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any insights is welcomed.

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Chiron098 said:

i'm searching for people that cultivated these species and what are their thoughts about it, the best way of doing that is of course, asking these people directly about how it was the experience. this is not off-topic, invasive or whatsoever, i just want to know more about it.

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tripdawg420 said:

ive grown alot of orcha/nats
how would i rate it prolly 9/10

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they have a good yield? is easier than cubes? are resistant to contamination?

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it depends on your own trade-offs and priorities as much as anything. It's hard to say more than generalities like "Cultivating actual natalensis is rare, but ochras are common, pretty easy to grow, and tend to be more potent than classic cubes."

They seem easy to grow. I haven't had issues with major overlay, but I've either grown in shoeboxes with a reasonably high proportion of coir to spawn (around 0.5-0.75L spawn to 2L coir) or top-fruited in jars with a coir top-layer. I may have also gotten lucky with non-overlaying genetics from multispore. Mine have seemed to prefer a little more airflow than cubes, but whether that means keeping a shoebox lid ajar or what depends on your climate. They did well in a water tub. They also didn't seem to mind a cold (59F / 15C) basement in the winter.



They can be easy to work with on agar, because the myc tends to be rhizomorphic often enough that it's easy to visually distinguish from mold. I haven't worried too much about it being resistant to contam, I just transfer away from it and focus on clean growth.



Left: Rhizo (ropy) ochra myc on a low-nutrition plate. Right: The exact same culture, on a high-nutrition plate. More tomentose (furry), but still looks more ordered/organized than mold growth. (The halo is the light behind the plate, not contam.)

They seem decently potent. Multispore grows will have variation, but it seems like the average potency within the gene pool is higher than with average cubes. They are potent enough, for my purposes. If you grow them you'll likely soon have enough mushrooms that maximizing potency won't be a priority. I'm mainly interested in measuring potency because I don't want to take way more than planned and have a terrible time. If I want more potency I'll just put slightly more in my tea.

Almost all ochras I've grown have been heavy spore dumpers (like the Tao's here), so making prints is easy. I found one particular culture that doesn't drop spores, and I've tended to grow that because it makes harvesting less messy. I'll probably go back to prints for multispore eventually though, I'm curious about what other variety will appear.

I can't be sure what I'm saying is universal to ochras, and other people here have probably grown 10-100x as many as I have, but that's been my consistent experience. They seem like a beginner-friendly non-cube species. You might like them more than cubes, you might not.

pickle_jars said:

Almost all ochras I've grown have been heavy spore dumpers (like the Tao's here), so making prints is easy. I found one particular culture that doesn't drop spores, and I've tended to grow that because it makes harvesting less messy. I'll probably go back to prints for multispore eventually though, I'm curious about what other variety will appear.

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I have had a similar experience recently while trying to isolate some colored cap varieties.  I ended up with a line that produces almost no spores to the point that I can barely see them on foil when trying to make prints.  The same line has the tendency to readily fruit on agar.  And since I just complained about very light spores I found one that dropped spores on the plate while I was out of town for the last month.