Chili Sauce, Seed Saving and Super Simple Mushroom Cloning

If you can leave the world a little more beautiful than when you found it you've left a life well lived. 

Here is a painting by my lovely wife Raquell. It faces huge bay windows which look out over Lake Atitlan (yes, we are still here ... it's lovely). As you can see, some volunteers exchange a little less energy than others. 

We are going to look at a sweet mango and habanero spicy chili sauce but first, if you missed my previous post on mushroom cultivation (and a kind of crappy chili sauce), here again is the easiest, fastest and very effective way to grow mycelium from mushrooms you find or buy at the store.

 - Simply soak some egg cartons or cardboard in a bowl of 9:1 water and hydrogen peroxide. 

 - Cut off the mushroom stems and roots (that's the same as mycelium by the way)

 - Break small pieces onto the soaked material.

 - Seal it up tight in a bag. You don't want little fruit fly like bugs getting in there. 

 - Cut slits in the bag and seal it with sports tape or any micropores tape. Careful for flies!

 - Label and date the bag and leave it in a dark, humid, room temperature like place. 

Mycelium will quickly start to take over and you'll have a nice amount of fungi to inoculate a grow bag or garden. Since this isn't the most sterile way to clone mushrooms, it works best with strong, hardy strains like oysters.

 

 

Seed saving is something I should have gotten into long ago. What a fine way to collect and share the most wonderful of souvenirs (careful at borders). Above is an amazing selection of Latin American corn including one cob of a super specialized cotton candy coloured cob which was selectively bred for radical colours over the course of 20 years. I also saved seeds from some of the chilies used to make what we are going to talk about next.

Look at these beauties. On the left we have a tiny pepper whose name translates to 'bite of the dog' and I can tell you with certainty that it does indeed bite hard. From there we have an unknown pepper that was selling in bunches at the market of Santa Clara in Guatemala and it full flavoured and super spicy. I wonder how it rates on the Scoville Scale? After, there are the classic red and yellow habanero followed by the good ol' red and green jalapeño. 

We are going to make a bright coloured mango and habanero spicy sauce today. I used ripe mango, yellow habanero, carrot, onion, garlic, lime, salt, black pepper and vinegar. 

I lightly sautéed the habanero peppers, onions and garlic with a little oil on a pan to bring out the flavours. You can take some seeds and cores out of the habaneros if you're not into 'knock your socks off spicy'. At the same time I started simmering the mango and carrots in some vinegar with the the lime, salt and black pepper included as well.

Before anything in the pan starts to brown, dump it all together in the pot with the vinegar and carrots and let it all simmer together on low for about 15 mins. This does two things. First, it allows all the flavours to blend together and second, it pasteurizes the ingredients to allow for a longer shelf life. 

Let the whole thing cool down a bit before throwing it all in the blender. Liquify to your liking and add more salt to taste. Be careful to keep a lid on the blender as hot sauce splashing up in your face is gonna be a bad time. Also, if you want to wear gloves while handling the chili peppers it might be a good idea as well. My fingers were burning for a good 24 hours. 

This sauce was a total hit on just about anything and have a look at that colour! I preserved a variety of chilies in a jar of vinegar with a bay leaf and some salt and black pepper. Let's see how the flavours grow with age. If you really want to properly pasteurize your sauce for preservation you can seal the glass bottles and boil them in water for 20 mins. That should give you a shelf life of around a year if done properly. 

Finally, a farewell selfie pic with some of the good folks hanging around Fungi Academy. We're saying goodbye to Tilo who inspired me to save seeds. Many thanks good man! 

Fungi Academy - Mushrooms in the Garden

While mother and daughter enjoy a morning heart to heart over coffee, I snapped a sneaky photo and then got to work on incorporating mushrooms into the garden. 

Here we have some buckets that are past fruitation and full of mycelium from the lab. One of the best things you can do with this wonderful waste material is feed worms. Building a worm farm with red wigglers which feast on mycelium and produce super nutrient rich worm castings is the ideal way to turn a byproduct of a mushroom farm into a valuable resource. We don't have a worm farm here at Fungi Academy yet but I'll make the case for building one.

For now, we have just taken the mycelium out of the buckets and buried them into a newly dug garden bed which happens to have soil in need of amending. We planted some beans on top and should end up with nitrogen rich soil ready for next season.

Keep in mind that some mushroom varieties like White, Pink and Blue Oyster take away a lot of energy from plants but others are garden symbiotic like King Stropharia (also called Garden Giant) and Elm Oyster are wonderful garden companions which help enrich the soil and distribute nutrients.

Here is the bed we made with delicious Garden Giants and medicinal Turkey Tails.

The first thing needed is a shady spot with some soil that can retain a bit of moister. We dug down a few inches and lined the bottom of the bed with cardboard. After, we wet it throughly and added a thin layer of soil. Then we took our Garden Giant mycelium which was growing on wood chips and layered it on top of the cardboard. Check previous posts for info on how to grow on different mediums. We mixed in some corn waste which had been pasteurized in lime water (simply soaked a bag of corn waste in a barrel of water that had limestone rocks in the bottom)

 


Continue layering soil, mycelium inoculated wood chips, corn waste and repeat to make a lasangia like bed. The mycelium are going to search out each other and try to join together by consuming whatever is in-between. When they have established a stable network of mycelium they will be ready to fruit - that means mushrooms will be popping up.

Once we built up our Garden Giant on wood chips with corn waste and soil bed we decided to experiment with surrounding the area with Turkey Tail inoculated logs. Again, if you're curious about plugging logs with mycelium then please check out a previous post.

Finally we marked the bed with a bamboo pole and added a bit of inspiration for the mushrooms.

Below you can see some other small terraced beds we made. There are Garden Giant inoculated wood chips mixed with corn waste under the stacked rock walls. We're hoping they start growing out and around the rocks as they are tend to spread and pop up away from where they were first established. This idea came from a friend who said they made trenches with Garden Giants under the pathways in their gardens. 

All of this fungi work has totally inspired me to learn more about how mushrooms can be designed into gardens. I strongly feel mushrooms are a fascinating system that not many people are confident inputting into their set ups. After living and studying here I cannot wait to go forth and help spread spores.

Coming soon - I'm preserving chilies and making much better hot sauces than my previous 'throw everything together whatever' recipe.

Fungi Academy - Mushrooms in the Lab

The food here is top notch. Fresh made falafel, hummus and rice for lunch. All the meals are cooked by whomever is in the kitchen at any given meal time like hour and it all seems to work out deliciously. Now lets get back to mushrooms. 

Here is the lab. In the cabinets above you can see all sorts of interesting things growing and being stored in a variety of ways. The newest addition is the wall painting by Raquell Yang.

Let's now try to go over how to cultivate mycelium and mushrooms in a rudimentary laboratory. You can fairly easily clone, expand colonies, grow and spread mushrooms by taking spore samples or cuttings from mushrooms you find or buy. You can also buy grow kits and order spores online that's not as fun now is it?

You can take tissue or spore samples from most mushrooms you come across and give them a chance to feed, grow and expand on a variety of growing mediums like wheat, straw, coffee grounds, hardwood logs and more. For now, let's go over how to grow and expand your sample in a Petri dish filled with a nutritious growing medium shown below. The best food source for your mushrooms varies from species to species with some eating just about anything and others being much more picky. We are going to start off with Oyster Mushrooms which are super easy to grow, are found all over the world, are delicious themselves and they consume just about every growing medium imaginable. 

 

To take a spore sample cut off the top and put the cap on a piece of paper for an hour. This method however has a high risk of contamination. For tissue samples just cut the mushroom open around the root and take a clean flesh sample from inside. This also has a risk of contamination which takes us to the next lesson - mindful practice of sterilization.

Allowing the fungi to consume food and grow uninterrupted can sometimes be tricky. Any kind of nutrition is constantly being fought over with other organisms. In this case, any microscopic spores or bits of bacteria which are constantly floating in the air all around us can contaminate your desired fungi's source of nutrition thus creating a battle for food. Ideally you want to give your favoured side the best conditions for winning and not allowing any others a chance by handling all transfers in a sterile environment. When contamination occurs there are some cases where your fungi is a strong and hardy enough strain to win but most of the time it is not and a mouldy bacteria takes over and needs to be disposed. There is a chance to cut out a healthy, uncontaminated bit and transfer it to a new growing medium but risk of contamination is high. Below you can see the white healthy mycelium fighting with black mould. 

 

You can fairly easily create a contained lab box out of a large sealable plastic tub and some gloves. A spray bottle of diluted alcohol and hydrogen peroxide are your friends. Everything inside and out of the box is sterilized before handling. Mindful care must be taken to keep everything inside the clean zone. In the lab here we are fortunate enough to have home made hepa filter clean air blowing units. Still though, there is only a small area of sterilized space within which to work. Anything leaving that area must be cleaned again. 

 

Above we're scraping spore samples onto a Petri dish. The same would be done with a tissue cutting. When the mycelium grows uninterrupted on the dish you can take out pieces to store for future  use. Remember, mycelium always like to keep running so its best to transfer it to larger growing mediums when its still moving rather than when it's consumed all the food available and starts to slow down it's expansion. 

After the mycelium starts showing healthy signs of uncontaminated growth you can then consider how you want to expand the colony. Remember to always think about what other things your fungi might be competing with so learning how to pasteurize, sterilize and prepare uncontaminated growing mediums is a must. Here we take grains and soak them in water for 24 hours then cook them half way through. After, we put them in jars and steam them in a pressure cooker for 2 hours. The condensed steam produces a temperature above boiling point which kills just about everything.

After a sterile growing medium is ready you can inoculate it by taking a cutting from your petri dish sample. Again, be aware and keep sterile. Here we are injecting the grain bottle with hydrogen peroxide before we put our sample in there. 

Below you can see a variety of different species growing mostly on grains which work well for the next stage which involves spreading the inoculated grains over another growing medium from which the mushrooms will be able to fruit.

Here are the inoculated grains being spread over some pasteurized horse poop in a little grow box with holes cut in and stuffed with cotton for air exchange with less risk of other spores or flies getting inside. The grains break up nicely and spread evenly allowing for a nice little poop and mycelium lasagna. 

After that simply store in a cool damp place and wait for mushrooms to pop out. 

Ok, after going over all that lab stuff I realize it all might be a bit intimidating to try to start this on your own. So lets go over some super easy ways to grow and expand mushroom colonies. 

Take some old egg cartons or cardboard, soak them in water and hydrogen peroxide at about a 9-1 ratio. Break up some of the lower parts of the stem and roots of a mushroom and put them on the sterilized paper product, pop them in a sealed bag, store in a temperate area, wait for mycelium to start expanding, open the bag, break apart the pieces into a garden with soil and wood chips, water every day for 2 weeks and then let nature take its course. Depending on the variety you could have mushrooms fruiting in 2-4 months. Remember to look at which varieties share nutrients and energy with garden plants and which ones do better on their own. Here we are propagating King Strofaria otherwise know as Garden Giant which is a wonderful companion to most plants and trees. 

Here we are inoculating fresh cut hardwood logs with little wooden dowels and sawdust we grew mycelium on in the lab. 

Drill holes in the wood, stuff it with mycelium, seal with bees wax, store them in a damp place or put them in a shaded garden area and cover with soil. All of these techniques should be started in the early spring with lots of rain and moisture, followed by an incubation and colonization period over summer and fruiting period in fall when the weather cools. 

Grow bags are another great option for fast and easy to pick mushroom growing. Fill a plastic back or bucket with the desired growing medium, add your mycelium in layers, seal the bag or buck, cut or drill some holes in the bag and cover them with microporous tape, store in a temperate place. Mushrooms for dinner in a few weeks if all goes well. 

 

There are a ton of websites and books that have all sorts of different growing ideas and tips as well as neat designs the incorporate mushrooms into gardens provide a number of enhancements with fresh mushrooms being an awesome bonus. 

I can recommend mycotopia.net which is a online community ready to answer all your questions.

Here is shroomery.org for mental medicinal mushroom tips. 

For classification, mushroomobserver.com is great.

Checking out one of these books is also an awesome way to get your head wrapped around growing mushrooms. I especially recommend 'Organic Mushroom Farming and Mycoremediation' for any newbie like myself and 'Mycelium Running' if you want your mind blown by the incredible power of mushrooms. 

Annnnnnnd one more pic. Me practicing mindful sterilization in the lab while topless teacher Tan keeps a kinda close watch.