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My brain hurts.

There's little wonder that some people on my grow your own mushrooms course are freaking out and backing out, saying that making a fruiting chamber is farrrr too complicated.

Oh boy, I get it. Fans and humidifiers and timers are getting a little bit techy, and if you don't normally fiddle with power and gauges and numbers, you can very quickly get out of your depth and feel super overwhelmed.

But I'm a big believer that you can do anything with some careful attention.

I mean, I have the hubs as back up. He knows his way around practial things like that. But there's no real reason why I can't - I just have to think harder and more carefully. I mean, I don't even really NEED to do all this techy stuff, but it'll help in the long run with higher yields I think.

One step at a time, right?

So here's where I'm at! As the mycellium spreads through the buckets I made a fortnight ago (shouldn't be long before they start to pin, pushing their fruiting bodies through the tape) I got busy ordering what I needed to make a mushroom fruiting chamber.

The mycellium a week ago - it's twice as white now but I'm still not sure it's white enough.

Once the martha or small greenhouse was set up, I connected a 6L humidifier to a hydrometer. This was fairly simple - setting the hydrometer was a bit harder. But all I had to do was carefully listen to the instruction and do what they said and - voila! The mushroom chamber became like a cloud, which is what I wanted it to do.

Now I'm wondering at what point to put the mushrooms in the chamber - I'm not sure if the buckets are fully mycelliated yet or whether I should leave them a bit longer. I know that tan oysters should do okay in this temperature so I don't need to worry about that.

The humidity needs to be between 80 and 95 percent.There's an alarm that goes off if it's lower, indicating something is going wrong. I'm happy with how neat everything is attached to the stool.

Air flow and exchange, however - eek. I've managed to order what I need from Amazon (12V fans, a temperature data logger, a few other things) - no, I don't normally do Amazon but my job gave me a leaving voucher, so I'm spending that on mushroom supplies. It'll take a few weeks to get here I think so I'm going to go ahead and start the grow without the fans and hope that the air exchange is okay with a vent cut at the top and the bottom of the chamber clipped open.

I still have to work out the air exchange properly.

I'm pretty happy with how neat it looks. There really isn't mushroom - boom - in my yoga room now, what with the apocathery cabinet and the mushroom chamber - but there's still enough room to flow through a vinyasa and do some of my morning pranyam. I'm not sure that's sustainable as I worry what will happen when they spore and if that's a healthy environment to breath in. Still, I can do yoga anywhere in the house, and resign myself to this room as my hobby room I suppose. Ideally, I'd like an outside set up in a container, but need to wrap my head around it at all first. Slow and steady, right?