Fungi Academy - Introduction

Can mushrooms save the world? If you ask any Estonians you find up the mountain above the hippy haven of San Marcos the answer will most defiantly be a resounding "Jah". Just follow the mushrooms painted on the rocks up, up, up through to the pine forest and down the path to the Fungi Academy.

It's a challenge to choose so few words to describe this group, what they've done, what they're doing and where they will go. I can for sure say we are enjoying our stay here immensely. The self taught scientists up here are doing exactly what they want to be doing and believe in. They are dedicated to the cultivation of mushrooms and mycelium, spreading the popularity of fungi in general and teaching people how to grow and enjoy mushrooms themselves. They also live as a community which has long term core members, volunteers, (especially ones that bring interesting skill sets) and guests. All meals are cooked and consumed together. The household and property upkeep is also shared and I've been doing a lot of landscaping and digging new garden beds. The community is happy, healthy and fit from carrying everything: gas bottles, sacks of potatoes and 30,000 pounds of bananas up the mountain. There is no tuk tuk ride up here.

Oliver and Tanel lead the Tuesday workshops and teach week long courses which start with an inspiring lecture about the many benefits of fungi cultivation. 

- Natural Medicine - immune boosters of both plants and humans.

- Healing the Earth - possibilities include cleaning petrochemicals.

- Soil Producers - single cell fungi prepared the earth for us by breaking down minerals. 

- Garden Buddies - mushroom plant relationships help share nutrition.

- Water Filters - mycelium provides micro filtration.

- Medicine for the Soul - psychedelics 
as aids in mental healing shows 
great promise. 

Above we have the queen of medicinal mushrooms - Reishi. It has been shown to boost the immune system, lower inflammation and hold off tumour grown.  Reishi mushrooms have been used for their medicinal properties by the Chinese emperors for thousands of years. At one time it was illegal for common people to eat them but they would be rewarded if they turned them over to officials. Reishi can be consumed by long boiling tea, grinding it up for powdered pill capsules or there is an alcohol extracting method as well. 

Chaga is King with similar health benefits as Reishi but with more tests pointing to added cardiovascular health as well. It's usually consumed as a tea and works best when broken up into roughly 10g chunks and can be boiled repeatedly.

So lets get a few things straight. Mushrooms are the fruit, mycelium are kind of like the roots or nervous systems and they are all part of the fungi family. The life cycle from spore to fruit is fairly simple

Two spores are needed to mate together and form mycelium which is a root like nervous system that links together a vast network of nutrition and information sharing webs through the soil or whatever it's inoculated into. When the mycelium reach full colonization or are 'shocked', like with cold weather, into thinking they will loose their nutrition source they start 'pinning' and mature into fruit - usually in the form of what we know as mushrooms. 

These are 'pink oysters'. Oyster mushrooms are found all over the world and are hardy, easy to grow and delicious. These ones can be seen blossoming beautifully out of a grow bag. You can see how the bag is full of white mycelium roots which have taken over most of the space. There are some slits in the sides covered with microporous tape to allow for air exchange. When the mycelium have little left to consume underground (in the bag) they burst through the soil (slits in the bag) and get read to spread their spores. Just remember, incubation needs to mimic the inside of soil or a log which is dark. Fruiting needs to mimic finding light and air. 

This perhaps is the most important picture of all. If you look closely you can follow the propagation process of fungi and see the steps taken to save spores, clone copies, expand cultures and inoculate other growth mediums.

The basic summary goes as follows:

- Mushrooms can be copied by taking a spore print (cut off the cap, place on a paper or foil, cover with a jar to seal off the air, spores will drop in half an hour) or cutting out a clean inside piece of the fruit and placing them in a petri dish with some nutrient rich agar or sugar rich liquid broth.

- From there you can save your mycelium or inoculate a sterilized growing medium. Here we sterilize jars of boiled grain by putting them in a pressure cooker and heating them to 120'C for 2 hours.

- After the mycelium start taking over, you can spread them to other non sterilized mediums like cardboard, wood chips, hay, grow bags, or trays.

- From there, mushrooms should grow if left in the right conditions depending on the species


These delicious white oysters on the right came out off of a grow bag and are bigger than my hand.

Above we have the lions main mushroom which is another medicinal that shows benefits for memory and mood.  And below there are the distinctively tasting and ever so popular shiitakes 

The good folks at Fungi Academy take their passion seriously and in style. Its not surprising to hear most conversations from a wide range of topics eventually narrow down to mushroom and mushroom cultivation talk morning, noon and night. 

 

And when I say style I mean they are gazing out upon one of the most picturesque postcard views you can imagine while hanging out half clothed eating delicious organic meals and cooking up some other mushroom related plan for the day. I'm going to be here for a while and will go into more details about how a mushroom lab works.

Bonus: I made spicy hot sauce. Just take any peppers you have. Boil until soft. Grab whatever herbs and spices smell good together. Grind them up. And throw the whole thing into a blender with some vinegar and add other stuff like salt or sugar or fruit until it tastes right. Everybody loves hot sauce.

Double Bonus - Me digging terraced garden beds with a random friendly dog.

IMPA - The Meso-American Institute of Permaculture

Field trip! We checked out IMAP - the Meso-American Institute of Permaculture located on Lake Atitlan (yes we are still on the lake, it's addictive).

IMAP was founded in 2000 and started development in 2005. It is the locally run permaculture institute of Guatemala. They are big into community outreach, making school and public gardens, promoting native food products, seed saving and giving value to their natural and surrounding resources. Their goal in everything they do and design is to show how it can be replicated by the public and local community. 

All great civilizations were founded by stabilizing agriculture. At IMAP, they devote a lot of effort to studying the Mayan agricultural calendar. They also know that good coffee is grown in the shade ;)  

We saw a good deal of neat little permaculture inspired systems.

Here are some keyhole gardens raised up with a system of stakes, chicken wire and black bags. This could be a decent idea to use over problematic land although one needs to consider where the soil comes from to fill those beds. I didn't love the black bag idea but looks like these beds are growing very well.

This was a neat idea. Below you can see a leafy green barrel sized bag and chicken wire grow system. In the centre of the soil there is a porous pipe running all the way down for even water distribution.

I'm writing from a place up the hill in San Marcos and there isn't an oven here. We are all just kinda standing around looking at pictures of this solar oven and imagining all the wonderful things we could cook with the power of the sun. It's simply just a reflective surface aimed onto glass covering an insulated box with a door on the front. Brilliant. 

In here we have a whole bunch of dried herbs and aromatics. The solar dryer is another boxed in structure painted black on one side ideally with a flat lower area as well which heats up and sends hot air up through the drying trays and out a small vent at the top.





The whole place is beautifully designed with natural and recycled materials. And most of them indeed look like they could be recreated by almost anybody.

IMAP is dedicate to spreading indigenous plants by saving, trading and selling seeds. They changed the name of their storage house from 'Seed Bank' to 'Seed Home' because of war inducing international bank interventions in Guatemala's bloody history.

The institute offers PDC courses, natural building courses and special focus studies on Mayan calendar farming practices. Their volunteer program is also alive and vibrant and applicants can refer to their website for more details.

And yes, they do have a herb spiral. 

I said I'm writing from the hills of San Marcos remember? I'm now at the Fungi Academy and learning to cultivate mycelium ... and it is like a Neverland of mushroom enthusiast who crash landed here on a bus. Coming up next. 

Quixaya - Aqua Paradise in Guatemala

In the market centre of Santiago there lies a somewhat interesting little model of Lake Atitlan with signs marking all the villages and mountains. It was inspiring to see a gentleman carefully stepping over the volcanoes to pick up some rubbish that was thrown in there. 

We took a pickup truck about 40 mins around hills and below Volcano Atitlan to the aqua paradise valley of Quixaya. A quick look through my pictures tells me they are terrible! There is hardly a way to accurately put what's going on here into any sort of decent 2D frame. So I'll try to describe it as best I can. 

The history of this river running through a valley goes some like this. 6 decades ago it was owned and operated by a coffee and sugar cane plantation boss that didn't like paying his workers fairly. The disgruntled workers joined together and entered a legal battle for their wages which ended with the land being passed into their hands. Now, with power over their own land, the families kept on producing coffee and sugar cane. About 7 years ago in 2010 when the sons and daughters of the older generation of owners came to maturity, they wanted to figure out a way of how best to work with the vast amount of water flowing through their land. They build multi connecting networks of terraced ponds and filled them with water cress and lined the sides all kinds of other water loving plants. I had to check my facts again and made sure that indeed they have only taken 7 years to transform the valley into such an edible utopia. It looks like a paradise. 

The terrance systems have allowed so much water to sink into the land that the valley floor is soaked to the point of being able to bounce on the water logged grass plots. 

There are 3 very clear microclimates. The bottom starts as described earlier, it's a 2km long aqua park. A little ways up the valley walls comes the humid park where a lot of grains are grown followed higher up by the highland dry area which is their agroforestry area stocked with coffee, fruit and wood trees. 

Quixaya means 'heart of the water' and I am well aware that the pictures leave a lot to the imagination so just think of yourself walking along 2km of water cress pools or watch this video which has no sound but great shots of the valley.

Along the road to Quixaya we pass rolling hills filled with coffee plants baking in the sun. They say its some of the massive 'Folgers' plantations and they look sickly. Good coffee grows best in the shade! The land owners now know this and many other sustainable and productive polyculture growing methods.

In the humid microsystem there is layers upon layers of growing surrounded by low, medium and cover cropping trees. Here we have squash growing on trellis giving ground cover for coffee surrounded by banana and natural walls along the pathways. It all looks majorly productive and diverse 

Below you can see some tilapia fish. They function well in 30cm pools as they like warmer temperatures and some water hiasan or other pond plants are a must for shelter and oxygen exchange. The fish are fed with local feed and a protein supplement and they reach eatable size at about 8 months old. 

A year ago they had over 20,000 fish in production which drew the interest of the endangered river otter. The otters decimated almost the entire population in a week. All that is left is one area with spawning pools - they saved the seed! They plan to raise money to build fenced in ponds. The fencing needs to be dug and cemented into the ground and surrounded by barbed wire to keep the wily otters out. That doesn't seem right for such an idilic place. Perhaps they could find a way to use the otter. It is an endangered species, surely people would be interested in observing the otter in it's natural habitat. Maybe a better balance of fish is needed. 

To the left are tiny tilapia which need to be separated from others when they first hatch otherwise they will be eaten. On the right we have a water snail farm. Apparently they make for a great great stew. Below you can see their eggs. One idea is to dry out the egg shells of the snails and

                                                      use it for a calcium supplement in 

                                                      the chicken coup. 

There is surprisingly little written about Quixaya in English. They have had some volunteers in the past and hope to expand that program in the future. 

Such a wondrous place must have it's flaws right? Below you can see the waterfall of trash flowing from the church situated up on the ridge of one side of the valley. 

Animals and Earthworks

Have you ever seen a guy so happy to play with his own poop? Here is Max and he's showing us his duel chamber compost toilet which happens to have one of the best views in the valley (sorry, view not shown). One of the first buildings installed on this property was this throne for more than one reason. Humanure is a concept which one should not snub their nose at. If more people started reusing their own waste instead of contaminating fresh water we would be on our way to solving many ecological problems in the first world and many deadly sanitation problems in less developed countries.

In Max's case he uses a super simple concept. His outhouse has duel 2 meter deep chambers with doors on the front. Bowl movements are flushed with a cup full of fine saw dust and once one is full he closes it up for about 6 months to let the decomposition do it's thing. After that, he shovels the mostly broken down pile of waste out the door and lets it compost in the open air for another 6 months. All that is left is simply perfectly rich soil.

None of the people I met using this system put the compost on any crops they sell to the public because of obvious fact that most people wouldn't be comfortable eating such a product. But all of them to a man say they use it on their personal gardens. Check out some other idea for composting toilets.

Mapping and knowing the contour lines of the land is one of the first steps in any design. Knowing how water flows through an area is essential knowledge. The idea is to basically slow the flow of water over the land and allow it to sink in and nourish the soil. You can do this by making ponds, digging swales along contour lines (essential permaculture knowledge), diverting water and using it to your advantage. Slow it, spread it, sink it.

Max gave us a demonstration on how to find the contour lines on land using simple instruments you can purchase cheaply or assemble yourself. A-frames are good for smaller measurements while a long clear 1 inch wide tube filled with water is good for longer lines. Find your level points and mark them off with stakes.

 
Goat is good! One of the biggest profit makers on a small farm are goats. Their milk is highly nutritious and great for cheeses. An experienced milker can do the job in less than 3 minutes. Most healthy goats give 2-4 litres of milk a day. The nipples first need to be cleaned followed by the utters and butt-hole. You don't want any hair or other nastiness dropping in the bucket. Next, massage the utters to get the milk flowing to the nipples. Pinch the upper nipple with the thumb and index finger and squeeze out the milk with the rest of the fingers. Or you can just look up a better explanation on how to milk a goat here.




Chickens are another wonderful addition to any property. Besides the obvious eggs and meat benefits, chickens are excellent at helping to make compost. They scratch, dig and peck around compost piles  and used up garden patches while fertilizing the soil at the same time.

The simplest and most humane way to kill a chicken is simply with a cone attached to a tree. The cone method holds the chicken still and steady while the nerves are still firing after decapatiation. Shad from Atitlan Organics is an inspirational teacher and has a great video on how to harvest a chicken. Almost 300k views.



Let's get into a little bit about how animals best function in an environment.

An active decay cycle, ADC, is a good sign there is a healthy ecosystem going on. When excrement and dead animals are breaking down fast on a forest floor the soil and bacterial life is going to benefit. The opposite of that would be if a racoon were to die in a Walmart parking lot and stink in the sun for  for weeks - that is not a healthy ecosystem.

Animals need space and space needs a relief from animals. If you don't give them a break from each other from time to time they will both get sick. Chickens, for example, can be a terrible stress on the land. They will first eat what they like, then they'll go down the food chain of whatever is available and are even able to change what is able to be grown in that area. If the chicken house smells bad and the land looks worn out, adding carbon to the floor and changing their outside roaming area is in order. Even their doorway paths need to be rotated. Move yards, move to fresh ecosystems or make fresh ecosystems for them.

Omnivores always follow herbivores. The bird follows the cow. The birds benefit is that it gets food in the form of bugs hanging around the cow as well as access to bugs on the grown that the cow clears. The cow, in return, gets pest control and security. The cow is tipped off when the bird senses danger.

Omnivores like chickens and pigs are active. They are ok with being dirty and their deep bedding is an active compost pile. It is constantly being turned and bombarded with nitrogen and moister and needs added carbon to keep healthy.

Herbivores like goats, cows and horses are clean and passive. Their deep bedding is dormant because it is not being turned. It's anaerobic and solid. There is no need to add water or leftovers.

This means you can put the herbivores bedding into an omnivores for further compost but not the other way around. When's the last time you saw a goat rolling around in a pig pen?

If you want to start taking care of animals don't be too intimidated by all the data you think you need to know. You will learn as you go of course but there are a few points that are pretty essential knowledge that you should get to know in this order.

 - growth rate and diet
 - age of maturity - when are they adults?
 - heat cycle - when can they get pregnant?
 - gestation - how long are they pregnant for?
 - number of young
 - weening age - when to separate and move babies?
 - space and furniture needed
 - harvest - when are they ready to eat or finish their life cycle?

Finally, understand the difference between 'breed' and 'management'. Breed sets the upper limit for production of quantity. Management set the upper limit of quality. Pick the breed that meets your need. If you want a lot of meat, don't buy a slow growing bird that lays a lot of eggs. Also, high brow breeds are often touted as such because they produce large quantities only under perfect conditions. They are also hard to manage if they come from factory perfect settings and are transferred to a more holistic natural way of living.

Again, breed is more important for quantity, management is more important for quality. Find a nice balance that does what you want it to do.

Coming up next. A trip to the permaculture paradise that is Quixaya.