8/10/19

Mushroom Team Blog

Today was a Saturday so we went to work a little later. We met with Jawara and decided since we were forcing him to work weekends we should also torture him with tests. The idea is that at the end of our trip here Jawara can lead tests for us and teach other people the basics of growing mushrooms.

There are a set of steps we have laid out for Jawara and we need to make sure he can do them all without asking many questions. Every test we have done so far he has asked “is this correct” after every step. I had a growing suspicious that he knew perfectly what to do and only asked for reassurance. So today I pretended to be mute and just watched. He successfully disinfected his hands. Packed two bags with two different substrates. He put good spawn in both bags, identifiable by its white color. After this he closed and mixed both bags. The only thing he forgot to do was to return the good spawn back to the fridge. This will eventually kill it so it is a worrying mistake but I’m sure it won’t happen again.

Today we made three spawn bags. We are almost out of spawn so in the upcoming days we will need to start creating new spawn. This process is much more sensitive than making grow bags so Marc and I will need to be extra careful. We are going to run experiments on different types of cereal grains because we had trouble finding the same types we used in the United States.