Quote:
Asante said 10 years ago:
Guys I'm going to show you what was done, and then tell you how to do it!
==================================================== WHAT WAS DONE:
Species: Psilocybe cyanescens (Wavy Caps) Activity: High (dried 12-25mg/gr) Dimensions: 3 x 2 foot, 10 inches thick (approx 150 ltr) Substrate: Course Beech Woodchips (pet bedding) Purpose: Outdoor Spawn Reservoir Status: mature bed, second flush Location: Holland, early november
THE BED
Here's the bed. It was allowed to become mossy to see whether the patch moisture level would be positively affected and whether the moss would allow the patch to not just fruit on the sides (it's an uncased beech wood chip patch, which tend to only fruit peripherally), and with this second flush, the most abundant ever seen on this patch, a month after the first, this appears to be the case.
Wavy Caps poking right through the moss
Cream of the crop, what not to like about this picture? All aspects of the habitat show beautifully
Mycelium showing, note the wavy margins
Various growth stages, overgrowth as can be seen were stingy nettles
Tight cluster near the wall at the patch's edge
Note the prominent umbo's on the caps!
Harvesting just the biggest ones of the patch yielded 80 grams fresh; ~4gr fresh on average. Note the blueing already on the stems and the spore-bearing lamellae.
Given the number of shrooms still on the patch, this one flush will definitely yield about a dried ounce if it can ripen before the frost. The first flush, in early october, yielded about 8 dried grams.
Now, a bit later, the 1 dried ounce barrier was broken.
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HOW TO DO IT:
--You go to the webshops of some Shroomery Sponsors and buy a Psilocybe cyanescens spore syringe, some vermiculite and some brown rice flour. If they are out of Psilocybe cyanescens syringes you can opt for Psilocybe azurescens, Psilocybe subaeruginosa, Psilocybe bohemica, Psilocybe arcana, Psilocybe serbica or Psilocybe moravica for similar results.
--You get a bunch of 1/2 pint jars (like ~250ml veggie jars from the supermarket) and with a nail you punch a hole in the center of the lids.
--of every 4 jars, you fill 2 with vermiculite, 1 with brown rice flour and 1 with water, then mix this to a loose "dough" and you loosely fill the jars with it, leaving about an inch free at the tops of the jars. Clean the inner rims, then cover with half an inch of straight, dry vermiculite and lay on the lids, don't screw them on. Cover the lids with a layer of tin foil.
--take a cooking pot, put a dishwashing cloth in and pour in 2 inches of water, then put the jars on top of that, on the stove and cover with a lid. Bring to a boil, then boil for 1 hour. Turn off the gas and let it cool down to room temperature overnight, leaving the lid of the pot on.
--the next day, take the jars out of the cooking pot and put them on the table. Shake the spore syringe well, then de-cap it, heat the needle with a disposable lighter till it sputters and drive it though the tin foil, through the hole, through the covering layer of vermiculite in your substrate. Wait 15 seconds then inject a bit of spore solution. Pull the needle out slowly and cover the tin foil with another layer of fresh tin foil. Repeat with all the jars. A syringe is generally 10cc. You should in theory be able to do 5 x 4 jars with it, but in practice 3x4 jars is more than ample. Put the jars in a closet at room temperature. You want to avoid drafts and excessive light. Do not handle the jars at all, if you can.
--After about 3-9 weeks, the jars will be completely covered in white mycelium, which basically looks as if they are stuffed with pure white cotton. Discard all jars that show strange colors immediately, by throwing them away whole and unopened. Now a joyous time begins: You have finished Sterile Technique and won't EVER have to work that carefully again.
--go to a petstore and get hardwood woodchips used for animal bedding. Do not use the ubiquitous yellowish compressed blocks of wood fiber, these are almost invariably softwoods (like pine) which are too resinous to support growth. What you want is the big loose bags of untreated wood chips. Good kinds are beech, oak, birch, chestnut, alder, maple, cottonwood, willow, aspen, poplar, elm , sweet gum and sycamore wood chips. Chips used in smoking (fish or meat) are usually perfect.
--How many jars have made it? Multiply this number by 10-20 and scoop that many jars of dry chips into a large container, and cover it with water, and leave it to soak up water for 24 hours, then let the water leach out for at least 1 hour. Lets for simplicity's sake say 1 jar made it, and that you are preparing 10 jars of wood chips (2.5 liters) for it.
--open the jar(s) with mycelium and scratch the contents out with a fork in a bowl. Use the fork to crumble the mycelial mass as finely as you can. Then, add it to the 10fold excess of leached wood chips and mix it really well. Put it into a plastic storage box to a depth of about 4-10 inches and cover it with a trashbag, which you secure in place with a few clothespins so that iot is covered but the mycelium can breathe. Keep this at room temperature for several weeks to months, until it has grown shut. If its needed, but chances are it won't, mist the mycelium occasionally with a plant mister. When the chips are colonized a joyous time begins, because at this point it becomes very hard to screw the grow up anymore!
--If you don't have a garden and don't want to guerilla farm, you can put these boxes outside in autumn when temperatures range to 50'F to a little above freezing, the fully colonized chips covered with half an inch of potting soil. At these temperatures the mushrooms will fruit directly on top of the substrate, even if you don't use the soil layer.
--Outdoor cultivation of the wood lovers is possible in the plant hardiness zones 6, 7 and 8. The range can likely be extended also to zone 5, but the beds will need to be protected by applying a layer of fresh wood chips or a thicker layer of straw to survive the low temperatures in winter. You can check what USDA Hardiness zone you live in. If you grow in boxes and only take them outdoors during a few months of temperatures from 50'F to a little above freezing, colder zones are possible.
--If you do have a garden or want to take it to the forest, prepare wood chips by soaking and leaching as described before. Again, you use 10-20 times the volume. One jar led to 10 jars in the plastic box and thus will need 100 jars (25 liters = 6.5 gallons) of wood chips.
--In the ground, dig small tenches or holes about 4-10 inches deep. If you want to maximize your initial harvests, make trenches 4 inches deep and wide and as long as you want, side by side, spaced 4 inches apart. If you want maximum spawn per surface area, make it a few big shallow holes 10 inches deep. Use the moistest parts of your garden or forest, and especially under bushes etc where theres little wind and light. You guessed it: the very parts of your garden useless for gardening!
--break up the spawn, the fully grown woodchips from the box, as finely as possible and mix them very well with the excess of leached wood chips, then dump it into the trenches or holes. The chips level should be about even with the ground. At this point you can use your bare hands or a spade to do the mixing and handling. Alternatively you can simply cover the ground under the bushes with a 4 inch thick layer of chips and be rid of it. Its good to make several locations where you dump the spawn to always have a backup in case weed mushrooms take over a grow. This can be in the same garden, but I urge you to go evangelical and offer to mulch the gardens of tripping friends, make patches into the wild etc.
--if you did all this in spring, in late autumn you might already see your first harvest. If it does or doesnt, next season there will be a harvest. Water the patchers if really needed in summer, but dont overwater them. Shrooms are akin to the creature from the horror movie "The Thing": every single part of the organism, no matter how tiny, can be introduced to fresh wood chips and grow out to replicate the whole organism. The patch can dry out a bit, and revitalize after rain. It can take frosts of -25'C/0'F if it has to. At this point a really joyous time begins because not only will you be harvesting one of the worlds strongest mushrooms each year with minimal effort, but your grow has become virtually indestructible.
--in the years to come, after the patches showed their first or a few seasons of mushrooms, you can break up the patches and use them as spawn to make more patches. One mushroom patch can be expanded to ten mushroom patches. Ten to 100. You end up mulching gardens of nontripping family members because they see the benefits to their garden and see the mushrooms as a really cute addition to their garden in late fall. You can go to the forest with bags of spawn and mix it with decaying wood, here, there, everywhere!
==================================================== IS IT WORTH IT?
You be the judge. What I described, if taken step by step, is REALLY easy to do. It doesnt require expensive equipment or unobtainable supplies. It has a high success rate.
Wavy caps like in the picture have a potency of 12-25mg psiloc(yb)in per dried gram, making them 2-4x more potent than the common cubie thats being sold. They are easily identified and turn blue on bruising like nobodies business. The high, compared to cubies, seems to be clearer, higher energy, and more euphoric than that of cubies. If you dry them and store them in a jar in a dark closet they are still strong a year later. In the freezer, they stay potent for a decade or more.
Once the ball is rolling your growing of one of the strongest shrooms in the world becomes as sophisticated as the most basic gardening, and you in essence invest big bags of woodchips to get big bags of powerful shrooms. You will no longer be dependent on what a shady dealer might offer, but instead you have 100% organic shrooms in abundance, more than you can eat, and with your spawn you have the possibility to make your tripping friends independent too.
So you tell me, is it worth it?
Now, ten years after that post, I have been adding beech wood chips every 2-3 years, simply topping it off, and the Wavy Caps became endemic to the small bed.
I planted a small Sakura Tree in the middle of the bed.
This was the right move, it turned out, it resulted in the biggest crop ever.
In 2020, 10 years after the former post was made, and just having topped up the bed with more woodchips, a whopping 680 wet grams, 1.5lbs wet wavy caps, were harvested off the patch.
I was afraid that the Sakura would suck the patch dry but no, none of that at all, the mushrooms love the tree and the tree thrives.
This is what you get if you get into woodlovers: you do the sterile work once and then you mulch, and you mulch, and you mulch, and your woodlovers will keep on growing and yielding if you have a good strong species like Psilocybe cyanescens.
These are 2-3x as strong as cubensis, in the dry state typically they contain 12-18mg Psilocybin.
The harvest is huge for this wild patch, about 3x of an average year.
Last year I was an asshole about how I handled the bed. I had pain in my back and resentment in my heart so I poured a bag of beech wood chips in the indentation in the bed, I threw two buckets of water over it and went inside
BUT NOW LOOK! BIGGEST HARVEST EVER!!
680 grams, 1.5lbs of fresh super strong Wavy Caps after chucking a bag of dry wood chips and two buckets of water onto a bed that was established about 12 years earlier.
I ask you again...
...is it worth it?
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