Auto-SummaryThe post discusses cultivating Psilocybe azurescens outdoors, referencing various sources and personal experiences. Key points include:
1. Azurescens can be cultivated without lab work, using a method described by Jochen Gartz.
2. European growers often start with spawn production in spring, resulting in a first harvest in the fall.
3. Clean, dry wood chips are recommended for feeding and covering the outdoor bed.
4. High humidity is essential for spore germination, and temperature affects speed but not overall success.
5. Azurescens requires several weeks of cold weather (0-10°C) for fruiting.
6. Watering should be automatic, as the mushroom likes very wet conditions.
7. Psilocybe cyanescens is considered the best variety for home cultivation, growing on Alder, Maple, and Fir, and taking two years to produce a harvest.
8. Azurescens and other wood-loving psilocybes, like Stropharia rugosoannulata, can be grown using similar techniques.
9. Azurescens is difficult to grow indoors, with the most successful indoor grow reported in about 3 months using a specific tek by user abert.
Azurescens Notes
Dreaming of doing an outdoor grow, with mushrooms poking up amidst the garden veggies. Here for my own records and anyone curious are excerpts and thoughts from several sources on shroomery about growing azurescens.
Anno already did a better job of this than I am about to do below, so if you're really curious go check out their thread here: Psilocybe azurescens outdoor cultivation
Sadly, the links in the article to more info are dead, a mere 20 years after the post was created. The MushMush link isn't dead, but it's a barebones website for a netherlands group that produces sclerotia on an industrial scale. Neat but not helpful for me.
Anno shows what is possible with outdoor patches in this thread from 2020: Psilocybe azurescens 2020
Quote:
Psilocybe azurescens cultivation in the Mushroom Info section of the Shroomery says:
Jochen Gartz recently described a "new method of mushroom cultivation in N.
America", which can indeed do without any labwork (6).
Some european growers prefer to start with a (onetime) run of spawn-
production (agar-dishes, glasses of oats/rye/barley, then glasses/bags of
wood-chips) in spring, which usually results in a first harvest in fall, and
a mushroom bed that can be enlarged both in area and yield in the next years
and very probably be maintained far beyond human lifetime. Clean wood debris
(like from a planing machine, sawdust does not work) seem to work even better
than freshly chopped wood. Although Psilocybe cyanescens seems to be able to
fruit on plain wood without any casing, it is advisable to supply the bed
with enough soil (and seeds), and leaves and larger branches, as the
mushrooms really love to grow in between and under grass or other plants.
The mushroom-beds obtained can be left on their own most of the year and (in
a good location) need attention only at harvesting time. Outdoors un-
favorable weather may of course diminish or prevent a year's harvest, but as
this cannot hurt the mass of underground mycelium, the shrooms will just make
up for it next season.
...
There seems to be hardly any difference between different MEA and PD(Y)A-
formulas or between cheapest agar-agar or a highly purified quality, or
whether pH is adjusted precisely, phosphate or trace elements are added or
not. High humidity is absolutely essential for spore germination; within a
reasonable range (maybe (5)10-30(40) degrees Celsius for PCY-AO) temperature
has effect on the speed but hardly on overall success.
...
PCY-AO seems to like barley, oats, rye, wheat or rice alike.
...
My personal favourite mixture is
half oats (least "sticky"), a quarter millet (often used for commercial spawn
production. Advantage: many small granules), rest: mixture of others as
available. I cut fully grown agar cultures (and only perfect ones) with a new
blade (PCY-AO mycelium is pretty thoughl; shows strong blueing here) into as
many pieces as possible (hundreds at least) and work these thoroughly using a
whole agar plate per jar. PCY-AO also seems to like nearly any kind of wood:
fir, larch, beech, birch, willow and others, did not show any difference in
growth. (At least) for spawn-making the use of chips from planing (clean+dry)
wood or a similar material, more coarse than sawdust and either soaked in
water overnight or sterilized shortly with steam (allow to drip off a few
hours), instead of freshly chopped branches, is highly recommended. A lot of
these small, clean wood-chips can be used to feed, cover and spread your
outdoor bed. Mycelial growth produces CO2 and is stimulated by higher
concentration of CO2. Us glass jars for sterilizing grain media and large
plastic bags with only a few tiny holes for growing wood-spawn, and pack
these into boxes.
...
Outdoor culture:
Once more: SEVERAL WEEKS OF COLD WEATHER (0-10C) ARE REQUIRED FOR FRUITING.
...
Water:
If your bed is well drained, so that it cannot be over-watered, it can easily
be watered automatically . PCY-AO likes very wet conditions, and often grows
happily with water standing (literally) on their caps for days (at 0-10C).
PCY-AO often has a very high content of water: one batch, harvested after a
week of rain, contained only 5.5% dry matter.
JOHNNY APPLESEED ON PSILOCYBE CYANESCENS
Psilocybe cyanescens is indeed the best variety of mushrooms for home
cultivation, as reported in the Fall '95 ER. They are up to seven times as
potent as Psilocybe cubensis and can be grown outdoors in all temperate
climates with no need for sterile techniques.
...
They grow on fresh chips of Alder, Maple and Fir. I have used fresh Alder
(Alnus spp.) brush chipped in the Spring. I mix jars of spawn into garbage
bags of fresh woodchips and lay one foot deep beds of the inoculated chips
under bushes were they will receive permanent shade. They need to be
reasonable damp during the year and covering the chip piles with several
inches of leaves insures this.
It takes two years to produce a harvest in my northern climate (near Canadian
border). After the first year, the wood chips will be completely white with
the developing mycelium. At the end of the second growing season, late in the
Autum (November), they will fruit. Many times I have harvested my main crop
in the first snows, they seem to like cold temperatures to fruit.
Each bed will give only one good fruiting season. Therefore one needs to
start new beds every year. Take a shovelful of the white chips from the one-
year-old beds to inoculate fresh wood chips. This is a very low-tech and safe
way to grow powerful mushrooms almost everywhere.
Definitely read the rest, I just cut out the parts I want to have at hand.
While I love the idea of something that lives in my lawn under trees and bushes and fruits when the winter comes, I'm looking more for a strain that I can fruit within a couple of months, planted under some garden vegetables. Gonna keep reading, but will also probably hit up a store for some woodchips to try out. I wonder if Azurescens plays well with King Stropharia, a popular garden path edible mushroom I was thinking about cultivating.
Quote:
psylosymonreturns in this thread from 2013 says:
cultivation of P auzrescen is exactly the same as P cyanescen .Its also the same s Stropharia rugosoannulata. so anything you read for thats species works for azzies or other aggressive woodloving psilocybes like P allenii or P ovoid.
So they'd probably compete for nutrients, although they have a different fruiting cycle, so maybe worth a shot, but probably best to keep them in separate beds.
Looks like azurescens is tough to grow indoors, really mostly suited to outdoors. Very few threads with successful indoor grows, best one is under mushroom info by abert Psilocybe azurescens indoor cultivation
agar=>wheat grain=>soaked wood chips=>1.5 months to colonize => cased with composted needles, foliage, sticks from the woods all chopped up uniform=>casing colonized, placed under wet vermiculite and refrigerated with ambient light through clear refrigerator door =>daily aired it out and humidified it => added fluorescent lamp 16hrs day=>mushrooms appear, 28 days later harvested.
second grow added the light as soon as it was refrigerated and put it in a warmer part of the fridge 46-53F had fruits 2-3 weeks sooner
Smallish fruiting compared to bulk spawn of cubes, but impressive to get fruits within about 3 months from start compared to 2 years in the older documentation above with outdoor methods.
Interestingly, I searched for abert in the forums and his threads are about a cultivated Phallus Hadriani egg. There's an awesome/weird/disgusting timelapse video of it growing here. But doesn't talk about azurescens again. Just a talented mycologist doing amazing things somewhere in Russia, and after 11/01/22, he hasn't been seen on the forums.
Well now I'm tired just thinking about doing this as a massive outdoor grow project, but I do have a little wine fridge that could serve as an azurescens grow chamber using the mysterious abert TEK.
OK, I was going to do some agar work, but I'm too sleepy. Night y'all!
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