Perhaps I should turn this into a blog post at some point, for now I will write in the form of notes.
Top e.V., a project space in Schillerkiez (Berlin), has given us a room in their basement to use as a mushroom fruiting chamber.
We cleared out the junk in the room, and are now making plans for how we will use it. We imagine making “a room within a room”, a wood box-like frame, with walls and ceiling made of plastic sheeting, to create an enclosed space where we can maintain a high level of humidity, (more on the design later), and grow a lot of oyster mushrooms.
One of our goals (among a variety of goals of varying levels of immediate tangibility, including during a vision brainstorming session Logan writing down on a piece of paper Radical Myco Democracy) is to grow enough oyster mushrooms, to become the oyster mushroom supply for Soy Division, who cooks every week down the street with a regular demand for oyster mushrooms.
We also have a connection with a supportive woodshop in Kreuzberg that gives us giant bags of sawdust for free (they normally have to pay to have the sawdust removed), and we are growing relationships with some coffee shops in the Kiez who can supply us with used coffee grounds, so the hope is that we can feed the oysters entirely on waste materials and also become a practical waste management service for the woodshop.
Another one of our goals is to document our process, so that hopefully this project can also serve as a helpful blueprint or inspiration for what to do (or not to do) in trying to collaboratively grow mushrooms at a small-to-medium scale in a city.
There is more back story, but without going into all the details this can be the opener for a thread to share in-progress notes and documentation.