Good luck with your bioassay!

As for inoculation, I generally follow the PF Tek with two holes in my jars rather than four. I do realize that the tek uses a different substrate so I only use the inoculation portion of that tek mixed with Cruetmixer's write up. That and I reference this as well. There are other references too but I won't link them all...they are mostly found within shroomery.

I have never used an agar isolation to inoculate. I always take a shower before I inoculate. Turn off AC or Heat (forgot that last time,I think). Then I sterilize the hell out of everything around me and in my work space with 99.9% IPA constantly as I go through flaming and alcohol swabbing the needles from a syringe. I usually do this on my completely empty and sterile kitchen table.

I wear a hairnet/bandana, a painters mask (not a cheap cloth one), gloves and clean clothes (usually just shorts).

I've never really had a problem with losing jars before this...of course I've also never worked with grains either. I'm used to vermiculite/brown rice flour substrates and variations mainly. I now know that grain can be potentially difficult...but no worries, I love a good challenge!!

Also I just read an interesting post by Roger Rabbit found here.

Basically, I've been keeping my jars in the dark and loosely covered by a white T-shirt. I think this may be another factor as to why mine are moving so slow! Apparently some ambient light will be beneficial to the truffle formation.

I messed around with exposing my first batch to light. Not sure it helped any. Certainly didn't hurt them. But then again, I think my first batch was doomed anyway. Hopefully it helps yours!

Bioassay was successful, I think. I took a minor dose to judge nausea/potency factor. 2g of dried material capped on an empty stomach. Effects began 30-45 minutes later. Thankfully, went like a normal light trip, which for me goes something like this:

1. Can feel something is happening
2. Feeling slightly unstable/uncomfortable/confused, body heating up, sweating
3. Discomfort fading into periods of introspection, happiness, laughter, humility, and sadness. Difficulty focusing eyes, falling into a trance-like state. Distances become difficult to determine. Colors begin to stand out, become more vivid. Things occasionally move in the edges of my vision.
4. Highs and lows fading to neutrality, stability, peacefulness

Looking forward to doubling the dose next time, probably as a tea.

Sounds about right! I can definitely relate especially with those feeling when you are coming up on mushrooms! It was always a bit overwhelming but after that first hour it was generally smooth sailing, depending on the dose of course! Sounded like a nice little trip from 2g dried! 4g will (should) definitely bring it to the next level!

Yeah, 4g should be good. I'll switch to tea though, and drink the solids with it.

The reason for this is to avoid too many gel caps. 2g was six gel caps. Doubling that will be twelve, which I think it starting to push it a bit too far. I either pack them tighter, or switch to another method. Tea works for me, so tea it is!

Oh, and I exposed my jars to light to see how they react. I'm going to want them a bit more mature for the dead show.

Finally got around to researching a faster way to harvest these things. Found a tek that basically has the raw product dumped into a laundry bag, tied shut, and washed in the washing machine on a short cycle with cold water. Sclerotia should be completely separated at this point, and just needs to be filtered out with a sieve.

I'll give this a try on one of my next jars.

Yikes, 12 gel caps does indeed sound like a lot for the stomach to process!

So I saw that John Mayer teamed up with some of the Grateful Dead to form Dead and Company and are doing a Halloween show this year! Is that the one you are talking about? If so, that is awesome! On a related note, my lady and I are going to see David Gilmour in Chicago next April! I cannot wait!!!



Now that is an interesting method! I'll have to test it out to when harvest time comes around. Lastly, inoculation day is tomorrow for 10 more jars. I followed your method you wrote out a few posts back. A lot more of the seeds seemed to have germinated this time around. I think soaking them all together and then giving them a good boil really helped. Last time they soaked in their individual jars before draining and then PC-ing. I have a better feeling about this next set now that I have a better sense of what I am doing.

I'm still considering starting those GTs but I'm on the fence because I already have two projects going already...I don't know, I'm sure I'll make up my mind sometime...

Yeah, I found out the hard way with my cactus experiments. Taking too many gel caps can cause digestive issues. So we're limited in what we can do using that method.



That's the one, yup! I don't think it's the Halloween show in particular though. I haven't seen the dead since Jerry was alive, so this will be special for me. Exactly twenty years later, I'm finally seeing them again.



Yeah, after that final boil, if you've stopped it right when they are staring to crack open, they should be soft and puffy-looking, totally stuffed with coffee water.

I would love to grow some fruits. They have the advantage of a much faster turnaround time. I just can't in my current situation, which is why I went with a much slower stealth method. I'd recommend doing it if you can, at least to hedge your stone grow.

I will definitely grow some fruits, it is just a matter of when...I'd love to be able to low dose before the David Gilmour concert (talking like 1 gram...it is a huge venue and I wouldn't want to get lost or be tripping too hard to find my way...I'm thinking pot brownies may be more appropriate...save the shrooms for the day before. Haven't worked out all the details yet! )

Yesterday, I inoculated the other 10 jars. I think they will do better than the ones I have now. The heater is helping but they are still going very slow. There are stones that have formed even without the whole substrate being colonized. I don't know if that is a problem or not. I think they may be too dry but no matter, I'm going to let them go for another 3 months at least and see where we are at and compare them to the growth of the new jars.

These 10 are going to be exposed to regular but indirect sunlight throughout the entire process. According to RR, this can help speed up colonization.

Also, last time while inoculating, I didn't make my jar holes big enough and was finding it difficult to squirt the spores around and down the sides of the glass. Needless to say, I made sure that that did not happen this time...

I find that I can think clearly enough to do normal every day things while low/microdosing (level 1), so you could do that if you want. The pot brownies merging in at the show should be nice.

That's what I'll be doing anyway. I couldn't find someone to go with, so I'm stuck going alone. Have to keep it all very low dose.


Awesome! I hope they turn out great!


Yeah, that's how my first batch was too. In the end they were finally all colonized, but very lightly.


Sounds good! Mine seem to be doing well with the light. I'm pretty sure I am seeing new growth just from having them out a short time. Probably didn't take much though, since they were already this far along.

The problem is that it defeats my stealth requirements. Short duration exposure isn't a big deal, I just can't have stuff out in the open for long durations.

Round 2 bioasay results:

Sorry for not posting yesterday. I was really quite tired by the time it was over. I was actually surprised at how drained I was.

I decided to go with 8g and have some fun, aiming for a high level 3. Shroom tea is usually somewhat inefficient due to potency loss, so I padded the measurement a bit.

8g into french press, wetted with lemon juice, while water boiled. After boiling, let water cool down slightly, poured over mushroom powder. Let sit for 10-20 minutes, poured half into cup, mixed with cool-aid. Chugged first cup, poured second. Taste isn't bad at all, way easier than cactus tea. Had a little left over, was going to get to it. Never got the chance...lol.

I drank the second cup more slowly. This is where it begins. Before I could even finish, it hit me pretty hard. I was barely able to finish the second cup before I was so dazed and confused that I was actually kind of frightened. It doesn't usually hit me this fast, but that's a good sign--the batch is pretty potent. As usual, I needed to go to the bathroom (the comeup tends to make me go). While sitting there, I started to see through the floor like it was a glass window over the sky, and slight multi-colored patterns started crawling across the walls. Woah. I was getting that 'eyes open wide, seeing everything all at once' thing, and I could feel it happening. As I washed my hands, I looked up at myself and saw my pupils dilating...this was happening within about 10-15 minutes!

I didn't have to worry though, it turned out OK. I blasted through the comeup within about half an hour, not too bad. Turned out to be a nice level 3 I would say. Not very visual, although there were persistent light visual components to it. It mostly just very mind trippy.

The edges of objects that I focused on were moving, undulating, crawling, changing, eroding into dust or a brown powder, something like that. Kind of hard to explain, as you can imagine. On the TV, actors faces would occasionally have blue and green hues fading in and out of them. It kind of makes them look like plant people, lol.

It didn't take long for it to be over, sadly. Definitely not as long-lasting fun as mescaline. Was probably about 5-6 hours before I was back to normal.

After this, I would like to figure out how to do two things:

1. Slow down the comeup so that it isn't hitting me so hard all at once. That was pretty intense!

2. Extend the duration to be more like mescaline, giving a longer experience. Once I'm in it, and I get used to it, it's kind of fun, and I would like to stay there a bit longer.

Would it be possible to slowly sip it for about 6 hours, taking in a large dose over a long duration? Or would I reach a point where a cutoff occurs, and nothing more being ingested would be used?

Awesome! Thank you for the report! It is good to know that mushroom tea is easier to down than Cactus. I switched to extracting mescaline mainly because of how nasty that tea is...Ayahuasca and Mescaline Tea are some of the grossest things I've ever put in my mouth...worth it in the end but still...

Anywho, so 8g tea did the trick this time? Wonderful, indeed! Do you think it would have been more intense if you had eaten the stone mush after straining your tea? That is what I'd probably do. Drink the tea and then gobble up the remaining mush in hopes that no potency would be lost in the process...Actually I'd probably just munch the stones as is. Sorry for the random thought patterns, I am tired and have had 2 pints of good ol' beer and just loaded up some blue dream...

I can definitely relate to those feelings you describe. On cubes, the come up would be very noticeable at about 15-20minutes in and would last for about an hour especially if on an empty stomach. Then it would even out and slowly rise to the peak...after that it would taper off gradually, generally.

To slow the come up, (again, with cubes) I would eat them slowly over the course of about 30-45 minutes or less(I would put the whole dose in my mouth, chew it slowly and swallow it bit by bit over time...gross, but it worked). This seemed to lessen the intensity of said come up but also lessened the overall experience too, IME. That could be purely subjective as I have nothing to really compare it to.

I have no idea when it comes to extending the trip. I am unsure if re-dosing (or constantly dosing throughout) would have a greater effect since normally you have to wait about 4 days for the tolerance to wear off (that or eat twice as much for the same effects)...The longest mushroom journey I can recall ever having is about 7-8 hours and that was on 7g of potent, home grown Golden Teachers. More like 10 hours if you include the come up, the comedown, and the afterglow which led to me crashing out into sleep.

I guess the only way to know for sure is to test it out...

You are welcome GTO! I hope everything is going well with your second batch. How long do you have left on your first batch?

I am still working on my cactus extractions. I have 4 feet of bridgesii sitting here waiting for me to decide what to do with it.

Since I've had no luck with the limonene tek, I'd like to next try Kash's A/B tek, but I am currently stuck on obtaining the required materials. I don't want to order anything online, and the stores around me don't have HCl/muriatic acid. (I assume they only have it during the summer, so I'm out of luck for half a year. Ugh.) I'm also stuck on finding citric acid, although that should be no problem to order online if I have to. I think I have everything else. I even got a pH meter, since that seems to be required. (I assume that's where I was failing in the limonene tek. Following the instructions "pH blind" apparently doesn't work so well.)

In the meantime, I've been making resin and capping it, which works OK, but gives a full spectrum trip--meaning that the further I want to go, the worse the body load will be, which blocks me from enjoying it fully.


Yup, definitely would have been more intense.

I did intend to drink down the mush after the second cup. There was about 1/3 cup left with mush in it, which wouldn't have been hard to gulp down. During the comeup, I saw it on the kitchen counter, debated for a second, and decided not to do it. I wasn't sure how far the two cups were taking me yet.

That probably would have extended it, since the solid material would take longer to break down. I'll try to do that next time. How about this: I'll move the solids to my first cup, which I can easily finish, then drink the second slowly over time. In the event that I can't finish the second up, I'll have already taken down the long duration material.

Alternatively, I could find a way to just eat the 6-8g of powder, without using gel caps. Maybe mix it with peanut butter or something. That method tends to cause more stomach distress and nausea though, but it's worth a try.

My first batch was inoculated on July 12th, 2015. So they turned three months old on the 12th of October. I plan on letting them go for another 3 months at least.



I too have Cactus, about 4.5 feet of San Pedro. I have a vacation coming up the first week of November so my lady and I plan to journey in one way or another. More than likely it will be a Mescaline trip with a bit of DMT at the end if all goes well.

I have had pretty good results with 69ron's Limonene Cactus Extraction. I don't usually purify it at the end either (MEK is nasty stuff) and the full spec product is hard to keep down I have come to realize, especially if no measure is taken to reduce the nausea. Cactus was the very first thing I ever extracted and that inspired me to learn more about chemistry and extractions in general, thus leading me here, to the Nexus!

I found that after basing the cactus powder, I would let it sit for an entire 24 hours, giving the base a lot of time to breakdown the plant cells and to sufficiently raise the pH. I also use a bit less water than the tek calls for. I noticed that when I used 300ml (or whatever the number is, been a while since I extracted cactus) the powder was soupy which made it difficult to separate the limonene, even when using a french press. I now just decant carefully and through a coffee filter so that no basic mix gets through (I do the same thing for limonene DMT extractions). I also up the amount of base closer to a 1:2 ratio of base to cactus. In Ron's tek it calls for 25g lime per 100g which does the trick but I usually use closer to 40-50g lime just to be safe.



That sounds like a decent plan and in theory, it should work quite well.

On eating the powder, you could put it in pudding or something...or the peanut butter would work but 8 grams would be a decent pile of powder so it may not be worth it. Too bad the mushroom powder isn't soluble in something food safe/edible to where you could dissolve it and then just drink it down like the tea.

Back when I used to mess around with MDMA (years ago) some friends and I would "parachute" our doses. Put your dose in a small square piece of toilet paper, wrap it up so it stayed closed and then with your head tilted backwards, drop it onto the back of your throat and chase with a quick swig of water. This would slightly delay the onset but nowhere near as long as it would take if we capped it. But that was more ideal for 100-150mg doses. I can only imagine how much TP it would take for 8 grams of powder...

Edit: Forgot to mention that my second batch (6 out of 10 jars) is already showing signs of life, after 6 days. That is much faster than last time. I believe it was a week and a half before anything noticeable happened last time.

Sorry, I hadn't seen your edit until now. Came back to mention the results of my last experiment.

That's good to hear! I'm glad the second batch is moving faster, that's a good sign.

Results of last sunday's experiment:

I decided on 6g of tea with solids, in the following way:

• Making only one very strong cup. I was previously making two cups, in order to be sure there was enough water to extract the alkaloids, since I wasn't eating the solids. I found that the water actually turns white this way. It looks like I put milk in my tea.
  
• Drinking the solids with the liquid. This was intended to increase the duration of the trip.
  
• Drinking the tea slowly so that it didn't come on so fast.
  

Drinking the tea slowly was successful in decreasing the intensity of the beginning. Thanks for that idea. The nausea and disconcerting confusion were kept to an acceptable level.

Drinking the solids with the liquids did seem to increase the duration of the trip. Not sure how much exactly, and I did have trouble at the end of the cup, but it did seem to work. I wonder if taking a handful of caps with the tea would do the same thing, thus avoiding the yucky solids-in-the-liquids thing.

The trip overall was probably the most intense (of the recent tests) I've had yet. However, the peak seemed again to be strangely premature. Out of the 6ish hour duration, it went something like this:

• 0:00 Beginning of dose ingestion
  
• 0:15 Noticing effects onsetting
  
• 0:30 Difficulty finishing last bit in cup because it was hitting me so hard
  
• 1:30 Seemed to peak with a blast of OEVs.
  
• Gradually coming down from that point over the next 4.5 hours. I probably could have gone about doing normal things after the 4:00 hour mark.
  

This is odd, because I thought it should peak at about 3:00 in? It has a rapid onset, quickly peaks, then slowly fades.

Another interesting thing to note is how I was getting what I would call "visual disturbances" throughout the week. Every once in a while, like once a day, I would see something change out of the corner of my eye (like an object's shape would change, or it would move slightly), but when I look over at it, it would be normal. That wasn't happening after the other experiments I've run.

Oh, and one more thing: Fargo season two is awesome, especially while tripping. I love the alien thing they have going on this time.

Good to hear that slowly ingesting (or slower than normal) helps with the intensity of the come up for you too. That was always the worst part for me. The come up always made me feel a bit uneasy so that is why I started experimenting with ingesting them slower.

About the peak, perhaps more of the actives are in the tea (liquid) and since that was ingested first, it absorbs and is metabolized quicker therefore leading to a quicker come up and peak. The remaining tea (solids) would take longer to get through your system and if they have less actives, they contribute to the peak a bit but they are really just extending the duration....? I don't really know but that might have something to do with it.

If you get the timing right with the caps and tea, I think you would be in for a very intense ride!

"Visual disturbances" are pretty common for me for a few days after any decent psychedelic experience. I think it is just our brains returning to baseline, playing little tricks on us until it gets there. I find it fascinating!

Moving onto the jars, my batch of 10 is flying in comparison to my first batch. I think I did a poor job of preparing the grain the first time around. That is really the only variable that changed besides having natural, but indirect sunlight on them everyday since inoculation. Whatever it is, I'm glad I started the second batch! They may catch up to the first ones!

Yeah, I think the tea makes it hit much faster, thus causing the trip to end sooner. I might have to drop that, if I want a longer duration. (It's nice to know that there is a short-duration route though.) I have also been thinking about mixing the powder with some honey and eating it that way.

The interesting part about the visual disturbances is that I wasn't getting them before (in my recent experiments). I am guessing that I was tripping pretty hard in this last one, just not in a way that I am used to.

Awesome! I bet your second batch will overtake the first batch, and I would guess will produce more fruits.

Good news! I tested out the water harvesting tek today. I was impressed by how well it worked. It is much more efficient. I didn't have a laundry bag, so I modified the tek to work around it. Let me create a new thread for this.

Second jar: 95g wet (all mostly cleaned nuggets, no unknown balls this time)

When the time comes, I will be experimenting with tea as well as just eating them plain in hopes of discovering any major differences in the ROA. My GF will also be included in these experiments, so it will be nice to have another perspective besides just the two of us!

It is strange...my first jars still have yet to fully colonize, some are close but not quite there. One has what appears to be a decent amount of stones...not that I would know. I think it is just too dry in the jars mixed with not enough broken hulls from the grain. Beginners (sclerotia newbie) mistakes, I guess...

On the flip side, the second batch continues to wow me! One jar is more than halfway colonized and is showing no signs of slowing down while the others are pretty much right behind it, growth wise.

I checked out that thread, it seems like it will work quite well and I'll have to give it a try.

Congrats on the harvest!

Just a small update:

The second batch has successfully outgrown my first batch (I think the first batch may have stopped growing all together and may need to be harvested...improper grain preparation resulting in too dry of a substrate was the culprit, I believe). There are HUGE truffle formations in most of the jars in the second batch. This may be due to the fact that I used 1.5-2cc of spores per jar but there could be other factors.

If all goes well, I might be starting some GTs very soon to supplement the stones.