The two sources for these plates were a piece from a diseased Salal leaf (left), and a piece from a brown spot on a potato from my kitchen (right). The CMA media is on the left, and the PDA media is on the right . There are a lot of differences between these plates. For one the Salal on the CMA media is having very little mold growth, while on the PDA media there are two molds growing (one green and fanning, one small blue). For the potato, there is mold growing on both but they are very different. On the CMA it looks almost like cotton, and on the PDA it is darker and fast growing. In this case I would argue that the PDA media is better, since it supporting faster growth for molds on both the potato and the Salal.
