Canhelp’s Mushroom Project – March 2012
Canhelp’s first Community Infrastructure project is the Mushroom project, its purpose being to train about 20 poor mothers on how to grow their own mushrooms.
Mushrooms grow wildly in Nepal for only a short period of time. For the remainder of the year, families must buy their mushrooms at the market.
Ultimately, our hope is that participants in the project will be able to establish their own small business growing their own mushrooms and selling excess produce at the local markets.
Below is a summary of the program. In April, we plan to update this page with the final photo showing mushrooms growing from the straw.
The man standing in the photo is the Nepali expert on cultivating
mushrooms.
The first step in the cultivation of Mushrooms is to
gather clean, fresh, straight pieces of paddy straw and avoiding old straw. The
straw is then chopped into small pieces (about 7cm long) using either a local
hand-made chopper or knife. The lady sitting second from right in figure 2 is
using a chopper, and this is the easiest method for chopping straw.
The chopped straw is then soaked in water for 2-4 hours, or sometimes overnight, in a container or a small ditch specially made
for this purpose.
The soaked straw is drained and then placed into a drum. There is about 15cm of water at the base of the drum and a metallic plate
with numerous small holes above the water to enable steam to rise into the
straw.
A lid consisting of a heavyweight material is placed over the top of the drum and
held securely with a rubber tube. The lady pointing to the drum is Prabha
Pradhan. The temperature inside the drum rises to above 90 degrees celcius.
The straw is removed from the drum and placed into a large plastic bag and secured to prevent contamination. It remains in the bag overnight and allowed to cool.
The room temperature straw is then transferred into strong,
smaller bags. A series of holes is punched into the bag using a common hole
punch. In the photo above, you can see the hole punch next to the lecturers
right hand.
Straw is added to the smaller plastic bags and the mushroom spore is sprinkled onto the straw.
The straw is compressed after adding the spores, and then the process is repeated with more straw and spores added and compressed, and so on until the bag is full.
The bag is almost full and will weigh 10kg when finished.
Securely tying the bag.
The bags are then hung and covered to minimise any light. The bags will remain like this for about 3 weeks.
Participants in the Canhelp Mushroom training program.
