Rainy Sunday

Rain water on the MPS floor.

We arrived at World Hope late today due to impedance from the rain. Upon arrival, we found that the roof of our structure had yet again run into problems with the weather. Rainwater had collected in two pockets on the front side of the house and some of the tarp on that side had ripped.

We drained the water but unfortunately could not do more to fix the problem because our construction lead had the day off. Many people in Sierra Leone take sundays off, which largely impacted our productivity today. Being unable to move forward with the structure itself, we tried to work on our new batch of grain spawn. The grains we had left to dry were still moist and sticky due to the humidity. This is a serious problem because we can't let our grains get moldy and we can't jar them until they are touch dry. We brainstormed solutions to this and came up with heating them over our coal oven.

Drying grains using mesh over coals.

This solution was successful in that the grains were dry enough to jar, however we still couldn't pressure cook them because they kept sticking together when we put them in the jars. We skipped using gypsum because our grains in the US hadn't stuck together very much, but these new grains are far too sticky. We need to use gypsum to solve this issue, but the market was closed today because it was both sunday and very rainy.

We also wanted to come up with a way to seal our barrel for pasteurizing so that we could finally inoculate substrate. All of the potential solutions we came up with require materials from the market, so yet again we could not do much more than add to our shopping list and agenda for tomorrow.

Attempting to jar the grains after drying.

Though we did not make very much physical progress, we've amended our spawn and construction manuals and have decided on more concrete designs for the structure to account for the specifications for different mushroom strains. This way we can really hit the ground running when the market opens and the weather is more cooperative.