MYcelium - new time waster

[Shannow]

Have been watching a lot of Paul Stamets of recent times, he is really one clever guy...

I think buster put me onto this video, and I've got a lot more of his talks on a thumb drive on the smart TV that I watch regularly....



I buy lion's mane powder, and take it semi regularly, with niacin before a sauna...

(the programming gurus in Silicone Valley combine the two, with microdoses of psylocibin mushrooms...but I'm seriously not going that direction).

So I'm currently messing in a number of areas.

 

[Shannow]

Picture uploader is woefully slow (or the kids stole the bandwidth in a record 7 days), so here's one of them...

It's a purchased oyster mushroom kit.

It's full of mycelium loaded wood fibre, you cut open the face and spray with water regularly, and the fruiting bodies emerge, rotate the inner four times to get four flushes out of a kit

 

[Shannow]

Here's the fruiting bodies starting to emerge from the mycelial mat...

When I get to flush 4, I'l poke some sterilised dowels into the second face (back from the last flush) and try to innoculate some dowels, to preserve the strain for implantation into poplar logs...

 

[Shannow]

Other stuff...

Here's a bought kit for regular mushrooms, but it was beaten up pretty bad, so transferred it into an old microwave that I harvested to get the transformer and magnets out of (another time waster for another day)....

 

[Shannow]

Re the lion's mane...I had some spawn that I bought online, which I'd had zero success of getting to "sprout" over the last 6 months using all the techniques I learned on the internet (except learning means achieving as well in my books).

Autoclaved grains and straw, rice, nothing worked...

Here's a travel fridge that someone dumped and I thought would make an OK farm.

Made some media...details below...and added the last of my lion's mane spawn.

Here's a close-up of the medium....and mycelium that have grown in the last week.

Hoping that's lion's mane and not contamination...will find out.

 

[Shannow]

All the media instructions on the net involve sterilising stuff in autoclaves etc.

(Coir in our pressure cooker wasn't a good idea according to my wife...but it cleaned up OK, and lost the smell after a few stews).

Stamets relatively new technique is to ferment the media in water for a week or two to create anaerobic conditions and destroy aerobic species...then decant it briefly and expose it to light...then inoculate, so that the fungus is the majority aerobic species, in an environment that's no longer anaerobic...

Here's how the pea straw media above was generated...again drink cooler harvested from the dump...

 

[Shannow]

Harvested some to go on pizza last night and they've doubled in size overnight

 

[Shannow]

Wow..

 

[Shannow]

It's amazing...the little bumps became hundreds of tiny mushrooms. Now they are being re-absorbed into the mass, completely deconstructed to go into the most viable of the big ones.

 

[Shannow]

It's gotten too cold for the outside stuff...doesn't mean that I'm not harvesting spores and distributing them to likely grow places

Oyter Mushrooms on their third flush...will turn the block 90 degrees and cut a new opening after I eat those (tomorrow).

Second flush of the lion's mane.

The jars on the helves are the sterilised bird seed that I'm using to try to propogate those two, and the turkeytales that I've got elsewhere (not photoworthy yet).

I appear to be having success 'though in other realms...the two sacks are my home mae gro medium, pea straw and wheat bran, sterilised in the pressure cooker.

Near sack is lions mane, browing off an innoculated dowel I bought off ebay.

Far sack is Oyster, with a shaving of the grow medium of the kit, which has nearly taken over the medium...the brick feels near solid, so it's likely all the way through the mass...soon to poke holes in the bag and let the mycelium experience oxygen, at which point they should fruit out the side.

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