The Mycological Chapter

For the last year and a half I have been living in the Pacific Northwest studying an array of sciences with an end all focus on mycology. After years of not staying in one place longer than a week or two, I have found myself a sweet little home in Olympia, Washington; with a dog (Rumi), a cat (Gouda), periwinkle trim, and a wood burning stove (Lucy). I moved to the temperate rain forest to dive into the study of mushrooms and the wonders that lie in the science that they participate in. This spring quarter at Evergreen State College I am doing a mycology contract, an independent study based learning, to focus fully on mycological based science and community. A portion of this contract has been dedicated to keeping record of Scientific journal articles that are particularly inspiring, mushroom media and technology, community based mycology events and documentation of my own forays in the surrounding areas in search of fruit-bodies (mushrooms).

The opening of this chapter is dedicated to my home land, the Napa Valley in California. Upon searching different data based for scientific journals primarily pertaining to medicinal mushrooms and myco-remediation (using mycelium to clean up toxic waste) I stumbled upon a journal about "Recycling of Vineyard and Winery Wastes as Nutritive Composts for Edible Mushroom Cultivation" written by Marian Petrea and Alexandru Teodorescua from the University of Pitesti, Faculty of Sciences, Romania. Having grown up in a Valley of copious wine production, squashing grapes with my feet in a barrel as a little girl and touching the "agricultural waste" every year after harvest, this article hits close to home.

Here's a taste taken directly from the article:
"Abstract. Every year, in Romania huge amounts of wine and vine wastes cause serious environmental damages in vineyards as well as nearby winery factories, for instance, by their burning on the soil surface or their incorporation inside soil matrix. The optimal and efficient way to solve these problems is to recycle these biomass wastes as main ingredients in nutritive composts preparation that could be used for edible mushrooms cultivation. In this respect, the main aim of this work was to establish the best biotechnology of winery and vine wastes recycling by using them as appropriate growth substrata for edible and medicinal mushrooms. According to this purpose, two mushroom species of Basidiomycetes, namely Lentinula edodes as well as Pleurotus ostreatus were used as pure mushroom cultures in experiments. The experiments of inoculum preparation were set up under the following conditions: constant temperature, 23°C; agitation speed, 90-120 rev min -1; pH level, 5.0–6.0. All mycelia mushroom cultures were incubated for 120–168 h. In the next stage of experiments, the culture composts for mushroom growing were prepared from the lignocellulose wastes as vine cuttings and marc of grapes in order to be used as substrata in mycelia development and fruit body formation. The tested culture variants were monitored continuously to keep constant the temperature during the incubation as well as air humidity, air pressure and a balanced ratio of the molecular oxygen and carbon dioxide. In every mushroom culture cycle all the physical and chemical parameters that could influence the mycelia growing as well as fruit body formation of L. edodes and P. ostreatus were compared to the same fungal cultures that were grown on poplar logs used as control samples."