Mushrooms - DIY, spores, etc šŸ„ (Part 1)

Thanks got the hang of it now.

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The kit worked very well for me. I became less careful from flush to flush (got way more than I needed at that time anyway) and I abandoned it during the 4th flush because I got some mold on the cake. Could have easily avoided that with a bit more caution.

I spent ~30ā‚¬, took only a few days to arrive. Came with a bag with micro filter and a clip, just needed to add water. Iā€™d order again, but I wanted to try doing it myself just for fun. And I can give away some jars this way.

Canā€™t beat the price of the kit if you only need a small (?) amount. I got like 30g dry I think, could have gotten 40g. I think vermiculite, syringes, rice, jars, an hour of pressure cooking plus labour were more expensive :stuck_out_tongue: The joy of DIY is worth a lot to me, but if it fails a few times for reasons I canā€™t control Iā€™ll be back to the kit.

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Mehā€¦ at least you did some looking into how to do itā€¦you werenā€™t some Reddit hipster thinking it should just happen because you read 3 posts on how to do it lol

Seems you have a pretty good handle on what youā€™re doing though so I think you do alrightā€¦ just keep me updatedā€¦ I love mushroom pics and noone really messed with them on here too much and Iā€™m too old to go and hear what the children on shroomery have to say about it anymoreā€¦ I was there for years and then decided to try my hand at growing weed, started here and kinda dropped them lol

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I like to get background when something sparks my interest. I do my procrastination on a high level I guess. :joy: And it took quite a while until I dared to order a kit, plenty of time to read up on things. I like the shroomery for the information I found there, but I never considered making an account.

I was a bit paranoid about growing them, I donā€™t think I have any pics left. I always found shrooms look crazy in pics, as if people photoshopped them. It was fascinating to see they really look like this. :joy:

I find OG to be a good place to dump weed pics and delete them from my devices, no reason not to post some shrooms. :wink:

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My last good shoe box lol

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Very impressive amigo! Does anyone know how long spores are viable? Do they die in water like pollen for example? I want to bring some live ones home and try to get them to grow in my backyard grass.

gonna go read https://mycotopia.net/forum/32-mushroom-spores-microscopy-shroom-biology/

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Completely agree for the most part, with one question.

When an individual spore germinates it is haploid, and needs to come in contact with another haploid to fuse into a diploid to actually produce a mushroom. Isnā€™t that the process of creating new strains, or would spores from two different strains be incompatible for some reason?

(I agree with your statement that thereā€™s no breeding mushrooms because a home grower has next to zero chance of controlling the process to that extent.)

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Typically last pretty well as long as you keep them cool, dry and darkā€¦ I still use a print from about 4 years ago I made and syringes are the sameā€¦ As long as you keep them well theyā€™ll lastā€¦ You will have a bunch non viable spores but they just wonā€™t germinate while the rest do but thatā€™s not a problem

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There is no variation of speciesā€¦ Mixing B+ spores and Golden teacher spores you are still just mixing spores lol

They can call it ā€œbreedingā€ or ā€œstrainsā€ if they want but in the end, there is no way to increase potency, there is no way to harness specific traits other than tissue cloning the mush you want and even then, itā€™s the environment that guages whether or not that cloned tissue can (and it will be DNA identical to parent) even look like the clone you took it from

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Just my thoughts on it over the yearsā€¦ Iā€™ve ran so many different named varieties of the same p. Cubensis mushroom and 95% all end up looking very similar with slight differences if any and if there are itā€™s because of how that specific mushroom, after many generations, has adapted to the environment it came from causing some to have a proclivity to be shorter and stockier whole others sometimes crank out tall hollow onesā€¦

I look at it as an evolutionary step of a living organismā€¦ Kinda like the finches of the galapogos, every island has the same finch species but on every island they all have small evolutionary differences that helped them survive on that specific island, whether it was blunt or sharp beak or drab colors vs bright and extravagant, but in the end, they are still the exact same bird species down to the double helix, just have adapted from the others to survive.

Wow Iā€™m feeling chatty today haha

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I love seeing people getting into growing them and especially taking the time to do it themselvesā€¦ It is a tough gig sometimes and it takes about as long as growing a good plant but thereā€™s something about the misting and fanning thatā€™s oddly satisfying lol

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So are cubes and pans too distant to be compatible? Man, we need a PhD Mycologist in the house. :grin:

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Yeaā€¦ itā€™s been tried, but with that kind of variation the mycellium would compete and you can actually see which is which because the wonā€™t lock up togetherā€¦ It gets even worse when you shake the grain as they get really confused and usually just stallā€¦ however you could grow cube on one side and pans on the other side of a cake but the pans need different treatment then the cubes do in terms of substrateā€¦

Now there was a story sooooo many years ago that the ā€œPF Menaceā€ variety was supposed to be a cross between cubensis and azurescens but thatā€™s been disproved through testingā€¦again hype lol

Now ā€œPenis Envyā€ is stronger than the rest because of the mutationā€¦ I donā€™t know how it works out but they are very LSD likeā€¦ Take a bit longer to grow as well but worth itā€¦ 1g dose of PE is like 7g of any regular old cubensisā€¦ Again there is a story there that Iā€™ll have to find as wellā€¦

And back to mixing sporesā€¦ Interesting thought and Iā€™ll find the picture in a while, but a few years ago I watched a grower innoculate jars with Albino A+ and another cube variety that was not an ā€œalbinoā€ and the dual mycellium was compatible as still cubensisā€¦ However, when it fruited, the albinos and the brown caps were visible and still very segregated from each otherā€¦ no brown caps in the albino clusters and no albinos in the brown caps clustersā€¦ it was a very interesting watch for sure

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Aight so after a little research:
There is Mycelial Mating, which is what I was referring to, but I guess itā€™s usually unsuccessful in creating a hybrid and usually only one of the two will grow, like you mentioned.
Thereā€™s Protoplast Fusion, which seems to be the most viable method, and even then, percent of useful hybrids would be in the single digits, if even that high.

It sounds like mushrooms as a species have just been around for too long, and like turtles and alligators, they donā€™t see any reason to change the way theyā€™ve been doing things.

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Exactlyā€¦ And reading ā€˜Mycellium Runningā€™ and listening to Paul Stamets talk about it is amazingā€¦ the processes and symbiotic relationships they form are amazing

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Iā€™m happy this thread was resurrected, such an interesting process! I want to get going on it at some point.

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There is definitely something alive in there.

Edit: just scrolled back to see when I started them, it has only been 2 days. Guess I did an ok job at this. :blush:

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It sure is. his ted talks are cool

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if you had given it fresh media it could have kept growing =) you could tranfer a bit of the last flus and transfer to a new rice cake and so on.

this is how in the victorian days mushrooms where cultivated

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For two days that is too much growth also looks greyish not whiteā€¦ My guess is cobweb though.

Editā€¦ Seeing greenā€¦ Change that to trichodermaā€¦worseā€¦

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