Non Green Gardening 2012
2012-10-02 15:07:22 by Monique Alvarez
NON (GREEN) GARDENING or (edible) mushrooms
'I am… a mushroom on whom the dew of heaven drops now and then 'John Ford, The Broken Heart (1633). And who said: 'Life is too short to stuff a mushroom'???
“Non-Green Gardening” is the selected project out of the Time's Up Open Call for Gardener and Machinist in Residence, applied by Natalia Borissova. The project is part of the pan-European project Resilients and >Augmented Urban Gardens.
Non Green Gardening is the series of living-lab experiments with mushroom cultivation through research, curiosity and practical experience, involving some technological elements and based on bio-remediation /conversion of locally available raw organic by-products from households, gardens, farms, forests and agriculture into the brain/soul/soil-consciousness sustenance.
Throughout a time-period of six month, Natalia Borissove will be on-site at the harbourside laboratories for at least three times to follow the fungal kingdom's eternal process of turning death into life, toxins into food and unstable into sustainable. Her current interests within her presence at Time's Up are lined out as followed:
Teaming up mushrooms (mycelium) with plants (roots) into the Myco-eco-system, where plants provide oxygen to the mushrooms and mushrooms make carbon dioxide for the plants in return. They are also plant-protective (some species actively kill virus's, nematodes, insects, etc). Which kind of greens to plant in relation to which mushrooms, where, how, types of substrates, etc. - to find out, observe during the project in co-relation.
- Starting the Myco-bed culture.
- Starting the Myco-log culture.
- Testing some unconventional conditions and (organic) fertilizers for better fruiting/growing (giant).
- Making a mini Myco-eco-system by grow mushrooms mixed with some plants in the aquarium-like container for the better observation/documentation and experimentation with light, humidity, temperature in connection to environmental sensors for mushroom-data cultivation and harvesting.
- Some sterile experiments (more lab-related) such as growing of the mycelium on Agar in Petri Dishes spore-/less from newly cultivated and/or distinctive edible wild mushrooms.
- Microscopic observations and documentation of the mycelium could be a very spectacular natural performance.
- Testing mushroom-potential as a remediative tool.
See images of the progress and results
Follow the process on Natalia Borrisova's page