This is from the first grow I did, PF tek style but with a few updates. I did a couple monotub grows a year later that went great but I can't for the life of me find any pics.
The white pebbles are perlite and the cake is mostly rice bran meal and fine vermiculite, with a little coffee and gypsum.
Believe it or not there are a lot of youtube tutorials last time I checked
in addition to everything else, unclebens on reddit has a lot of beginner resources; using bags of precooked rice is easier in principle than sterilizing your own mushroom food
I watched Let's Grow Mushrooms and read a bunch of posts on shroomery.org
i still have some dried up magics on me, am i able to try and grow more if i’m unsure if i have spores? how lenient is this process for someone like me who isnt really that well versed in mushroom growing?
sometimes your weed has seeds, how likely is this to happen tho.
i ask because i have like 1 cap still.
This is actually untrue, you can clone a mushroom from fruitbody tissue, even if it's been dried!
If you really don't have access to spores (they're legal to buy in the US, also people do spore print giveaways and trades all the time), then it's possible to clone a 'shroom from actual dried tissue or from old spores and I believe all the info you'd need you could find online. It would involve rehydrating the sample and using antibiotic agar and would be a pain in the ass and take a while, but as a last resort it's definitely possible!
Nice! I took some time during quarantine to try my first grow as well. Ended up with about a zip after second flush. Then I got lazy and got some contams. Really fun hobby though. I'm gonna try gourmet for a while.
I did cakes in a fruiting chamber. Looks like we followed the same tutorial video!
Nice! Yeah that vid is a classic. The guy with the beard posts regularly on Shroomery as RogerRabbit. He has a really rad gourmet mushroom operation that involves a partially buried 40ft humidified shipping container "mushroom cave."
The tek in the video is based on the PF tek, by this dude named PsilocybeFanaticus. In the early 90's PF posted an add selling spores in the back of issues of High Times along with a URL that led to a site with directions for a novel method of growing mushrooms without the need of an autoclave/pressure cooker and with materials any college kid could cobble together. Was really successful, and in typical fasion the DEA busted down his door, raided his house and arrested him at gunpoint, all because he linked to the directions. Super lame, but he avoided prison anway.
Oh nice! I was on shroomery constantly during my grow. I'm sure I saw some of his posts at some point.
Yeah it's interesting how you can sell spores in the US but you have to be very careful to state they aren't for cultivation. It's nice to see shrooms becoming the next wave of legalization efforts. I kind of wonder how far they'll get though. I don't think people will be as open to it as they have been for weed.
"Intended for microscopy only" lol
Michigan decriminalized psychedelics in general like a month ago so that's something. I agree it seems like it might be a harder road than for weed, but at least there's a periodic stream of research from Johns Hopkins and such to sensationalize them in a positive light
Yeah the Michigan thing surprised me. It does seem like there's some investment going into medicinal mushrooms so that's promising.
Fuck yes dude, finicky though right needs to be all sterile? But all legal to order shit off the net
Yeah, not as hard as it seems I don't think though. Gloves, a can of lysol, and a clear plastic bin with a couple hand holes in it to work inside of for inoculation and transfers goes a long way. Also you don't need a pressure cooker for the PF tek (or the uncle ben's rice thing people have been doing)
Sterility will only become a barrier when you move up to things like sawdust colonies that are too large to deal with in a still-air box and agar plates which are extremely sensitive to airborne contamination. If you start with the pre-sterilised uncle ben's bags and then transfer those to nutrient-poor bulk substrate like coconut coir (or straw for oysters), your sterility requirements are washing your hands and heating a needle. If you upgrade to a pressure cooker you can do about 5 colonies in an instant pot for a quarter of the price of an uncle ben's bag.
Psilocybin is one of those elements of fungiculture that appeal to me as a political project. Culinary mushrooms are really cheap to grow and are a premium ingredient in poverty cuisine so you can really contribute to a Black Panther breakfast kind of thing, but psilocybin is something special. In both microdose and recreational dose forms, it's a very safe drug which counters alienation in a way others don't. It grows so cheaply that you can give it away without a second thought to price, grows so easily that it's a great springboard into fungiculture, and when you find the people it can really help it has a profound impact on them in my experience. Unlocking a greater sense of introspection and compassion and appreciation in someone works against alienation with its related traumas and toward self-actualisation.
This is a top notch post. The mention of Black Panther breakfast has me wondering if the Food Not Bombs chapter around here would be interested in mushrooms grown by some random hobbyist.
If not them, I see potential in local mutual aid orgs (Here we have an anarchist militia, the Colorado Mutual Aid and Defense) and whatever party/movement steps up when the economy goes to shit. With something like log colonies, that's a foolproof method of recycling waste (I just got like two dozen logs for free from a guy cutting down an invasive hardwood species, municipalities and homeowners trim theirs all season) with 1-3lbs of mushrooms per log per year growing anywhere there is shade and a hose. I keep looking at the space I'm putting my new batch of logs, a barren rock path between my garden and garage, and seeing it as a small contribution to a project which is still larger than I'd be able to contribute in vegetables. A few large straw oyster logs cost all of $5~ and make 6-12lbs of high quality protein that has positive effects on poverty-linked illnesses like diabetes and cardiovascular/immunological/neurological dysfunction. When meat is unaffordable, that's a very powerful niche providing the luxury part of a meal and the bread book to go with the bread.
Shroomery has good tutorials for different growing methods.
Tripping as a depressed person can be rough at times, but these difficult trips can be productive. If you're on any SSRI, psychedelics will not have much of an effect, though.
SSRI tip is top notch, I feel so bad when I read about people finally acquiring mushrooms or L and then being like "was this bunk?!"
Damn really? So I'd have to stop taking my medicine if I wanted to try? That sucks.
It's something to read about. I don't have personal experience with combining them, but I think it depends on dosage and your specific physiology.
some reddit guides and they’re usually about “normal” mushrooms. will the same techniques work for psilocybin mushrooms?
Cubensis is a saprophytic fungi. It decays things with cellulose in a parasitic way so if it has a food supply it will grow with varying degrees of efficiency. Pretty much all saprophytes work like that apart from some doing well on certain substrates and wood types. What you learn for oysters and lion's mane mostly works for cubensis (minus sawdust blocks which probably still do), what you learn for cubensis directly translates to being able to grow most culinary species. Even your monotubs will hold three sawdust colonies so I just grow culinary mushrooms in them.
I just skimmed that video and this guy is a boss. Those are definitely psilocybe cubensis he's growing but he doesn't actually say it haha. The way he said "supplement" at the start had me wondering but you can clearly see when he harvests.
This is pretty much exactly what I did on later grows. I used rye berries instead of millet and I didn't use agar. Just spores directly to the jars of hydrated grain. Agar is awesome but it's also an extra step for contamination especially without a flowhood and i was just using a still air box. It also seemed like a real pain doing agar work with the limited mobility and visibility of working in a still air box.
That video is great, I'd check out all the steps on shroomery to make sure you understand everything super thouroughly, and having expert feedback when some weird color shows up or something doesn't go as planned can give you some great peace of mind.
cupenis
Lol grow the "albino penis envy" cubensis variety, it looks cool as hell and allegedly is denser than other cube varieties which is kind of interesting.
