[Tastebridge] Oyster Mushroom update

[Matthew Downs]

Greetings Tasters!
Just dropped-by to check on the babies.  Filled the humi.  We're able to
get about 4 days between fills now with the humistat.  Thank you to
everyone who contributed to this wonderful innovation!

There are about 5 of the coffee grounds blocks remaining and all of them
are fruiting!  Hopefully we'll be getting some fat flushes from these over
the next few weeks.  Our chamber is pretty well contaminated with bread
mold...we've pitched several blocks, but the tree oysters are so hardy they
are fighting it off.  We removed the dry saw dust blocks from this summer.
 I took the uncontaminated ones home, hydrated them, broke them up and
burried them under a layer of sheet mulch.  Hooooping this will start to
colonize my garden bed, which is mostly woodchips and cardboard at this
stage. We'll know in a few months...if this works out, we could have a nice
source for spawn.

As you may know, Rikke has moved to Atlanta for a few seasons, so Natalie
and myself are now sheepherding the fungus project.  I want to give a shout
out to Rikke for all her hard work over the last several weeks --cleaning
the chamber, keeping an eye on everything, just being generally passionate
and awesome.  Our current plan is to let these blocks fruit out, then tear
down the chamber.  If there is interest, we may continue to do batches in
the future.  Personally, I'd love to try to get some shiitake going, but we
need to tear down, thoroughly clean and rebuild the chamber if we're to
fight-off the mildew and contamination.  Depending on how the current
fruiting goes, we may wait ot tear down until after the first of the year.

i'm having a minor medical procedure inside my nose, so I will not be able
to be there this Monday thru Wednesday, will plan to meet next Monday 12/9.

Spores,
~Matthew
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