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.