[wittedhaddock]

My roommate moved out, and we couldn't fill the room in the coronavirus world, so we started a mushroom farm making a couple hundred pound of oysters per week and haven't looked back:

https://heartymushroom.com/

Stamets taught me that one cubic meter of soil has 7 miles of mycelium! I think we have a lot to learn from the digestive tract of nature :)

[Alex3917]

Make sure you keep a HEPA filter running so you don’t get mushroom lung from the spores. If you’re growing in the hundreds of pounds per week I wouldn’t even go into that room without full PPE.

[wittedhaddock]

Yeah thank you -- I have a squirrel box fan pulling 1800 CFM out of the room, but this is a legit risk for sure

[hanniabu]

Yeah definitely want negative pressure and to make sure the door and any vents are sealed.

[synaesthesisx]

I found it amusing that you offer a “mushroom column” rental where you grow oyster mushrooms for others, and they can track progress and eventually receive the fruits of their “labor”. Mushrooms as a Service?

Personally, I think they’re fairly easy to grow so I can’t imagine someone paying others to do so - however I wonder if this idea could work for other types of farming, especially if the user could interact with and adjust parameters for their “column” or plot, and eventually choose when to harvest it.

Think of it as a virtual community farm - where a user can manage a mini-farm and have control over various parameters for their plot: light, humidity, irrigation, etc. They could maybe even get a live stream of their crops, or receive time-lapse updates of progress weekly. Telefarming? Telehydroponics? I could brainstorm a couple other interesting directions to take this...

[Jedd]

For 100% metric people, that means 1 cubic metre of soil contains ~11 kilometres of mycelium.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Personally I prefer very-mixed units and contexts, so why not:

61023.7 cubic inches of soil contains 1.97984 nautical leagues of mycelium.

[Jedd]

For people outside the USA, the idea of mixed units, or even just the various interpretations of imperial/archaic, I suspect isn't as intrinsically droll as it perhaps is from within a culture that's still trying to work out whether to adopt a basic measurement system in use across 95% of the planet.

However, gripes aside, for fruity measurements you may wish to adopt (read: you may not be aware of, but if you aren't, I suspect you'd approve) the FFF [6] measurement system.

The above relationship would be expressed as 54 furlongs of mycelium per 1.2283533E-7 cubic furlongs. (I think)

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFF_system

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Ha! Nice.

Yes, I wasn’t aware of the FFF system.

I particularly like the fortnight as a unit of time!

I approve! :)

[aSplash0fDerp]

I thought that was funny. Too many fragile egos on HN with no sense of humor.

I`m still counting the inches in a light-year, so the nautical leagues perspective made me giggle a little.

[Jedd]

Humour. And we have plenty of it.

[aSplash0fDerp]

No doubt. I`ve come across a few worthwhile perspectives.

Though I observed someone yesterday for the 1st time here that could not form their own conclusion/opinion and was agitated by their incompetence. I agree that the humour is pretty thick sometimes.

[uuuuuu]

I try to find excuses to express density in an area in terms of miles per gallon, but it turns out to be surprisingly difficult.

[mimac]

This seems off by orders of magnitude.

From data (Mycorrhizal Functioning: An Integrative Plant-Fungal Process; Michael Allen) an estimate of 200cm per gram of soil is mentioned. This would translate to 2000m per kilogram and 2.000.000m = 2000km per tonne of soil. A cubic meter of soil should weight on average 2.6g/mL so it would come out even higher at 5200 km per cubic meter.

Just nitpicking :)

[wittedhaddock]

Yes! Please see my edit in a response (guess I took too long 'fore HN prevented me from editing op)

[eaenki]

That’s very cool. Where did you get the spores? Resources for the whole process?

[wittedhaddock]

Agreed! I spend a couple hours a week packing bags basically and have found it as a way to relax.

I read Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms by Stamets and subject myself to public shaming on /r/mushroomgrowers, got spawn from North Spore (though there are other several good ones I can recommend if you email me, would probably not recommend going straight to inoculate/spores as you need a more sterile env), bought a fog machine from a mini golf course, racks from home depot, using wood pellets (which come pasteurized as a side effect of pelletization, compared to pasteurizing yourself which is a huge PITA unless you can do it with lime in bulk imho), and a raspberry pi controller to monitor humidity to turn on/off fog machine

[ryanwaggoner]

Please share more about this! I’ve been thinking about trying this myself, and I’d love to hear more, about both the tech / ops side, and the economic side.

[acdanger]

I just ordered a couple of grow kits from you. Cheers!

[wittedhaddock]

No way! Nice! Keep me posted on them please :)

[wittedhaddock]

Edit: sorry, I mean 7 miles in one INCH^3 of soil!!

[kohtatsu]

Wait really?

That's 4 orders of magnitude difference.

7 miles in an inch cubed... That's insane.

[wittedhaddock]

Totally insane. Think about the bandwidth it might be able to support...