Experiment 1 & 2 results

After 21 days of growing, I decided to end the the experiment as I feared it will be too long and the mycelium will start to produce fruiting bodies or will somehow degrade.

Above, you can see how it looked like when I opened the tubs. Both are pretty well covered and overgrown with the mycelium. Being these my first experiments, I am quite happy how they turned out. It seems like there was no contamination or any issue while growing, which I am very pleased about.

Reed-like substrate (garden waste).

Yet, both of the substrates were not fully overgrown. I was aware of this before I decided to end the growing phase but I was unsure if letting it grow for longer is not going to cause any issues. Perhaps I could try to conduct experiments with these substrates again and let it grow for longer to find out whether more time will enable the mycelium to fully overgrow the substrate. However, it is questionable if is absolutely necessary to have it fully overgrown. Is it going to improve the physical properties of the material in any way? Will I benefit from this as a designer/producer? Further experiments need to be undertaken, unraveling answers to these questions.

Egg shells and coffee waste.

I took the material out of the tubs and pre-dried it in a crack-open oven at 80 degrees Celsius for a couple of hours just to dry the outer moisture and ensure no fruiting bodies will start to grow. Afterwards, I put both materials on a rack and air-dried them until completely dry.

The materials were not too fragile, yet I did take care when taking them out not to break them or impact them in any way. Both had a very nice forest-y and mushroom-y smell (quite fresh and irresistible!).

The surface is fascinating on its own as well. It was very soft to touch and felt a little bit like cotton, leaving fingerprints behind.

One thing I forgot to do, is to weight the wet material and compare it to when it felt dry, so next time I have to remember to do this as this will indicate if it is fully dry or not.

After around 4 days, they both felt dry, lost all the smell and became a little bit more rigid. I keep them in the open however, just so it remains dry.

The next step is to test some physical properties of these materials. I will mainly focus on sawing the materials and see how it looks like inside. After sawing, I will try to make a cubic form out of each and try sanding. Afterwards, I will test some drilling and lastly surface finishing (painting or dyeing). Nonetheless, all of these will be executed only once I have access to the workshop on campus.