Organazing like fungi

[zaunders]

Hey all!

I’m Viktor and I have been a part of the SSB mushroom scene for a while. Excited to see this place emerge!

I’ve been a hobbyist mushroom grower for some time, doing log culture, some Oyster on straw and other smaller experiments. Last year me and two colleagues started a microgreens and mushroom micro farm in our village. About three months ago we built our first fruiting room in order to start learning and growing mushrooms.

I’ve already learnt a whole bunch, like don’t build with wood haha, and the need for a good fogger. But despite our fumbling beginnings we have been delivering some really delicious and beutiful mushrooms to local customers. So far we’ve been delivering Lions Mane, Shiitake, Oysters, Nameko and Maitake. People are really loving and craving Lions Mane so we are focusing on getting stable with that right now.

In other dimensions, I’ve been working on transforming our food systems onto regenerative and bioregional ethics and values through our Food Shift collective. Last year was a deep dive into how to run food cooperatives.

I’ve also been a part of the community around the distributed data integrity framwork called holochain for the last 3 years. Things are just about to get really exciting with all that.

Much of all this work is coming together now in a project that we are calling Shiro, this is meant to be a distributed set of software tools that enable communities to create pathways for provisioning food and supporting local growers. A virtual mycelial network for human nutrition if that analogy doees not offend

That may be too much for an intro, but I am happy to be here!

[glyph]

@zaunders

Hey Viktor, it’s so great to have you here. Welcome! You have been very busy since we last spoke - beautiful work.

I know that @Lando has been working on a fogger for the Kiez Pilz fruiting room. Perhaps there’s an opportunity for some knowledge sharing there.

The Hericium is looking very happy in your photo. It certainly seems like a wise move to focus on your relationship with that species and aim for stable production. I’m looking forward to hearing more about your process and following your developments. See you around

[zaunders]

Cool, yes, our latest developments have been to run the incoming air with a small bathroom fan through a makeshift plastic box with a 3-membrane ultrasonic fogger in order to create and distribute fog to the room. Seems to be working pretty well and all in all cost about $160. Very similar to this setup from Southwest Mushrooms that I was inspired by. Happy to take photos if you are interested!

[notplants]

@zaunders that southwest mushrooms farm video on cleaning your grow tent is also somehow one of my favorite mushroom youtube videos. happy to see it re-appear.

Our humidity setup is very similar, although @Lando has done some interesting in-progress stuff with trying to attach a larger water tank on top of the plastic box so we have to refill it less often.

I’d be curious to hear more about your whole cultivation process with your microgreen and mushroom micro farm. For instance, what substrates you are using, how you are doing sterilization, if you make your own spawn, what is your cycle of cultivation. I guess I would be curious in as much detail as you want to share it haha if you want to make a post about it, but also happy to just see the updates as they come.

Also where are you based out of? (unless it is a secret farm)

[zaunders]

Aha, cool @Lando, are you looking to automate that refill of the box? A float valve? Audrino pump?

sure thing @notplants .

So we are currently partnering with one of the few substrate producers in sweden. A pretty small operation that has mostly been doing grow-your-own kits for like 10-15 years. We just started last year and are buying in sterilised and innoculated sawdust/grain bags from her.

While I’d love to keep expanding our partnership, we are also considering finding a way to sterilise, innoculate and incubate bags ourself. Mostly in order to get a more stable supply of bags because it is a little bit sketchy right now and we are beginning to have som more stable demand.

The microgreens part has been going on for a bit longer than the mushrooms and we are currently selling trays of mixed greens (peas, sunflowers, broccoli, etc.) directly to eaters. We’ve tried selling harvested bags for a while, but the whole harvest and packing thing takes a lot of time and uses a whole lot of resources.

I hope to be able to experiment more with connecting the enterprises. Especially by piping incubation CO2 into the growrooms and oxygen back, but also by composting our substrates and using that compost to grow greens in.

Our farm is in southern Sweden, an hour outside of Malmö in a small village called Röstånga. Where are you at @notplants?

[notplants]

very cool to hear about the microgreens and the fungi, and possible future connections.

also love the idea of friendly partnerships with others doing some specific part of the cultivation process

will be curious what equipment you invest in for sterilization if you end up going that route

@lando and I are living in Berlin, and our cultivation so far happens in the basement of a community/project space called Top Lab

feel free to send a message if you ever pass by berlin!

[zaunders]

Upgrades!

We are now on our third interation fruiting room. Using a 3x3m Gorilla Grow tent. We have been very much inspired by the Southwest Mushroom videos. And I have been really enjoying learning my way around new nooks of the hardware store.

Now we are almost straining our partner that is producing our bags as they need to max their incubation capacity for a while to supply our space.

We are still looking to focus on Hericium Erinaceum as we’ve had som much feedback that people love them. And we are also looking to build a DIY dryer. If anyone would be up for a conversation on how drying could be done well, I’d be super interested in that conversation

My favorite thing in the new room is the steam box being directly connected to a faucet so filling is just done while gleefully looking though the window of the tent

[notplants]

@zaunders very cool to see!

if you find time to share, I’d be curious to hear more details about your setup and timing for air exchange and humidity.

the faucet filling sounds very satisfying… our fruiting chamber is in a basement without water access, so I’m still lugging a big tank of water up and down the stairs. But nice to dream…

ty for sharing

[zaunders]

Hey @notplants, yes, we have been iterating again and are just installing a hygrostat that will sense the humidity in the tent and turn on and off our humidifier as we’ve experienced it really hard to do properly with just timers as surrounding conditions vary grately. We’ve also upgraded to a pretty strong fan which is now turning over the air in the tent around 3x per day. that is running continuously at this point. We had a really undersized bathroom fan before that did not preform as we had read it should so we had super spindly lionsmane and now we are getting really nice round and beautiful fruitbodies

[notplants]

@zaunders thanks for sharing!

I’m curious what model hygrostat you are using?

with kiezpilz, this summer we switched to using mycodo, but so far just with timers.

we were using this cheap humidity regulator before, but one broke, and the next, if often seemed “unpredictable” — our analog hygrometer was showing that humidity did not really stay in the range the regulator thought — and our analog sensor seemed more “calibrated” with the mushrooms … by which I mean when the analog hygrometer read low numbers the mushrooms often looked dehydrated and suffering… so essentially was using the mushrooms as humidity sensor to know the accuracy of the other sensors haha

I wanted to try hooking up a BME-280 sensor to mycodo,
but basically finding it surprisingly difficult to find the right thing for a reliable humidity so far.