Svdharma Hatfield

If you can find clean clay, and if it fires well, there have been several ceramic houses built out of local clay and then wood fired from the inside. Requires a good, low firing clay with little thermal expansion, though.

I am considering building a monolithic dome and I though some people here may be interested. Basicly, it is a 3" thick concrete dome with rebar stablization, build on a huge inflatable form. Mine is going to use an OSB form, but the idea still stands. Monolithic domes are not the most eco friendly, mine will require about 100 yds of concrete and several thousand feet of rebar, however if all goes well it should still be standing in 1000 years. I am planning on earth-sheltering the whole thing, and they lend themselfs quite nicely to rocket stove heating. Mine is going to be built by first "framing" it out of rebar, welding all the joints, and then layering mesh around the rebar ferro-cement style. Then I will wire OSB boards around the inside and apply the concrete from the outside with a shovel and a trowel. Power will be via a wind mill on the roof (normally a terrible idea unless you want your house shaken to peices, but should eb OK with a cement dome) and waste water, if I ever even install drains, will be processed via mycofiltration or mulch pit. The roof will be a "living" roof, in that it will be covered with cholla, mormon tea, and sage brush, but I dont think it will be getting any irrigation or purposefull planting. The purpose of the building will be a place for a shop and storage, but the floor plan will be completely empty, so I am sure it will serve many purposes durring its life.

I was planning on doing an agar culture off a spore print for the oyster mushrooms but I found some "Monterey" brand ones at my local Albertsons so those are the ones I am going to try first. My culture technique is very simple. I want enough spawn to inoculate a couple straw bales, so I minced up a big cluster of stem buts really fine and threw them in with some wet cardboard. This morning they where already attached to the cardboard by there mycellium. This gave me a great idea. I know you can chop them up as fine as you want, even using a blender, and every piece will make a separate colony on your growth medium, so I blended up another cluster of mushrooms with enough water to hydrate a 1/2 lb of grain and then mixed the broth with the grain. We will see in the next couple days if that grain will be heavily contaminated or not, I suspect it will be but I may be pleasantly surprised.

Anyway, in the next couple days I am going to cut up my myceliated cardboard into strips and use that to colonize several large boxes worth of cardboard. Once those sheets are colonized, I can put them between the straw bales in my filter to inoculate them. I am really excited to get the filter going and I want to get it done while I am still on that wave of energy, so I am setting the somewhat ambitious goal of the end of next week for having the filter assembled, inoculated, and in action, but it might end up taking twice that long if I have contamination issues or something.

I am very excited about the possibilities of oyster mushrooms for processing humanure. They attack and eat e-coli and nematodes on contact, they posses powerfull antibiotic agents to kill any nasty bacteria, and they could break down human waste very quickly. Maybe if we call it a "Myco Reactor" they wont notice that it is a good, free, organic solution to there problems instead of an 10,000 septic tank that will need a new leach field in 5 years.

How these mushrooms react to pesticides etc will be interesting also. There is an overwhelming amount of research to be done in this area.

That is a perfect application of bunker spawn. You should do the whole property line and then test the soil on either side in a year or two. Is it neighbors greywater or just runoff water from their garden?

Mycelial filtration uses the mycelium from mushrooms to filter water. The mycelium, which is sort of like the roots of the mushroom, are naturally excellent at filtering nutrients and some heavy metals from water. Not many people, if any, actually use this technology in there homes yet and I hope to be among the first. I will be recording my progress and all my thoughts on my blog. I dont have my camera right now so I cant show pictures but I have actually built the concrete "mushroom box" already its about 4'x3'x8', as soon as my camera arrives I will update with pictures of the box and hopefully my oyster mushroom cultures by then. Anyway this is a great potential greywater filtration method and hopefully soon some other permies can adopt it if it works out for me. I suspect that mushrooms will be able to filter greywater in a much smaller area and with much less hassle than most other systems, and it seems they may do a much better job of filtering also. I cant wait to get this thing going!

My blog post for slightly more information:
http://www.greenhornmining.com/permaculture/mycelial-greywater-filters/

If it works out I will dedicate a new section of my blog to this topic.

Imagine building a house, filling the walls with growth medium (straw? agar?) setting some spores free and turning up the humidity. Plus, I am sure there are applications for mycellial chiton in making armor, structures, etc. but that may take genetic alteration of the mushroom species so that they produce mycellium with the correct characteristics. Oh and I totally brought this thread back from the dead.

I live in the desert but since the bale of straw will be wet anyway I think I can rely on shade, the thermal mass of the concrete container, and evaporative cooling to keep them cool enough. I think the reason that they use cyanscens in "mycellium running" might be because bioremediation is a good excuse for growing hundreds of pounds of psychedelic mushrooms on your property. At least half the photos in that book are psychedelic species.

Do oysters grow in soil or do they just colonize trees and stuff in nature? I would think that for filtration purposes a mushroom that colonizes soil would be best because they are adapted to filtering water which percolates through the soil, whereas a mushroom growing specifically on dead organic material probably would not be so adapted.

After reading "Mycellium Running" I want to use a mycellial filter to help clean my greywater before it goes back into the ground. The author of that book uses a species native to his area, psylocybe cyanscens, for almost all of his mycellial filters. I am not sure if that species would survive in my area, or why he used that particular one. I am basicly going to do the same thing as him, just put a bale of straw innoculated w/ the mushroom of my choice is a concrete box which my greywater flows through, forcing the water to flow through the bale, not just around it. According to him, this filter almost completely purefied the water including almost all the heavy metals and all the microbes. Does anyone know which other species are good for this? Does anyone know where I can get a p. cyanscens culture?

I have been considering building a cinva ram, I bet it would make great "rammed cement" tiles. I know that concrete is not as sustainable as wood or ceramic but ceramic is too expensive for me and fire danger is of prime concern where I live so a wood shingled roof is pretty much a death wish, especially when you heat your house with wood (I do).

Make sure to leave yourself the option to vent the stove into the greenhouse. C02 supplementation can double yield depending on the crop and other conditions. I hope this post was not too old.