Picking shrooms in nature is an unbeatable experience, but they aren’t easy to find, or import (if you are picking in one of my favourite spots, San Jose Del Pacifico for instance). But also what if you want a particular strain, or feel? Are you going to fly to Mexico, or Bolivia?Likely not.
So what do you do when you want to fulfil that mushroom craving? Grow them!
Now, growing mushrooms is not as easy as growing cannabis. But after much experimenting, we’ve hit the perfect formula for growing mushrooms that thrive, and they can be a great crop for growing indoors at home. If you’ve ever had a wet basement, you’ve seen why indoors is not a bad thing for a mushroom farm.
Many people sell mushroom grow kits (heck, we might even do that in the future), but you can’t get the hard-to-find varietles that way so we grow from scratch.
While laws are loosening in Canada around psilocybin mushrooms technically became illegal in 1982 in Canada, so maybe don’t brag about it openely when you manage to get your first crop;)
The Beginners Guide To Growing Mushrooms
Step One: Create a sterile environment
You need a sterile environment. Yes, we all know that mushrooms grow in damp, moist, dirt laden spaces, but you have to make sure there is no contamination in your mushroom lab. Spores are very delicate, and need to be innoculated or your wonderful shroom-growing environment could become a wonderful mould environment, or grow a more aggressive (and less psychedelic, or even edible) form of mushroom on your wonderful substrate (or growing matter).
Before we go into our mushroom-growing space, we spray ourselves down with alcohol to make sure we aren’t going to bring in any unwanted bacteria, or spores with us.
Step 2: Obtaining a Spore or Spawn
What is a spore? A spore is like the mushroom seed.
Spores are generally purchased in a syringe that has the spore and water. Mushroom spores are microscopic, single-celled reproductive structures that fungi produce and disperse to reach new food sources. The fungi is connected under the ground, and the spores are it’s way to reach out to a larger area. Mushroom fields become giant interconnected hive-mind fungi of intergalactic madness. Ok, but honestly we think this is why shrooms make you feel so at one with everything. But we digress…
What is a spawn? The spawn is the thing that the spore will grow on
& it’s ALSO the mushroom seed.
(Yes, mushrooms are complex and confusing). Strangely spore is a word related to vegetation, where spawn is for fish, a living animal. We think mushrooms are both, but we digress again…Anyway, you need spawn to grow indoors. Spawn is the living fungal culture (mycelium), grown onto a substrate. Substrates can be anything from cardboard to sawdust, grain, or wood “plugs”.
Step 3: Prepare Your Mushroom Substrate
What is mushroom substrate? The growing medium of the mushroom.
Mushrooms can be grown on coffee grounds, grains, cardboard, wood, you name it, and if those items are carrying any other spores or bacteria, it’s likely you will find you are growing THOSE entities rather than your hard-to-find shroom spore. So you have to sterilze or pasturize your substrate BEFORE you innoculate it with the spores you have in your syringe.
Water will also need to be added to the substrate and it may also need to be amended with extra nutrients.
Magic Mushroom Mix & Match Sale
99$ / oz
Choose any 4 of our mushroom varieties (7g each).
Step 4: Innoculate the Substrate
In this case, we aren’t protecting the substrate from shrooms, on the contrary we are infecting it with mad shroom spores!
When you inoculate you want to place your syringe above the substrate at the disinfected level, then dispense evenly throughout the substrate.
Step 5: Incubate Your Shrooms
It’s time to place your shroom babies into a warm, dark, moist (and sterile!!) environement. Remember it is REALLY easy to innoculate your nicely prepared substrate with all kinds of tiny living organisms that might take over from your carefully cultivated shrooms.
How long does it take to incubate shrooms?
Times vary from a few weeks to a few months depending on your set up, the cultivar…the magical mushroom gods…At the end of incubation the mycelium completely colonizes your substrate and you can end up with a solid white mat of mycelium on the outside of your substrate at the end of the process. Don’t freak out. This is a good thing. This means your mushrooms are ready for fruiting!
Step 6: Fruiting your shrooms
You’ve incubated your spores on your substrate, now it’s time to let those little psychedelic psuckers fly. Normally all you have to do is let in a little air, and things should start to grow. The first thing you should see ( within a few days) is the pinning of the mushroom.
Pinning is when strands of mycelium composed of hyphae, (hair-like cells that make up mycelium) start bunching together to form hyphal knots.
Hyphal knots then develop into primordia or baby mushrooms that growers commonly call mushroom “pins” because they often look like the heads of pins.
Seem Too Complicated? Let Us Grow Your Shrooms For you!
We’ve been working hard for the past year to develop hard to find cultivars of incredible mushroom variatles just for you!
You can try our Mix and Match mushroom packs to see what species speaks your language (or makes you speak an amazing new language)!
Remember always start with a microdose of any new magic mushroom, or even a type you are familiar with, but from a new supplier. You never know how strong, or what kind of reaction you will get, so wade in unless you are a diver!
