have to just dump them in. Unless you want to spend all day with the turkey baster.

 

[WendySHall]

Doug...the cultures I received from Josh's came with very small peices of charcoal. There wasn't any big chunks to pick up and tap.

 

[WendySHall]

Hey, that sounds like a much easier way to do it than anything else I've seen. I can see the sphagnum rotting...but is there some reason everyone stopped with the filters?

 

[WendySHall]

Well, I don't have any tree fern...but I think I'm gonna give the coffee filters a try on top of my charcoal cultures and just change them out every so often. Thanks!

 

[WendySHall]

I then added 5 grains of rice in the middle of each culture, and I put 2-3 grains elsewhere around the cultures.

How moist should the cultures be?

I don't put the food directly in the cultures anymore...the mold throughout the container grossed me out. Lately I've been placing the food onto one of those tiny butter bowl lids and then placing it into the container. If something happens and it gets a little too yucky, I throw it away and replace it with a new one. Just keeps things a little cleaner and still lets the mold grow without taking over everything.

If you're keeping about a half to an inch of water in your container, the humidity inside should keep everything moist enough as it is. That's what I do and there's always condensation dripping from the lid.

 

[WendySHall]

Hey Wendy, you should really try letting it get good and gross. It is the...liquifying food that they really go nuts over. Or, just go with Active Bakers yeast which liquifies right away on contact with the wet substrate. Try it and watch your production go through the roof!

Yeah...I know, I know...it's the really disgusting stuff that they like. It just really, really grosses me out. I've cleaned out tanks and had my hands in frog poop, gently picked up a dead frog to check on it, killed fruit flies directly on my skin...but that mold...ACK!

I do use the yeast as well as fish food and rice (I know I've been lucky so far)...and my cultures produce far more than I can use.