I got inspired by this build where they heat a green house with a compost pile. If you could make it more powerful with a heat-pump with a compressor to extract heat from the compost pile.
The air-pump is to push in air into the compost .
The ammonia is a refrigerant.
more interesting heat pump videos
After some late night googling I found this cool video on YouTube.
http://coldmushrooms.weebly.com/inoculating-pellets.html#/
on how to inoculate wooden pelleted sawdust with mushrooms and let them grow at low temperatures.
The rational why this is working is because the pellets already have been heated and dried and if you grow the mushroom at low temperatures 15 – 21 °C (60 – 70 °F) it will benefit the growth of mushroom instead of other organisms.
So I waited a week to see if I could grow phellinus igniarius in an agar agar medium.
Non Bleach version
There seem to be something white growing in the agar agar. But just a little.
Bleach version
Well nothing happened to this one. It seems to been preserved in the bleach.
Conclusion
Well they didn’t grow as much I hoped for in my agar agar media.
Some thoughts on what I would do different if I were to try this again.
I think the mushrooms I used was too dry. It was very hot the day I collected them. So I would probably soak them in water first.
Maybe I should have used smaller pieces of mushroom and buried them deeper into the agar agar. I would also cut the agar agar with a sterilized scalpel to be able to penetrate it. The agar agar is like rubber when it hardens.
I also didn’t have any nutrients added to the agar agar. I read somewhere they use boiled potato peels, so I’m interested to boil potato peels and use the water for the agar agar.
I started a new experiment last weekend.
Since the mushroom didn’t grow in straw I thought I try to grow it in agar agar.
Agar Agar grow media recipe
15 ml (3 teaspoons) of agar agar powder
300 ml hot tap water
10 ml (2 teaspoons ) of sugar
I poured everything in a plastic container and stirred ferociously with a fork.
I then microwaved it for 4 minutes and 30 seconds without paying enough attention. It boiled over and it lost a lot of fluid but I still used the agar agar.
I poured half of the agar agar into another plastic container that I had some household bleach (Sodium hypochlorite) and hand sanitizer (Alcohol gel) in.
I wanted to make two tests to see if the mycelium would grow better in a bleach solution were the it didn’t have to compete so much with other organisms.
I collected a small polypore from the forest.
The polypore is most likely a Phellinus igniarius that likes to grow on dead birches. This samples was much smaller than the one in experiment 1.0 .
I cut the polypore with an awl (pointy screwdriver). I didn’t bother to disinfect the awl.
I tried to put the mushroom pieces into the agar agar medium, but the medium had hardened and was really hard to penetrate.
I pricked some holes into the non-bleach agar agar medium with the awl and pushed a piece of the mushroom into the agar.
I later watched some videos where people cloned mushrooms. They used a sterilized scalpel to cut a hole in the agar and used much smaller pieces mushroom.
I put a piece of the mushroom in the bleach agar agar container. The agar agar medium is very dense and rubbery so it’s hard to penetrate.
I then put the containers in plastic bags that I tied a knot on.
And waited…
I waited another week to see if the mycelium would spread but instead it seem to have been taken over by some green mold.
Conclusion:
Phellinus igniarius doesn’t grow in wet straw.
I found a picture of the mushroom I used for experiment 1.0.
open source mushroom dome house 