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Messages - wiccan_seeker

#1
Cultivation / Psilocybe cyanescens outdoors in Holland
November 07, 2006, 06:27:33 AM
I decided to attempt growing Wavy Caps when a friendly stranger handed me a tablespoon of spawn on woodchips. I would probably fail, but why not try it?

Along the way I decided to cut several corners, and nontheless succeeded. Here and there are about 10 pins, and its the first day in Holland that's in the correct temperature range.


First thing I did was put my spoonful of spawn in the fridge and headed for the pet shop, where I bought a bag of small hardwood chips used as animal bedding (not the wood shavings, which are pine, but small chips about the size of 1/2 inch matchsticks which were hardwood)

I mixed the woodchips with their own weight of water, then loaded this into peanut butter pots, and I pressure-cooked them for one-hour, and let cool overnight.

I only had little spawn so with a sterilized forceps I took bits of spawn and put them on top of the wood chips, loosely placing the lids on top of them. I put them in an ordinary dark closet for colonisation, and there they remained for months on end as the spawn had to grow through the full length (5 inches) of the substrate, as the pots were full and could not be shaken. In this way I converted a tablespoon of spawn into about two liters of spawn

Then came last spring.

In a tub I mixed eight liters of woodchips with their own weight of hot water, which they readily soaked up, and I let this slowly cool in an airtight plastic bag to make maximum use of this very sloppy pasteurisation.

Then I forked out the jars of spawn, reduced it to small bits and then stirred this into the moist woodchips.

I then dug a shallow trench of about 30 x 20 cm and 15 or so deep, and poured in the ten liters of inoculated woodchips. I did this in an awkward corner of my garden that's always moist and catches almost no sun, even to the point of making lavender unhappy, which as many gardeners know is quite hard. I covered the woodchips by shaking about half an inch of soil and leaves over it.

I only occasionally watered it. Not as much as my cat which initially loved this outdoor litterbox, until I shook some eucalyptus leaves over it, a good cat repellant. The patch was shaded by belladonna growing overhead.

Then, in the beginning of November, temperature dropped into the favorable range and presto! Out pops a mushroom, and about ten pins are visible here & there.


This in no way is HI TEK, but rather a rather sloppy Ghetto TEK which proved to be succesful.

If anyone should get anything out of this, it is that you really should give woodlovers a go: as seen here it is hard to mess up with them, and once you got an established bed then thought-out expansion techniques can deliver you from sterile techniques forever, reducing growing shrooms to normal gardening procedures.