-Primate

1 cake can only produce *so much psilocybin*. What good is it to produce 5000 grams of mushrooms from one cake if those mushrooms are so weak in potency that i need to eat 2500 dry grams to trip (exageration ). I've seen the only successful way to expand the mycelium with minimal loss of potency of the fruits to be grain spawn ---> compost ---> casing of compost/spawn. Compost seems to have adequate nutrients to stimulate a constant psilocybin production which lasts before, during, and through the fruiting process resulting in equally as potent fruits as any other method.

Trust me, i ventured deep into the woods of experimentation and concluded that this is the most constantly successful way of getting a large amount of potent fruits from minimal spawn.

peace
camel

You really need to understand some fundamental aspects of the psilocybin mushroom life cycle including some elementary info such as that posted above by myself. The same also holds true for gourmet species of mushrooms. The taste diminishes as the mycelium is expanded.

Think of it like this:

I have 100 baskets and 1000 apples. That's 10 apples per basket (the apple in this case is psilocybin and the baskets is total mycelium including the fruitbodies). Now lets say I remain with 1000 apples (as psilocybin is controlled genetically and is automatically shut-off when the limit is reached), but I now have 1000 baskets (representing the abundance of more mycelium/fruitbodies). Now I can only put 1 apple in each basket (ie the psilocybin content is much lower than if we wouldnt have expanded the mycelial mass), thus resulting in the requirement to eat more fruits to achieve the same effect. So lets say we sold apples by the basket. That means that I would need to buy 10 more baskets now to get the same amount of apples, ya dig?

camel has concluded his lecture in ethnomycology

peace
camel

quote:
"Innoculation beyond third generation transfers is not reccomended."
and
"However, every cultivator must ultimately return to agar culture in order to maintain the purity of the strain."

So right there it says it. Let's face it... The mycelium will not grow forever and ever. We must eventually return back to the original culture, because as mycelial expansion progresses your strain deviates further and further away from the norm (original strain). This is how strains begin to degenerate.

It has been proven that a given amount of spawn will produce a given amount of psilocybin, and then slow production or even halt it. This is why over-mature fruits (upturned caps) contain less psilocybin per fruit, because the psilocybin production is halted. This is true with the over-expansion of the spawn as well. The further you try and go with it, the lower the potency of the fruits. Anybody who has experimented with straw knows this very well. If I use 1:10 spawn:straw ratio, I have a much less potent crop than if I would have done a 1:3 ratio. Again, the characteristics of over-mycelial expansion is proved.

Aside from proving myself correct on that point, I feel the need to point out one thing. This post is just a tad too exaggerated to be true. I'm sorry, but there is a correlation between the amount of dry grain used and the total crop yield. This counts even with the addition of a casing layer/adding soil etc etc. Your % efficiency is WELL over that stated by Stamets in his books. I would think that if such incredible 200+% efficiency yields were possible, that the man who went to school for mycology and who makes a living off of writing books about it would be able to figure out such a simple way to increase yields over 200% what was the previous estimate (per dry weight of grain).

It just seems a tad odd that some nobody newbie grower would be able to outgrow Paul Stamets more than 2-fold. Jeez... I'm sending my copy of TMC back to Fungi Perfecti, and I'm buying yours!

peace
camel

Am I right in assuming that a strain will not degenerate if spores are taken from mature fruit bodies, and then new mycelium grown from the spores, new spores taken, etc???? Since the whole life cycle is allowed to complete, degeneration would not occur?

So degeneration applies only when you transfer mycelium to new substrate, and keep doing that over and over?

Please let me know if i am right or totally wrong.

Understand the same applies for regular cloning of crops, as I have stated in many of my papers. If you grow mushrooms, clone the best one, use that to grow another crop and clone the best looking again, and repeat this, this quickly leads to strain degeneration.

Strain degeneration here means: Loss of psilocybin production, loss of flavor value, mycelium wont grow to full potential, mutated fruits, etc.

peace
camel

A good rule of thumb, is dont expand your spawn too much before fruiting (or after fruiting, which quite honestly isn't a "heads up" plan anyway minus maybe throwing spent cakes/casings in a garden or compost pile for hopeful fruitings).

So here are the main rules to live by:

1) Don't stretch mycelium further than it can handle.
2) Don't clone cloned strains (ie: don't clone a mushroom from a flush that was derrived from clone mycelium). It's just a bad idea, because the strain can't get that much better

Doing the above two things will result in one or a combination of the following:

-Odd looking fruits
-Mycelium that halts growth
-Much lower psilocybin/cin levels (in psilocybian species)
-Less pleasant taste (with gourmet species)
-Other fun oddities that will prove unpleasant to the grower/psychonaut

Hope I've helped...

peace
camel

I spoke with the Lab Manager of a Pennsylvanian mushrooms farm (grows mushrooms for a couple companies like Campbells and smaller companies as well) about where strain degeneration can most commonly come from, and what he said confirmed what my personal studies (of legal mushrooms of course ) had resulted in.

Degenerate strains 95% of the time is due to either A) over-expansion of mycelial mass or B) Multiple clonings of subsequent "clone flushes".

It is also a well known fact in many of the mycological groups that I have been involved with that psilocybin/cin production can directly be correlated to a bell curve model.

In other words... The first couple and last couple flushes will be have fruits that have the lowest psilocybin content. This means that quite often the 3rd/sometimes 4th flush will contain rather high (compared to other flushes) levels of psilocybin/cin and then drop substantially afterwords.

This led my personal cultivation of psilocybian mushrooms to a new path (theoretical cultivation of course). I would allow the first 2 flushes to flush, but I would limit the amount of spaces that receive light by covering them up with black construction paper. Usually I just put a sheet that fit in the middle of the casing tray, and allowed about 2" of flushing space on all sides. Just as the 2nd flush was past pinning (12 hours after pins are seen) the construction paper was removed and light was allowed to hit the center of the casing. This resulted in very large 3rd and 4th flushes.

Lab analysis confirmed that psilocybin/cin content of the 3rd flush was almost 35% higher than that of the 1st or 2nd flush.

I confirmed my theoretical experiment with the head of the Mycology dept at the closest University that offered mycology as a dept (University shall remain nameless for anonimity purposes ).

I do, however, find it humorous that you compare mammalian cloning to that of fungi! Is that because in the cloning of a mammal one takes some live tissue from the animal and puts it on malt extract agar? Just kiddin But I failed to make the connection in comparing two different kingdoms. All is good though No worries...
peace
camel

[This message has been edited by camel (edited May 18, 2000).]

Humans produce very little (head) hair when they are young infants. Over time this goes up to a period of lots of hair production, then eventually decreses, and for some people, go bald altogether.

Hehe... I could've saved myself a lot of typing effort by saying that from the get-go Ahhh well, it's good to have lots of facts on the board to better the newbie and advanced cultivator alike

peace
camel

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