It's the moment you've all been waiting for - what's happening with this building project of ours!
Coming along and almost done...
And voila!
This is not actually a fruiting chamber for indoor mushrooms - at least not permanently. We are using this new space temporarily for that purpose though. One reason is that we've got some buggies (little gnats) in the new fruiting chamber (grr) and it seems the only way to thoroughly get rid of them and clean everything up real well... is to get rid of everything and start over. Uh, we'd rather not!
So we built this space, as part of a bigger plan, and new blocks will go in here. As the blocks in the old-new chamber finish and get tossed, eventually that space will empty out and then we can scrub it down real good!
What we intend to use this space for in the future is a kitchen! It will probably take a while to get to that point. And we might have to do a little fundraiser - kitchen stuff is EXPENSIVE! But there are more and more reasons why having one - a proper commercial kitchen that is - makes so much sense for us. I'll share one reason today: our butters and pates. We know folks love them! There is a commercial kitchen about 15 minutes from us in another town that we have been using. It's been really nice to have that, but for the last two years or so we've only been allowed in one day per week and only when staff are present - we can't just go in when the building is closed. When we're under-staffed or very busy (and it always seems to be one or the other) it gets really hard to make that one-day-a-week work. If we had our own kitchen, we could make pates and butters whenever it worked for our schedule. It's also pretty inconvenient to pack up all sorts of supplies and ingredients and schlep them back and forth between here and the kitchen. We are very excited about this new possibility!