Now that I had the land and a basic infrastructure of a concrete room, and lot’s of information, including what i gathered from my failed attempt, I had to get going with making preparations so well this time that there was no scope to fail.
It started with hiring a contractor to construct the additional room required. I struggled between various options – a concrete structure, a puf panel structure or a thaw structure. The verdict was a thaw structure. Bamboos, wooden pipes (balli’s) and thaw was collected at the plot. A few good men (pun intended) worked for over a week to give shape to my future mushroom’s fruiting room.
Okay…so there are 2 rooms now. What next?
Just having two separate rooms was not enough. What was needed was far beyond that. That’s where the real struggle began. Searching for a full time person to work with me at the farm (yes, I started calling the place my farm, instead of that plot). Then I needed lots of things – drums, water hoses, buckets, ropes, sprayers, some chemical (for fumigation), plastic bags, rubber bands, spawn, straw (lot & lots of it), and more and more and more…It took endless trips to old Gurgaon, many different hardware shops, hero honda chowk (for drums), beej bhandaars, tooda mandi (straw market), HAIC Murthal, NHRDF Delhi, and more and more and more.
But all’s well that ends well. I gathered my armor and was ready with my first lot of pasteurized straw (20 kg)
And so it was time to do the next big thing – fill bags, of course. And that’s what I did…
But the problems and issues never end…upon realization that the size of bags that I was using was way too big, the run to get smaller bags was done the very next day. And so on…something or the other has kept happening and I kept evolving each day, as a more refined mushroom grower, armed with theory learnt at training, mistakes learnt with my first attempt and more mistakes as I keep working, hard, very hard, each day, with a smile 🙂
