10/30/13: MUSHROOM TEDDY BEARS :)

Last Wednesday, I continued with the next step in the process of making my very first mushroom test-product at Evocative. In the previous post, I shared my experience in putting together a bag of growing medium (compost) for the mushrooms to grow on. After these bags show signs of inoculation (also as stated in the prior post), one would open them up and throughly mix them together--and this is exactly what I did. 

After my mentor and I decided that the two bags we had left to inoculate were sufficiently ready, she informed me that my next procedure would be to pour the compost, now covered with newly-grown fungi, onto a flat surface and to completely mix it so that it would give off a homogenous appearance rather than only the surface portion of the bag containing the white mycelia. (this is shown in the picture to the left)

After accomplishing this task, I got to choose the type of mold to pack this compost in--I went with the teddy-bear shaped mold. As mentioned many times before, the mycelia (white things that appear during inoculation) acts as a glue for the compost materials. Thus, when the mycelia-infused medium is tightly inserted into a plastic mold, over a time period of three to five days the agricultural waste transforms into a durable material. Depending on the type of strain of mycelium used in the prior step (the step that I explained in my previous post), Ecovative is able to make a variety of different kinds of the final product. For example, one type of strain would produce a water absorbent product while another would produce a dielectric final packaging product. In this way, the company is able to meet the requests of many different types of companies and each of their products (ie: computers, wines, etc).

Before

After 3~5 days