SporeDeskSporeDesk

Features

Follow one grow, start to finish.

This is SporeDesk running on my own grows. Real cultures, real harvests, and real failures, straight out of my account. Here’s how a grow moves through it, from the first recipe to the last flush.

The SporeDesk lineage tree for Lion's Mane, with one fruiting block's path highlighted back through grain, syringe, liquid culture and plate to the block it started from.
Point at any container and its whole family lights up. That’s LM-FB2, a Lion’s Mane block, traced back through the grain bag, the syringe, the liquid culture, and the plate to the block it all started from.

01Before anything grows

It starts with the recipe.

Every grow starts at the bench, so SporeDesk does too. Your agar, grain, and substrate recipes live in one library. Type a batch size, or tap ×2, and every ingredient recalculates. The steps check off as you go.

Right next to them: a cheat sheet for each species (temps, humidity, how long it should take) and the calculators I actually reach for. Spawn ratio, substrate hydration, biological efficiency, dry yield, and unit conversions.

A coco coir and vermiculite bulk substrate recipe with a batch-size scaler and checklist steps.
The Blue Oyster cheat sheet: fruiting and colonizing temperatures, humidity, fresh air, colonization time, pin-to-harvest, and substrate.
Species cheat sheet
Calculators for spawn ratio, substrate hydration, and biological efficiency, filled in with example numbers.
Calculators

02The shelf

Every plate, jar, and bag is its own record.

Pour a batch of plates or load a round of grain bags and each one gets logged as its own unit, with its own auto-numbered label, so you’re not inventing names at 11pm.

You can see what’s on hand at a glance. When a plate gets used, it says exactly what it became, and one tap takes you to that culture.

The Stock list: four plates of peptone-enriched malt agar on hand, and used plates showing which culture each one became.

03Labels

Print it at the desk, scan it at the shelf.

Print QR labels from your computer on standard address-label sheets, 30 to a page. Already used half a sheet? Tell it which label to start at and it skips the used ones.

Stick one on the jar. Later, one scan with your phone opens that container’s whole record: where it came from, its photos, your notes, and what it turned into. Once a plate or bag gets used, its label follows through to the new culture, so there’s nothing to reprint.

A container's record on a phone after scanning its label: LM-BK1 with its full family line, photos, and status.
What a scan opens
The print screen: a sheet of QR labels for four agar plates, ready to print.

04The grow

Then the tree takes over.

Every culture traces back to its source. Inoculate a grain bag from a syringe and SporeDesk draws the line. Over time you get the whole family, from a spore print or a purchase all the way down to the block on your shelf.

Tap any container for its status, history, and notes. Contamination and failure are logged separately, each with a reason, so a trich bag doesn’t get lumped in with one that just never took off.

Rather read than zoom? Flip the tree to a list: an indented outline with every container’s status spelled out.

A monotub's record: its family line, photos, status buttons, harvest logging, details, and a dated history of notes.
The lineage tree as an indented list, with each container's status written out.
The tree as a list
The species grid: 16 species, each showing how many lines and live containers it has.
Everything on the shelf, by species

Every photo, in one place

The photos you take along the way collect under the whole line, not buried inside one jar’s record. Scroll down a lineage and watch it go from a clean bag to a fruiting block.

A mosaic of real grow photos across one Lion's Mane lineage: grain bags, a monotub, and fruiting blocks, each tagged with its container and date.

05Harvest

Every flush becomes a lot.

Log a flush on the block and it becomes a lot you can keep following. Dry it, powder it, blend it, extract it, or give some away. Every step keeps a record of what came from where.

How much is left is always worked out from what you’ve logged, so the numbers add up instead of drifting.

Harvest lots: dried Reishi, Shiitake, Lion's Mane and Chestnut, and a Blue Oyster extract, each with how much remains.

06The honest part

Then it tells you what’s actually working.

The Data tab turns everything you’ve logged into answers. Success and contamination rates, whether you’re getting better month to month, yield by block and by species, and where in the pipeline you lose the most runs.

Those are my real numbers. 47% success, and 80% of my agar work hasn’t made it. It stings a little to post that, but that’s the point: I’d rather know my plates are the weak spot than keep guessing.

Headline numbers: 47% success rate, 9% contamination rate, 1.72 kg harvested, and 82 runs started.
Bar charts of success rate and contamination rate by month, and runs started versus finished.
Am I getting better?
Yield per block with best flush and biological efficiency, and loss by pipeline stage.
By block, and where things fail

And the small stuff

The things you only notice once you’re using it.

  • Quick-start species

    Templates for 12 common species, so adding Blue Oyster doesn’t mean typing out its temps and timelines yourself.

  • Search that goes straight there

    Type LM-GR3 or a recipe name and it jumps right to that jar, lot, or recipe.

  • Your units

    Metric, imperial, or a mix of both. Pick once in Settings.

  • Photos without the baggage

    Location data gets stripped out of every photo when you upload it.

  • Phone or computer

    Works in any browser, and installs on your phone’s home screen like an app.

  • Easier on the eyes

    Follows your device’s text size, with a higher-contrast mode, a reduce-motion setting, and that list view of the tree.

Private beta

Want to run your own grows through it?

SporeDesk is in private beta. Cohort 1 opens October 26 and is capped at 50 growers. You get the full app free for the beta, and I get honest feedback from people who actually grow.

Join the beta