"Ok. Who wants to go first?" Masjid asked the group.
Jenn steps up to the 'glove box', which is a home made, hermetically-sealed plexiglass box with two, four inch diameter holes in one side. She dons a pair of lunch lady style one-time-use plastic gloves and sticks her hands into the glove box, just as Masjid had demonstrated.
"Now pick up the bottle and remove the cap," Masjid instructs.
"Oh, no, the other bottle. Ok, yes that one."
There are numerous jars and bottles in the glove box. Each containing media for cultivating blue oyster mushrooms.
The following steps are difficult to describe (as I was not completely tracking what was going on) but in short, it involved spraying everything in the glove box with a healthy amount of 70% alcohol for disinfection, then adding 1 ml of a mushroom growing nutrient dispensed from a syringe with an unnecessarily long needle, and then transferring media from one jar to another.
"Don't touch rim to rim. It is very important to avoid contamination." Masjid constantly reminded as Jenn executed the mushroom media inoculation imperfectly.
(Jenn here: basically I had to dislodge a bunch of moldy, er, "inoculated," pieces of grain that had congealed together in repurposed soy sauce bottle, then shake them out, one by one, into the approximately one-centimeter-in-diameter neck of another repurposed glass bottle of un-inoculated grains. Everything was super slippery from the alcohol, plus I knew Tim was going to love how much I was struggling. Not only did I touch the rims together, but I dropped the whole damn thing and spilled inoculated (i.e., moldy) grains all over the box. Whoopsie.)
Next, it was my turn. Then, another guy from Georgia. Everyone got a chance to help with mushroom inoculation. Prior to helping with this important step in the production of mushrooms, we had a 2 hour lecture on the mushroom basics by Tanel, from Estonia here at the Fungi Academy. It is an intentional community in the hills above the town we are staying at (San Marcos) on Lake Atitlan. They started about 9 months ago with the mission of educating people on the power of mushrooms to save the world. They are currently working on a internet-funded campaign to purchase a school bus, which will serve as a mobile mushroom lab that they will drive around Central and South America spreading the word about mushrooms and their powers.
This was the most interesting place we have visited on our trip so far. Intentional communities are full of unique, interesting people. I hope to encounter more during our travels. If anyone knows of other intentional communities, let us know!
Taking a break at the academy de Hongos.
Eunice teaches us how to inoculate a log with mushrooms.
No comments:
Post a Comment