A Quote: "Analysis of death is not for the sake of becoming fearful but to appreciate this precious lifetime." - Dalai Lama
The Law of Contamination
The beauty of gardening lies in the inevitability of… death. The changing seasons make me appreciate what I accomplished in this brief 3- to 6-month span, before the cold weather sets in again and I bury what’s left of my veggies, flowers, and plants in the ground to prepare for next spring.
If we discovered how to make our plants bear fruit indefinitely, I think we'd lose much of the appreciation that comes from nurturing a plant or vegetable from its very beginning. It's kinda like the question of immortality: what's the point of starting anything if you know you have forever to do it? I think our drive to self-excellence comes from the finitude of life itself.
Maybe the concept of the deadline is relevant here: As a student, when I was given two months to write a paper, I'd spend six weeks worrying about writing the paper, one week researching, another five days worrying, and then two days of actually writing. When we have unlimited time, I think we start filling it with unlimited meaninglessness.
The art of mushroom growing is about outpacing the inevitable. Unlike wild fungi, mushrooms grown indoors in bags have limited space to thrive. When contamination strikes, they can't escape it, and we often lack the tools to contain it. It's not a question of if, but when. All we can do is refine our transfer techniques and handling, hoping to prevent it a little more in the future.
I think my satisfaction with growing mushrooms comes partly from that risk of failure. Similarly, gardeners find deep satisfaction in their success precisely because there are real consequences to getting things wrong—using the wrong soil, planting seeds incorrectly, or watering too little or too much. These potential failures make our successes more meaningful.
The Law of Contamination states that in due time, everything will contaminate and all will be lost, making mushroom cultivation essentially the art of delaying the inevitable.
I feel like the word care is understated in relation to the cultivator of anything. You need to know what you're growing organisms need, what makes them especially vibrant, and what puts them at risk. Our livelihood depends on caring.
I don't think the word cultivation would've been relevant to growing foods or raising animals if there was a perfected system where you just press a button and it was done for you. We are cultivating by bringing in all that's good for our organism, and attempting to protect them from all that's not good for it. And we cultivate by expanding on our knowledge to do even better for the things that we grow.
The seasons come and go. While indoor mushroom cultivation isn't bound by seasons, it still faces inevitable outcomes. This inevitability lets us be truly grateful our successes—and when things fail, we feel the loss, as if we've lost a piece of ourselves. Because our organism’s success is the success of our own techniques, and our drive to do the best for them and ourselves.
This was a very digressive way to say that the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. The art of indoor mushroom cultivation is highly technologized to prevent contamination in our grain spawn and fruiting blocks, but it’s a technology that always has an organic element to it: Ourselves, the air that we breathe, and the small organisms that live in the nutrients we provide to all the mushrooms we grow.
Don’t sit on organic substances as if they’ll never contaminate, just because you used a pressure cooker and a flow hood. You’ll flirt with the reality that the earth will always take back its own, in the form of bacterial infections or trichoderma or mold.
And that’s alright, because our techniques allow us to succeed 99% of the time. And the knowledge that there’s something to learn from that 1%, those brief reminders that we are working with the living, the breathing, and the vulnerable.
Grow more,
Dom
PS - Don’t ask about our grain spawn contamination rates though! :(
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