FARM:shop

Mushroom Database on BBC R4 

“Mushrooms have remained a bit of mystery to researchers, having barely been studied.

Science reporter Rebecca Morelle speaks to researchers who are collecting a database of mushroom DNA so as to prevent them disappearing from the British countryside”

Listen here

MUSH:room Pt1 - first steps in mushroom farming

Yum
We started with a feast. Shroom Sunday was the day to get mushroom production up and running at FARM:shop, but we thought we might as well begin by reminding ourselves of why.  Apologies If you are one of the unfortunate people who don’t like eating mushrooms, but for the rest of us they are an essential element of a great brunch. So, slicing her way through a couple of pounds of button mushrooms Laura fried up a storm of mushroomy deliciousness in the FARM:shop kitchen. Then, to work.

Mushroom 101
How do you grow a mushroom? Being a unique animal kingdom, mushrooms play by their own rules. They do not photosynthesise, but grow by releasing enzymes that break down organic matter to use as food. The body of the organism is the mycelium, normally growing under the soil or in a rotting log, and the mushroom is the fruiting part, thrown up into the world to scatter spores in the wind and spread the fungal love.

Kit list
So, you need:

• a growing medium: frequently sawdust or straw
• in some sort of container
• a suitable place for spawning, and later for fruiting, with appropriate temperature and air flow
• as clean an environment as possible: the less your mushrooms have to compete with nasty, inedible fungus - like molds - the better. 
• moisture
• and spawn: this is like the seed, the beginnings of the fungal growth normally cultivated on some type of grain, prepared in a sterile environment and bagged and posted to the would-be fungus farmer.

Bleach or boil?
The key question was how to pasteurise the growing medium - eliminating all life (sterilisation) is both more difficult and unnecessary. There are various options and one YouTube video showed an Indian outfit happily dunking their straw in a liquid solution of formaldehyde! Not wanting to go there we chose to try two other suggested options:

1) Bleach
A dilute solution of bleach, one cup per 55 gallons (roughly an oil barrels worth) CHECK  We used some spare hydroponics trays and soaked a couple of bags of straw overnight in the polytunnel. We then packed this into a couple of pillowcases to allow the water to drain out.

2)  Boil
Websites variously suggested boiling the bags themselves sealed with the straw inside, or the straw itself, for 2 or more hours, but this seemed both highly energy intensive and time-consuming.

So we took Ann’s advice and added the straw to the mushroom bags and then poured in boiling water before folding over the top of the bag and leaving it to cool.  One of  the reasons for ordering the specialised mushroom bags was that they are made from polypropylene, rather than polyethylene, and therefore have a higher melting point.  (We have found some cheaper bags designed for goldfish, about a tenth of the price, and may trial these soon). 

This second method felt a little more cumbersome, and as time marched on we had to speed up the cooling process with some cold water. Much better to prepare the straw in advance. The key question though is how well each method succeeded in pasteurising, and we’ll keep a close eye on results to see if there is a noticeable difference.

Packing the straw, drained of excess water, into the bags we then added the spawn, shaking it around to spread it out as much as possible and give the mycelium a good chance of taking over the entire bag.  During this process we wore gloves and tried to touch the inside of the bags as little as possible. Each bag was then sealed with string and labelled with a number to allow us to log details.

MUSH:room In the basement
One of the great advantages of mushrooms is that they don’t need light! The farm shop basement seemed the perfect place to set up production. The obstacle was the one faced by would-be users of basements everywhere - where to put the junk! Well, not exactly junk by any means but it took Courtney’s sharp architectural brain to reorganise the space, and Tetris-like we freed up two large cupboards. The space was then brushed cleaned and wiped down to make it as clean as possible.



Bags were lined up in the cupboard, where we placed a temperature and humidity meter to allow us to log changes in the environment: how cold did the basement get overnight? And how moist would the cupboard be?  Ideally, your measuring device would automatically transmit data into a spreadsheet providing a real-time log, but perhaps will reach this level of sophistication later on! For now we are trying to record the maximum and minimum levels for each over a 24-hour period, which the device allows, and we set the reset time for midday.

So all that’s left now is to watch and wait.