Re: [DIYbio] Dynamic Sculpture Fungi

Have you seen the fungi sculptures and furniture by Philip Ross?  He mostly works with Reishi mushroom.  As i understand it is slower and more difficult to grow than oysters but more woody and "permanent".  Eric Klarenbeek's oyster mushroom chair is also cool.

Check out "Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms" by Paul Stamets, kind of mushroom growers bible.  There was a copy at my city library that I found fascinating.  Haven't grown any mushrooms yet though, my fungi cultivation has been limited to yeast (beer!)

Dakota...any chance I could take you up on that offer to share petri culture of oysters?   :)

Mike

On Sunday, February 22, 2015 at 9:51:16 PM UTC-5, Dakota wrote:

I'd recommend oyster mushrooms, which is what I thought ecovative used initially.  It's an extremely aggressive grower and will out-compete most everything else.  Steam sterilization with an autoclave or large pressure cooker works great for spawn bags, but if you want to do really large scale stuff, I'd recommend straw pasteurization with a 50 gallon drum.  Oysters are also great because they aren't picky when it comes to substrate usually, they'll grow on wet cardboard, newspaper, coffee grounds...you'd have a tough time getting a shitake to spawn on that.

I've been reading up on straw pasteurization with hydrated lime but have yet to find the low magnesium kind which many people swear is important.  Iv'e tried wood ash (sort of half-assed) with poor results.  Trichoderma or whatever else was on the straw took over every single bag, except the bags with oyster mushroom spawn in them.   The oyster spawn crushed them.  

If you want to be able to sculpt things, I'd think about a mixture of media, with straw, paper, sawdust, etc that you can form into bricks or shapes that will hold once it's colonized.  

As for a brick once it's colonized, I know people that use a 0.1 % hydrogen peroxide solution in water for misting.  The thought is, it'll kill any bacteria or young fungal cultures on the outside of the spawn brick, but won't do enough damage to the mycelia that's already taken it over.

Timing is important if you want to keep it going, because once a fully colonized brick is exposed to oxygen and moisture it will probably pin and grow mushrooms, which I suppose could give the sculpture a really cool look as different pieces are pinning at different times.

You can control the pinning with CO2, moisture, light, and temperature.  I would completely forget about using boatloads of antibiotics or some transgenic mycelia, nature has already given most fungi pretty good defense mechanisms against bacteria.

 shroomery.org is THE go to place for all things fungi.  There are plenty of great threads there on edible mushrooms, not just the psilocibes.  

I have cultures of white oyster, elm oyster, pink oyster, golden oyster, blue oyster, and king oyster you're welcome to a petri dish of

On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 2:15 PM, Biosynthetique <ejlpe...@gmail.com> wrote:

Im looking to build a dynamic living sculpture that can be shaped over time - where pieces can be added and removed. I'd like to use fungal mycelium for this and propose inoculating a tower of substrate (autoclaved ag-waste) that has chunks of mycelium mixed in. When the substrate is fully colonised, new agwaste chunks can be "bolted on" using a wire insert that connects the tower with the new piece.

The biggest issues I have foreseen are:

1) What fungal species to use? Ive looked into Ecovative Design's technique which is largely a trade secret. Their patents suggest the use of white-rot polyphores like Pycnoporus cinnabarinus. Any suggestions on different species to trial? Im going to try a bunch of different mycelium on a small scale first.

2) How to maintain mycelium dominance over bacterial infection/colonisation? Short of treating the entire substrate with antibiotics to prevent bacterial colonisation of raw substrate I dont see an easy way around this - sterile environment could of course work, but this would be difficult in the hackspace. There is the secondary issue of preventing bacterial infection once the mycelium has colonised the substrate. This I feel could be solved with transgenic mycelium that express various antibiotics, but I have no experience working on such complex fungi, only yeast. Any pointers?

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