Mould-farming.
As a child, I was extremely interested in mould. Not why it exists,or even how it forms, but just what I could do to manipulate it's forms and growth. I think it all kicked off when I found an old bit of bread in a cupboard, covered in white fluff. I didn't know it wasn't meant to be there, so I put it back. A week later, the white fluff was completely green! WTF? At that moment, my hobby was born.

For a few weeks, I collected lots of plastic pots, such as one gets hummus in, and secreted them in my room. Once I had enough, I got bits of bread, and the experiment began: what can I do to breed mould in different textures and colours?

I can't remember all the results, but I seem to remember that mould grown on plain, damp bread was the fastest to grow. Bread with some fruit in took quite a while to get going. Putting them in dark cupboards worked better than on a windowsill in the direct sunlight. Adding drops of chemicals from my toy chemistry set did absolutely nothing.

Above all, I learnt that when doing scientific experiments, one has to keep records of:
what is in each pot? (bread, water, jam, mud etc).
how long it has been grown? (5 days or 5 weeks?)
under what conditions? (sunlight, dark warm airing cupboard, dark cool and damp cellar?)

And, most importantly:
Where the hell did I leave the pots? I'm sure I had more than this!

Apparently my mother was finding little pots of life in the airing cupboard/my wardrobe/the coal cellar/on top of the fridge for ages. I got a massive bollocking for that. And she threw away the pots, so I didn't know how well those ones had worked.
(The Empress it seems you CAN polish a turd!, Mon 28 Jul 2008, 13:01, 6 replies)

Sounds like my ex wife!
Ecept in her case it wasn't deliberate experimentation, it was more a case of leaving half drunk cups of coffee under the bed and forgetting about them for a week.

She really was a total slob when I met her. How she ended up being so uptight about mess I'll never know. It was almost Stepford Wive-ian...
( Davros' Granddad a voice of calm reason in a world of spastics., Mon 28 Jul 2008, 13:17, closed)

You needed my parents
My dad introduced me to agar when I was about 7.
( Madam Marlboro wonders if you've found her yet, Mon 28 Jul 2008, 13:21, closed)

In university halls,
I was visiting my friends, and they lived in the smelliest corridor ever. I think it later turned out there was a dead fox under it (I mean, wtf?). Anyway, the kitchen was also pretty rancid, but that wasn't their fault either. I was in the kitchen, and my eye was drawn to a pile of loaves of bread (in their bags) on the corner of the worktop, all apparently half eaten. Well, I picked one up and there was no bread in it, it was 100% funky whacked-out green mould. The shock of the discovery, coupled with my general clumsiness, resulted in me dropping the bag on the floor, whereupon it released a large cloud of green spores. The room was evacuated for public safety reasons...
(Stu Moo winner of five nobble piece prizes, Mon 28 Jul 2008, 13:59, closed)

Mould
We used to grow mould in a locker in our common room. We would feed it scraps from lunch every day and called it Albert. That was until the bottom of the locker gave way and all 5 months worth of decomposing food fell down to splatter into the locker below...
(ab1kenobe, Mon 28 Jul 2008, 14:58, closed)

@ab1kenobe
We did exactly the same thing in our common room at school. We had little metal tray things which slid into a shelf unit, which were ideal for the task.

The best mould grew on a teabag, as I recall.

Unfortunately, the experiment never went to completion, as the smell meant that people complained and the janitor cleaned it all up.
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Mon 28 Jul 2008, 16:46, closed)

Empress, you are a legend.
*Click*
( Duke Of Belmsford has got 99 records, but Jay-Z ain't one, Mon 28 Jul 2008, 23:01, closed)