alzymologist

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/30676397

A cute little Suillus bovinus (probably) grew with my COVID-time seed planted tree

A cute little Suillus bovinus (probably) grew with my COVID-time seed planted tree

Was going through the hives yesterday to move queens upwards to new box (the method popular in Finland and good in local climate - in peak time this is done about weekly; method developed by my neighbor actually) and kept thinking about this picture.

My favorite children clothes store https://www.maammekauppa.fi/ is shutting down (I'm not affiliated, but where will I buy those pretty and durable shirts now?), reason - people are not buying local, one of two local manufacturers who was their suppliers went down last fall for the same reason. This fanatically local and very personal shop just didn't make it. And as small local business owner, I see my reflection in their shutdown.

This is just sad.

And they are right. I'm (affiliated here) trying to sell local brewing yeast for a year now, and almost nobody buys it. I offered gardening chemicals to supermarket networks to be marketed as local - they say there is no demand, they end up with unsold surplus of this (and they know their numbers). I want to believe and praise "buy European" story, but right now the opposite is happening.

I was just walking the street last week and got showered with this rare treasure - ample crop of ripe elm seeds. These seem to have very narrow germination time window, so I scooped as much as I could in my hands

and planted them between soil and quartz sand layers asap, with this density. Let's see if some germinate this year!

(I did similar thing 2 years ago and got some trees in pots; I also scattered some shovelfuls in forest, no way to tell if they managed to survive yet with all the undergrowth)

I'm not using my 6-BAP on this yet, I hope to select for natural germination ability and later propagate bonsai seeds into the wild if I can. This place totally needs more elms, with all the climate change.

Hello!

I own and run a small technology company in Finland. I've been reluctant to advertise here for some time, even after asking in Matrix channel of this group some months ago, but now I've finally made my mind. It's more of introduction post, I guess, because I'm really bad at marketing.

I'm also make this as a statement: don't just buy European. Sell European! We are blessed with social security systems the rest of the world could not dream about, trying for business opportunities never results in uncertain future - if all fails, we stand for each other. So please, try the new things, be entrepreneurs, and be small if you have to, for it's small businesses and their humble people who really make the Europe economy run!

Anyway, we've been bold enough to actually manufacture things that are commonly thought to be made in Asia (or sometimes USA) here, in EU, better and sometimes (not always) cheaper. And we are just a few friends doing this weird thing for fun and to stay afloat financially.

Here is a webstore link: https://store.zymologia.fi/

It's not pretty, but I suppose there is no European alternative for most of this stuff, and people who need it (as far as I can tell) do not really care for pretty webstores.

We make plant cell culture chemicals. For example, root growth hormone gel, dip a plant cutting in it and it will grow roots much more reliably than normally. Just today I discovered that not only regular plants regrow roots, but also so did this piece of grape my neighbor sliced from his plant erroneously without any buds on it, last leaves it had were in October, still growing roots (not sure it will survive)

Another product is BAP-6, hormone that stimulates shoot formation. We've just finished rolling out it's production last week, so I'll try some on these leafless grapes to save them. We'll make a gel with this soon and place it in store as well, but anyone can already just make a gel from this powder.

And we make microcloning supplies, that allow propagating plants from a single stem cell (plants have plenty of these) in a jar, without light or any watering. Good way to grow plenty of, say, berry bushes, or rare plants.

We also have bee monitoring wireless sensors that we've developed here and assemble here to order: http://apiologia.zymologia.fi/ These are useful for beekeepers, the data they collect could predict swarming several days in advance (it's a bold statement as most other products could at most do it within 30 minutes or so when you don't really need a sensor to see what is about to happen; but we've found some know-how in old soviet research and made it work).

We also make really good liquid brewers yeast strains through pure culture technology, fed with all-grain pilsner malt, lively and ready to action.

All is handmade with love, we use our products ourselves (more than we sell, unfortunately). So if you, or some of your friends, are into some of these or similar weird hobbies and in need of supplies, or need something new developed and made locally, please contact me!

Started this from a random seed found on a street about 5 years ago. Today is the first transplantation, if it survives, it's brothers and sisters will follow! Not sure it's optimal time for spruce transplantation, but the previous planter was 4 times smaller (soil footprint could be seen in center, with intact moss layer).

kesä tuli minun autoon...

Does anyone know if any quality meltblown tissue is made here and if so where can I buy a roll?

This time of year one thing happens that has absolutely no relation to holidays: late berries (cranberries, lingonberries, rowan) spent enough time in frozen state to develop flavor worth of melomels. A gift for self in several years, something to be safely forgotten until bottling and then again.

Of course, I've kept those in freezer, as I don't want to fight all the birds for rowans (note: they still had plenty, I'm not greedy) and I'm not that good at digging frozen forest floor for the rest.

I've been doing homebrewing together with my wife for quite some time, and at some point we started collecting a yeast library. There was a point in my life where we had an opportunity to start a company that does something we enjoy; we've tried starting an analytic lab for microbreweries (as we are both actually doctors in chemistry), but it didn't take off at all due to lack of demand (and COVID breakout), we had to switch to doing whatever brings cash (of course IT stuff it was, mostly, I feel ashamed).

But yeast library kept growing. We've decided to give it another try, got permissions from the Big Brother, and rolled out a small production!

We've deployed a webshop at https://store.zymologia.fi/ , there is other stuff that's kind of a byproducts of whatever other things we've had to do to get along (some of it was and is fun after all). The idea is that I don't think it makes sense to scale it up any further, we just have proper but minimalist equipment to do sterile pure culture cultivation, not large tanks, only glass that could be properly washed and autoclaved, and full-grain growth media because I hate smell of extract (and proper preparation of wort is about as difficult as getting extract clear enough for yeast making). Anyway, it's an actual commercial operation, I'm curious to see how far we can go with such attitude and whether it would become profitable or just another "make the world a bit happier place".

Most of yeast on sale is listed as "not available" which means we'll just have to wake them up, feed them up to speed, and package, which takes up to 2 weeks, which is less than beer recipe planning and preparation phase, at least for me. I don't think keeping an inventory with live yeast is a good idea anyway - many times I've had sad starved liquid yeast fished out of fridges in stores only to see lags on 30+ hours. That's also why I'm reluctant to go to resalers, though I might try it.

What I really think should be happening is yeast exchange. I don't want to keep things any more commercial than the general Finnish anti-soviet spirit tells me, so let me propose this idea: yeast growth takes time and effort, but sharing is caring - I'd be happy to share a swab of yeast culture with anyone who comes to our place (just tell me when, of course most of the time there is only yeast in the lab) with their own sterile slant carrier - I won't be shipping these, for I'm absolutely certain delivery services will mess it up, and also I (or whoever would be hanging around at that time) won't get to have a chat with you. (Please do this if you know what you are doing though, storing culture and scaling it to a starter is a bit more complicated than just making a starter, mistakes multiply badly with exponential growth and it's not very feasible to propagate without going through single-cell plating or something similar. If you don't know what that means, learn it first, or it's worth just buying a ready liquid yeast, the great purpose of sharing culture material is to let other people have it in their library, which would require you to go through single-cell propagation at least a few times a year).

We also have an opensource (all we do is opensource, I believe in the idea) piece of software to keep yeast lineage in check here: https://github.com/Alzymologist/yeast It's a bit underdocumented at the moment to say the least, but it uses Bayesian inference to analyze yeast parameters and catch mutations, and it was able to detect deviations before we've tasted the outliers blindly, I think it's quite cool too. I don't think anybody did this before.

Sorry for self-advertisement, I've asked moders if this sort of thing is OK here before posting. I hope this is interesting enough to be worth being here.