Arizona why are you so prickly?

How to procrastinate homestead style

This week my ceramics teacher, watching me work with intense focus on my piece, asked me if I was a control freak. It made me think later on my bike ride about why I put so much energy into some things when I find them worthwhile. My conclusion is that (hopefully), I am not a control freak. I simply don't have an off button when it comes to keeping myself occupied with doing things that engage my mind and especially my creativity, and I want to do those things well if I can. Hence, procrastination usually revolves around some sort of project like ceramics at school, or at home it's always something homestead/getting ready for the Apocalypse style.

Here are the latest two projects:

1. Derek jokingly suggested that I knit a coozy for his new glass mug. Some scrap yarn, old buttons, and the length of Fire in The Sky (a really bad alien movie set in Snowflake AZ), and... A mug sweater? This could get out of control.

2. Next, I got inspired from one of my classmates, who got an oyster mushroom growing kit last month and now is eating one of my favorite mushrooms, fresh from his kitchen. So I did a little research. What I found out is that you can grow them at home in a bucket of coffee grounds, and all you need is a couple stems (actually called stipes) to start with.

Step one, get some oyster mushrooms. I bought some from the grocery store that were still all clumped together at the base with fuzzy white stuff (mycelium). Then I chopped off the stems and sliced them lengthwise into strips. At the same time, I boiled some squares of corrugated cardboard. That step is intended to sterilize them, but I don't know if it's needed or not. Then, you slap together some little mushroom sandwiches:

I put the sandwiches in a tupperware for 3 days because I wanted to keep the moisture in and be able to check up on the experiment. Today the stems had grown some new fuzz, which latched onto the cardboard sheets, essentially gluing them together.

This means the project is working! The mycelium is going to take over the cardboard and eat it. Yum. Oyster mushrooms like cellulose, as in trees, which is why they colonize dead tree trunks. Unfortunately I haven't seen them around Flagstaff and our wet season is the summer, hence home growing...

Next, put the cardboard sandwiches at the bottom of a bucket and start filling the bucket with your used coffee grounds. If you save up coffee grounds for a week or two, you can put those in the microwave for a few minutes to sterilize them. Otherwise, just dump your freshly roasted grounds in the bucket and they're sterilized from you making your coffee-- convenient. You could even throw in the filter if you use paper ones. Cover the bucket and keep it all moist and not freezing (oysters are forgiving and will tolerate a temp range from around 40-80 degrees if I remember right, but don't take my word).

And then wait... I don't know how full to fill the bucket. Maybe once you get impatient? The mycelium will spread through the grounds and colonize it as you keep filling the bucket every day. At some point it fruits and mushrooms appear. Maybe more on this later. Enough procrastinating for one morning...