Yerrrrr, how ya doing fam? I'm pretty good, just drank some Guinness, having a nice night watching the 1952 classic Invasion USA.
Any of yous guys know how to grow fungus? I want a source of organic vegetarian tacos and vegetarian tacos fucking suck without a mushroom base to take the place of the meat. Yous guys know how to grow portobellos? Shittakes? lmk how to properly grow fungus because I aint know shit and I wanna learn
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbN_JHTKhR_eC2KyhOTIJOg
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkzY4M9kg2VmqJ2nNcNM8hw
There's tons of stuff on youtube about it.
At some point I'm going to grow magic mushrooms. My last batch was ruined by black mold in my spawn bag. The simple gist of it is:
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source some spores. spores come in different forms. you can buy spore syringes, agar samples, spore prints. the goal is to make your own agar so you can propagate in the most efficient/inexpensive way.
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put your spores in a grain spawn. you can buy pre-sterelized and sealed grain bags to inject your spores. You can buy your own grain (millet, rye, brown rice flour, etc) and use a pressure cooker to sterilize it. Then use mason jars to spawn your mycelium. Again, doing it all yourself is cheaper and you have more control.
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transfer the mycelium to a substrate. people often use cocochoir and vermiculite for moisture retention. Of course you need to sterilize this too. there's other substrates you can use as well.
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then the mycelium attaches to the substrate and mushrooms begin to pop up.
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you can harvest your mushrooms and then soak the block of substrate in water (this is called a wash) and then you'll get more mushrooms out of it.
There's tons of techniques (teks) out there. Just like with any other gardening, everyone has their way of doing it the right way. Mushrooms can be a little more particular because you do need a clean environment for part of it.
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Not sure on the edible kind, but if you ever want the magic kind
https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/22337800/vc/1#22337800
This monotub worked great for me, pretty simple.
Shroomery is an amazing resource for mushroom cultivation across the board, the "gourmet" section of the site is very robust. i grew lion's mane and enoki very successfully exclusively from info from the site. BTW that is truly a magnificent cubes grow, well done!
Apparently it's actually pretty hard because you need to like completely sterilize the growing substrate to make sure no unwanted funguses colonize it. You should write to your local library, they're usually really good at helping people find resoruces for things like this.
It's actually surprisingly easy even with common kitchen materials, thanks to years of hobbyists refining the process. You need:
- A bunch of big transparent boxes (monotubs or pf fruiting chambers). That's where your mushrooms will fruit.
- Some glass jars, for initial mycelium development (required both for monotub and pf cake approaches).
- A pressure cooker; allows you to sterilize the growing substrate (after putting it into the aforementioned jars) for initial mycelium development. If going the pf cake route (much smaller yield, more effort, but also lower tech), even that is optional - a simple kitchen pot is sufficient.
- A still air box - this is basically a large plastic box with holes for your arms, and is the ghetto replacement for a flow hood; you put your sealed substrate / petri dishes / whatever in there, wait ten minutes for foreign spores and bacteria to settle, and get to work. It works surprisingly well if you work quickly.
- If planning to take this as a serious hobby, I can't recommend going the agar-agar / petri dish route enough; it guarantees you'll be able to spot and put aside contaminations, and can even allow you to select the best performing mycelium and conserve it for long durations for future cultures in the fridge.
Mind you, my experience is entirely related to the psychoactive kind but the principles for food-related mushrooms are the same.
