Trying and failing to grow my own mushrooms

 When I first started researching fungi and looking into different species of mushrooms, the first species that interested me and gave me some inspiration for potential work was the Shaggy Mane Ink Cap. These mushrooms not only look quite interesting with their feathered-looking caps but also act in a really peculiar way; they naturally produce a black ink-like substance as they decay, and they decay pretty quickly. 

Naturally, when I learned of this fact, I was absolutely enamoured by the idea of making my mushroom-based project and drawing all of these mushroom sketches using entirely mushroom ink. After some research I found that Shaggy Mane ink is not an easy nor cheap thing to source, however shaggy mane spores to grow your own mushrooms are much easier to come by, even if it meant buying them from a dodgy website that seemingly hadn't been updated since 2015.

So I bought my spores from that dodgy website and a grow bag kit on Etsy and thought "how hard can it be?". Apparently very hard. 

Once everything arrived in the mail, yes my spores did actually show up against all the odds, I set up my little growing station in my bedroom, planted my spores in the grow bag, doing everything I could to keep it all clean and sterile, and waited for some evidence of mycelium growth. 

One of the first difficulties I encountered was that mycelium naturally kind of looks like a kind of mold, because it sort of is. But when you're trying to grow mycelium you really don't want mold to form, well you do but just the one specific kind of mold, so the whole growing environment has to be kept completely sterile in order to prevent contamination from the unwanted kinds of mold, as this will render your spores unable to grow. The difficulty comes from the fact that it's pretty hard to tell apart mycelium growth from mold contamination in the early stages of growth, so your spores may already be contaminated by the first week while you're waiting patiently for some mycelium to form. 

I waited for some signs of life for a couple of weeks, nothing yet, but also no signs of mold so that's all good. Then I went away to visit family in Greece for a week, leaving my poor little spores to fend for themselves and when I came back...

Disaster. A bag of mold sitting in your bedroom is never going to be the most pleasant thing to come home to but it was only made worse by the fact that my silly little dreams of drawing pictures of mushrooms using mushroom ink were now dashed. 

I did actually get some mycelium growth happening, if I hadn't been away when the mold started to become visible it's possible that I could have transplanted the mycelium to a new grow bag in an attempt to rescue it, but alas, it wasn't meant to be.

So that's my little story about how I did a science experiment in my bedroom and it failed. I half considered just lying and using normal ink throughout the project while just saying that it was Shaggy Mane ink but I think this is funnier.