Project description: Laytonville High School students built a Straw Bale Mushroom Cultivation Room to grow Oyster Mushrooms, and expanded the small "mushroom log" business they had previously started.

This project demonstrates how the use of hardwood by-products (tan-oak logs) can be used to create value-added products to aid sustainable forestry. The students research and experiment to find the most suitable substrate for growing the mycelia before inoculating the logs.

The project evolved last year into their "Myco-remediation" project, engaging students in real, investigative science, asking questions that were important to the community and to which they was no answer yet. They experimented with using mushrooms to clean up soils contaminated with diesel fuels, using soils from the wrecking yard across from the school. Their work could make significant contributions to our community, as students envision "offering to set up and teach people how to clean up their own soil. Most times now, contaminated soil is not cleaned up, but just hauled away and piled up somewhere as toxic waste and new soil in brought in to replace it."

Future projects include purposefully inducing "spalting" (the staining of wood into cool patterns by the mycelia as it grows through the wood) to produce a "value-added" wood used for fine-woodworking.