Wednesday 02/03/2012 we had a awesome fungi workshop at Mediamatic in Amsterdam with Maurizio Montalti, a passionate researcher, artist and engineer interested in life’s bigger and smaller insights.
Besides he learned us to make a sawdust substrate on which woodloving mushrooms like Black Poplar, Shitake or Glow in the Dark mushrooms like to grow, Maurizio gave detailed feedback on all our fungi questions rising from our various trial and errors fungi experiments in the last months.
We began the workshop by making a mixture of sawdust (from a nice windmill in Zaandam 49%), rye grains ( roggegraan, 4%), wheat bran (tarwezemelen 1%), calcium carbonate (krijt, verkrijgbaar bij Jacob Hooy 1%) and some water. Every substance is weighed and measured properly before we mix them thoroughly together. We put this mixture (the substrate) in special filter bags, and put the bags in a pressure cooker (for 40- 45 minutes) to get rid of the existing mold and fungus spores that are often naturally present on the wood. After we cool down the bags (which takes an hour) we add the mushroom spawn (10 gram per 1,5 kg substrate or one spawndowel) in the cleanroom, to avoid contamination and sealed the bags of. while waiting for the bags to cool down Maurizio passionate told lots of stuff like that you have to keep in mind 3 parameters for optimal growing conditions. that is temperature (25- 30 degrees celcius), humidity and sterile conditions), letting myclium growing in the dark goes faster. That bacteria normally fall from above so keep your bags horizontal when you open them and work fast. You can use 70% ethanol or alcohol to sterile your home made glove box. Oyster mushrooms are strong and can be grown on just straw nd don’t really need a hyper sterile environment.
It will take about 6 months before the shitake batches are fully grown. ( 4 months for the Black Poplar) When the time is ripe for sprouting you can give it a shock; by lowering the temperature with 10%, to let light come in and let oxygen in by simply opening the bag or by making a cut in the bag. Make sure you keep the humidity high, by spraying it every day (but don’t spray on the mushroom self). Only when the substrate block is completely white you can inject it with water with a syringe. You can as-well put the bag in a terrarium together with a a few bowls of water, open te lit a few times a day to let oxygen in.
Also Maurzio and Margarita guided us along the works of amongst The Secret Sounds of Spores by Yann Seznec and Patrick Hickey http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzpaAMYSPTA. Ecovative’s great light weight mycelium material samples http://www.ted.com/talks/eben_bayer_are_mushrooms_the_new_plastic.html, The mycotectures of Phil Ross, and the mycelium moulds of Thomas Pleeging <a href=”http://thomaspleeging.nl/projects/mould.php.
http://thomaspleeging.nl/projects/mould.php.</p>
To regenerate a harvested substrate batch, you can give it a cold bath (for about 4 hours.) and dry it with a towel.
In short Maurizio really opened some doors in this workshop about the secret art of growing mushrooms. http://www.mauriziomontalti.com
Mediamatic’s Mycelium Rising blog has great fungal topics: http://www.mediamatic.net/search/101422/en
Tactile Research lab 