Week Five: Healthy Growth

Oyster Mushroom mycelium on rye grain.

This week we saw a lot of encouraging progress with our grain spawn.  The rye grain inoculated with oyster mushrooms from the week has shown a lot of healthy white growth in clumps.  However, it seems to have slowed down since the first week which may be because we shook the jars pretty vigorously to spread the mycelium.  Both the sorghum and millet inoculated with oyster mycelium show impressive amounts of growth, and we think the sorghum may be the most effective grain for our mushrooms.  One of the sorghum jars is fully developed and we hope to use it next week for transplanting on substrate! Our hope is to see healthy mushrooms fruiting on substrate because we leave for Sierra Leone to confirm the vitality of our process and materials.  

Unfortunately - but not surprisingly - all of our silk straw mushroom cultures were unsuccessful.  They either showed no growth at all, or the growth of unhealthy, gray mold. We want to try a new grain spawn of straw mushrooms but it is difficult to find spawn to purchase that we can trust will be healthy.  

Unhealthy mold growth in millet inoculated with silk straw mycelium.

Our trip is fast approaching so now we are buckling down and preparing a bill of materials and developing a plan for in country.  Our bill of materials includes items we will need for spawn generation, MPS construction, and the fruiting process. It is vital that we don’t leave anything off the list or behind at Mountaintop so that we can be as efficient and successful as possible when we set up the farms in Sierra Leone.  We’ve also begun researching grants because our main avenue of success in the short term is procuring income for our project manager Jwara so he can spread our industry in Sierra Leone. The proximity of the trip is incredibly exciting but we still have a lot of work to do before we leave.