# 2020-07-31

## Why?

These seem to be the easiest for beginners to grow.  Given not too
harsh temperatures, they can eat away wood, grains, coffee, you name
it.  Even (oil) contamination they don't mind.  The pink kind is
pretty and supposedly tastes like meat/sea food, depending who you
ask.

## Strategy

There are a lot of techniques shared online when it comes to growing
mushrooms and I don't want to spend too much money on trying it out,
so I got myself a kit consisting of inoculated wood spawn and a
plastic pot to be filled with coffee grounds.  That leaves one problem
though, I'm a tea, not coffee drinker.  More troublingly, the
instructions ask for 1-2 liters of coffee grounds.  I researched a bit
and bought one kilogram of decaffeinated coffee (it's supposedly nicer
to plants), coffee filters, a special cup to let the water pass
through and a coffee grinder.

## Preparation

I regularly made some coffee, scraped out the warm coffee grounds into
a tupperware box and let it chill in the fridge after cooling down a
bit.  Once ready, I've put on gloves, mixed the coffee grounds with
the mushroom spawn in the pot and applied a bit of pressure to the
mix.  It turned out that a 500g bag of coffee is equivalent to a liter
of coffee grounds.  Perhaps it would have been smarter to get out and
ask a café for ten bags of fresh coffee grounds...

That process took me two days, now it's time to wait and occasionally
water the mixture until it's fully colonized.  Things left to do:

- Find something to put under the pot to collect the extraneous water
  and dirt.
- Figure out how to get room temperatures from 25-30C to the
  recommended 20-25C.  Ideally lower than that because fruiting
  requires 15-20C.

# 2020-09-14

## Update

I got impatient with the growth of the fluff in the pot and
transplanted it into a clear shoebox and locked it up.  Bad idea.  It
developed trichoderma and turned completely green.  I had to bury it
in the forest and am patiently waiting for rainy days to check up on
it.

This is not the end though.  I've cleaned the tub with fungicide, then
isoprop and set out to retry with more spawn and pasteurized coco
coir.  My next attempts will be with king oyster and pioppino.