Alcohol Prep

Alcohol preps: sterilise before you start

When growing mushrooms, the hard part is rarely the growing itself. Keeping everything that touches the substrate clean is what decides the outcome. Mould spores and bacteria float around in the air and sit on your hands, and the moment they hitch a ride on a needle or a blade, a nutrient-rich substrate gives them free rein. An alcohol prep takes a couple of seconds and removes exactly that risk.

The pad measures 65 x 30 mm and is prepped with 70 percent alcohol. That ratio is a deliberate choice. Alcohol at nearly one hundred percent evaporates so fast that it barely has time to act, while the water in a 70 percent solution slows evaporation down and helps the alcohol pass through the cell wall of micro-organisms. This is why laboratories work with 70 percent rather than the pure stuff.

What you use it for

The best known use is the injection port of a mycelium or substrate kit: wipe the port, let the alcohol dry for a moment and only then insert the syringe. The pad is equally handy for cleaning a scalpel blade, a pair of tweezers, the neck of a liquid culture vial or the piece of table you are working on.

Easy to add to your order

These preps are sold per piece, so you can order exactly as many as you need. At Avalon Magic Plants the same category holds sterile syringes with needle, sterile gloves, a scalpel with blade, mouth masks, vermiculite and perlite. Everything is shipped in discreet packaging.