It... Lives!

Now witness the mushrooms of this fully COLONISED and OPERATIONAL spawndry basket!

Mushroom Projects and New Hobbies

I'm back after a long vacation away in Northern Canuckistan and I'm devouring Sandor Katz' paean to pickling: The Art of Fermentation. I've just today gone out to Salcedo Market to get some farm-fresh ginger root and turmeric root, and grabbed some red ginger from the local Rustan's. Also, with the availability of Muscovado sugar (from raw cane juice), I couldn't help but liberate a couple kilos for my nefarious purposes.

Using instructions from the book, I've put together a ginger bug and a turmeric bug: these things are simply fermentation starters made from water, sugar, and shredded roots (with skin). Each day, you add a little more shredded root and sugar. It can take about three days for a good vigourous ferment to get going, but once the ferment starts to work, it's going to be time to make ginger beer! I'll also make turmeric beer and if I can find galangal, I'll do that one, too.

In other news, I have been able to clone the reishi mushroom from my front yard using a rather unorthodox method. Thanks to the fact my wife was away, I was able to do this. I took a bunch of wood chips and stuck them in a couple jars. I then topped the jars with water and stuck them in the microwave for five minutes. It made the room smell interesting, but the water-infused wood (and the jars) were well and truly sterilised. I sealed the jars and let them cool. Once cooled overnight, I plopped a few bits of wood chips from my tree stump into them, and left them about four weeks. This is what I now have:

Thoroughly mycelially - enhanced wood chips with no apparent source of contamination.

I also colonised some pure coir just to prove it could be done. This was done in conjunction with my spawndry basket. News on the spawndry basket front: It flushed!!!!!

And then it deliquesced because I wasn't at home to see the mushrooms flush (see above note on me being in Northern Canuckistan on long holiday). I've since put the basket out in the rain where it will keep wet and hopefully flush again. The mushrooms had grown only at the bottom of the bucket (close to the only source of moisture) due to lack of water, in my reckoning. If I can infuse the whole thing with moisture, I hope that I can get a better second flush.

Projects, projects, projects... at least I am on the right track with the ginger beer, my wife is highly supportive of any activity that provides her with yummy and nutritious ginger beer!

Spawndry Basket

I must admit to wondering whether my wife reads my blog. If she does, I should find out soon after she discovers this post.

I'm calling this a Spawndry Basket because it's yet another crazy mushroom spawn experiment, only this time with a laundry basket. One of the projects from the DVD "Let's Grow Mushrooms" was a great big laundry basket filed with straw bulk substrate and pleurotus spawn. I'm doing the "Philippines version" of that by boiling up some shredded coir and layering that with spawn.

I'm accustomed to my mushroom projects failing, but that's not to say I'm too terribly sad about the failures. I'd rather get them out of my system now while it doesn't matter. I'm also not really setting myself up for success. I'm primarily interested in totally dumb methods of doing stuff, because I'm dumb. I want resilience, not perfection. In this case, if the substrate isn't colonised, I will try again with more coir. Eventually something will work. We had to have done this in an era before clean rooms, so I'm going to keep banging at it until I've got something that functions.

If it works, WHEE! more oyster mushrooms for me, and I will start stealing people's waste coconut husks.

Vermicomposter

Thanks to the kind Hala Chaoui of UFO, I now have a vermicomposting unit! I went from shipping box to fully built in ten minutes exactly. Instructions were clear and well-illustrated. I've got a few projects this week, after getting some more spawn from the mighty men of the Ministry of Mushrooms, I want to make at least one (maybe two, maybe three) laundry-basket mushroom projects. I learned the process from the DVD "Let's Grow Mushrooms", and as long as I can get spawn, it seems bloody easy. Just boil your substrate and layer it lasagne-style in a laundry basket... keep it watered, and BOOM! Mushrooms. Let's see if it works. If it does, I will have more num-nums for the worms in the form of spent mushroom substrate.

Anyhow, after all that work I was tired so I had a beer and sat down for a while.

Holy Saprophytic Polypores, Batman!

I appear to have Reishi mushrooms growing on a stump in my front yard. They exhibit the classic kidney shape and rust brown spore print, with the white active growing area also notably present. I have another stump that I wouldn't mind giving over to Reishi propagation, so I'd better learn how!

Just wait 'til I tell the guys at Ministry of Mushrooms!

Mycelium Running... for real this time.

I appear to have had some luck running mycelium in coir and wood chips lately. See the above three jars filled with bits of happy mycelium? They are from left to right, pure-ish coir to mixed coir and wood chips. So far it seems like the rightmost mixture is the happiest, though it could also have something to do with the fact it appears to have retained a little more moisture than the others. The pure-ish coir jar seems to have good, fuzzy mycelium in it:

Whereas the one in the mason jar seems to have developed some other form of mould to compete with the pleurotus ostreatus. Perhaps a holdover from its days holding other foods and not being as thoroughly cleaned as it should have been:

If I had supervision of any kind at this time, I might be forced to throw it out, but I really want to see just what happens... and if it goes rank, I'm putting it under the microscope, by gum!

The black soldier fly is doing well. They are crawling off a lot nowadays, so I hope we are getting an increase in the local population. I am not yet ready to start collecting them as I have nothing to use them for. If the neighbourhood allowed it, I would have gotten a chicken or something to et the BSFL, but I think they are going to have to go into an aquarium of fish eventually as fish food. They eat bloody fast though and I'm alone in the house now with dwindling amounts of food to give them. I had a bunch of people over last night, so we had some scraps, but I can't well have a party every night just to feed my BSFL. 

Then again, I suppose I could, and it would be pretty awesome to have a maggot-themed party, I'm sure.

Lastly, I've ordered a vericomposting kit to compost the castings of the BSFL into some friable compost. In order to keep moisture in the indoor food collection bin down, I've been putting dustings of coir in the bottom. These are slowly building up in the BSFL bucket as the BSFL can't really eat coir. After a good soak in the bacteria-rich goo that the BSFL leave in the bucket, it should be soft enough to be able to be eventually digested by the worms I hope. Also would like to plug the vermicomposter's designer, from UFO  (Urban Farms Organic). Check out their designs for high-volume modular composters. I will be reporting back to UFO on how they work out here in the tropics on BSFL leavings.

That's me up-to-date, more news as it happens...

Mushroom Fail, Soldier Fly Win

While it seems my mushroom bin went rank due to moisture pooling in the bottom of the container, the larvae that I had once worried were not black soldier fly appear now to be black soldier fly. I'm not 100% certain - heck, I'm not 100% certain about many things - but they do seem to have taken on the proper form of BSF.

My dear mushroom contacts over at Ministry of Mushrooms came through for me today with some spawn to pick me up from being morose about a failed first mushroom experiment. One kilogram of oyster mushroom grain spawn to experiment with on my coir! Next, I'll have to purchase a pressure cooker...

More Mycelial Love

It appears the mycelium is taking to the coir substrate, with the moist coffee grounds maintaining the humidity of the mix notably high. It appears almost as if the coffee grounds are doing double duty, as they can be metabolised by the mycelium and they provide an obvious amount of moisture: obvious by the waft of moist air I get when I pop open the container. Let's see where this goes!

Mycelium Running?

The title of this post is, of course, a riff on Stamets' great work Mycelium Running, one of the three inspirational treatises by Stamets I'm working from. The others are Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms and The Mushroom Cultivator. I say "inspirational" in part because they are inspirational, but also in part because I'm not doing anything Stamets really recommends. However, after pasteurising my bulk substrate of coir, palm fronds, and coffee grounds, I appear to have mycelium running!!

Phase three... or is it five? Mushrooms.

Got a fruiting bag of mushrooms to provide mycelium for a clone. The guys at the Ministry of Mushrooms at Saturday's Salcedo market are pretty awesome and helpful. I've now got a pot to sterilise my bulk substrate, some coir, some leaves, and I think I'm ready to go.