A friend of mine found an exceptionally potent strain of Psilocybe Bohemica that has been confirmed by a mycologist to be high in psilocybin. We tested these little mushrooms and they are really magical - they bring quite deep dreamy meditative state even at tiny doses, nothing I've experienced even with high doses of Golden Teacher or McKennaii.

I've decided to cultivate these from wild spores (also to spread spores of these wonderful tiny shrooms) but I am not sure what is the best route to take as a beginner (so far I am familiar with just the original PF Tek).

Unfortunately, she is not familiar with making spore prints so I expect these to be somewhat contaminated.

I would like to stick as closely as possible with PF Tek as I don't have a pressure cooker, grains etc.

My idea is the following:

1) put spores on agar dishes
2) pick/isolate healthy culture (most are expected to be plagued by molds and bacteria)
3) make liquid culture (for BRF cake inoculation)
4) inoculate the jars and continue like with original PF Tek

P. bohemica are wood lovers, they probably won't like the PF tek. With woodlovers you'll be in it for the long haul - getting fruits within a year would be exceptional although I can't say for sure if P. bohemica won't be any quicker.

If you manage to get some mycelium on the agar I'd say transfer it to damp cardboard (corrugated carboard which has been soak in hot water for an hour or so, then drained) and once the cardboard is colonised use that to inoculate wood chips. This has worked for P. cyanescens and P. ovoideocystidiata so it should also work for P. bohemica I would think.

Success has also been reported with spores started directly on cardboard but mine didn't work due to Aspergillus niger contamination.

Thanks. I didn't know psilocybes differ that much in habitat. I knew bohemica likes decomposing wood but not that it's necessary for fruiting.

I will therefore stick with basics, there is no more time or space to dwelve into that project unfortunately

Well, you could try making PF style cakes but with more added sawdust. Don't be put off!

Wiki:
(P. bohemica is now considered to be a variety of P. serbica.)

Seriously, if you have the opportunity to push forward knowledge about this species it would be well worth a try.

I've read that they are not too distantly related to P. Cyanescens and P. Azurescens.
I think you'll get a lot of good information researching cultivation of those two.
Seems the gyst is to isolate a clean culture, but I am pretty ignorant of the specifics re; spore vs. cutting bits from stems.
However, I recently inoculated rye grains (sterile) with solated P. Cyanescens spores, which, when the rye was colonized, I just mixed in with non-sterile, soaked woodchips, which then went under the rose bushes in the garden. Very aggressive colonizer. Hopefully P. Bohemica is as vigorous??

By this you mean a colloidal suspension?

The method sounds simple but how did you ensure your spores were free from contamination? How long did colonisation of the rye grains take?

This is taken from "Mycelium Running" by Paul Stamets:

Heh, you overestimate me, Mr. Bond!
I bought them off t'internet, didn't I?

Took about a month to colonize a litre of rye. Maybe a bit slower than P. Cubensis. But once transferred to chips 1 L of inoculated rye burned through 20 L of chips in maybe 2 weeks or something. Fast!

Okay it seems worth trying at least to isolate the culture.

The "Let's Grow Mushrooms!" tutorial (see end of the post) has a chapter about sawdust and woodchips. Their substrate has also gypsum and wheat bran in it (all very cheap ingedients).

Unfortunately, it seems a pressure cooker is necessary to sterilize this substrate. This is a game stopper for me as these large PCs are exteremely expensive in EU. I have a solic 20L canner for thorough steam sterilization but not sure it's enough to sterilize such substrate.

A smaller PC will also do the job, and with the cardboard spawn may even be unnecessary.

In the video, the large size of the PC corresponds with the size of the substrate bag being sterilized.

Yes but I don't want to buy a PC just for this experiment (I ran out of money for the PF tek supplies so I can't even afford the small one...) and I would like to grow a lot of them so I would want to go for large PC anyway, be it for mexican cubes or anything else.

Okay so I will wait until having more resources. The spore prints will hopefully survive the year or so before I could be able to start the project.

Just start some of the spores on cardboard. They'll give you plenty of time to get anything else together and if they're successful you'll have a head start.

You will need:

*cardboard (free)
*hot water (nearly free)
*a plastic tub (very cheap or even free)

One does not need a PC to grow large amounts of woodlovers!

Beautiful shrooms you have there

I see. There is a time involved and I am unfortunately extremely busy (now learning liquid cultures, agar, making growboxes etc. not to mention ten other running projects).

I thought it would be easy to just use different spores in a tek I am already running (PF Tek) but it seems it requires more space and time.

Unfortunately I don't have even an inch of space to place the cardboard in, the room is literally stuffed with mushroom cultivation, extraction and lab equipment

If you were to start with a small piece of cardboard you could leave it in a small tub in the back of a refrigerator for a few months, perhaps? Spores don't keep forever.

Not even an inch of space at the back of your fridge?

Sounds like fun, though

It is not hard to make a reasonable quality spore print. You need cheap latex (or nitrile) gloves, bio-ethanol (or any other desinfectant grade concentrated alcohol), a few plastic food containers or glass jars with lids, a sharp knife, scissors, tweezers, zip-loc bags ("weed baggies" ), a roll of aluminium foil and a roll of kitchen towel paper.

The zip-col bags, aluminium foil roll and the kitchen towel paper roll should ideally be fresh from the shop, so they'll be "factory sterile" (ie. not truly sterile, but with very little contamination).

Put on the latex gloves, wipe your hands with an ethanol soaked paper towel. Clean the alcohol bottle the same way. Clean the work surface in the same way.

Next, clean the plastic containers or the glass jars and their lids with an alcohol soaked paper towel and put the upside down containers/jars and their lids on a fresh paper towel on the clean work surface to let any remains of alcohol evaporate. Now clean the scissors and the knife with an alcohol soaked paper towel.

With all equipment cleaned, wipe your gloved hands again with an alcohol soaked paper towel and cut a rectangle from the aluminium foil. Place the rectangle on top of an upside down lid and place the plastic container or glass jar on top of it. Having the containers upside down like that makes it easier to manipulate the print and the mushroom cap. You can optionally make a stack of two or three pieces of aluminium foil, in case you manage to make more than one print from a single mushroom cap.

When you have prepared all the containers/jars, you can start putting the mushroom caps in. Place the mushroom on its cap on a clean paper towel and cut the stem where it meets the cap. Lift a container or jar from the lid and put the mushroom cap on the aluminium square, with the gills facing the aluminium foil. Put the container/jar back in place.

Wipe the knife with a fresh alcohol soaked paper towel and process the next mushroom, until you run out of mushrooms or out of containers.

After anywhere between 6 hours or a day, the mushroom cap will have dropped a load of spores onto the aluminium foil and you can collect the print.

Put on clean gloves, repeat the cleaning procedure as above for the gloves, the alcohol bottle, the work surface, the knife and the tweezers. Put a clean paper towel on the work surface.

Gently lift the first jar or container and place it besides the lid. Pick up the mushroom cap with one hand and pick up the aluminium foil square with the clean tweezers. Put the foil onto the fresh paper towel while still holding it with the tweezers. Press the clean knife blade gently down the middle of the foil so that it starts to fold a little. Using the tweezers, fold the foil in half, with the spore print on the inside of the fold. Press the outside of the folded foil a little with the knife, making sure the foil is folded flat. Now open the zip-loc bag and place the folded foil inside the bag and close the bag. Using a marker pen, write the name of the mushroom on the outside of the bag.

Repeat for all prints, cleaning the tweezers and the knife with an alcohol soaked paper towel each time.

Executing this procedure meticulously does not guarantee sterility, which is impossible with wild mushrooms anyway, but it will minimize unnecessary contamination. Spore prints produced in this way are a very good staring point for culturing on agar medium in petri dishes.


Last year I grew an agar culture from such a print. After a few transfers of selected best sections of the agar plates, I inoculated some mix of bran and sawdust with the agar plates. This was then spawned onto a big bucket full of pasteurized wood chips (I had been pasteurizing manure enriched straw and tossed the wood chips in the used pasteurization soup and let is soak a bit). I got a small harvest already last fall. The plastic bucket has stood outside in the shade all winter and summer, I have watered it a few times during the hottest weeks of summer. This fall I expect a really good flush.

BTW, I did try to inoculate cardboard with a piece of stem and some mycelium stuck to it last fall, after I cut the caps to make prints, but I find it to be a bit more tricky than it sounds. The cardboard dries out easily or, if kept too wet, is prone to some molds.

I know how to make quality spore prints.

But the friend of mine who can pick the mushrooms don't (she don't have the equipment etc). I already sent her an instructional video.

She live far from me so the time she visits me to hand me the spores, the picked mushrooms will already be dry and I won't have opportunity to work with them - so she has to make prints while at home...

Thanks for the tips. Maybe I will also make some cultures on agar, select the clean ones and send them for further cultivation (though the material may get damaged in transit).

One final tip on making spore prints (seeing as it's been mentioned, although all these tips could go into their own dedicated post ):

Stick an alcohol-sterilized pin into each mushroom cap as this helps with lifting the cap for a second print. Angle the pin so it doesn't just pull out.

Cardboard tek works best if the temperature is kept between 35 and 50°F (about 2 and 10°C). My mouldy one was certainly warmer than this for the most part.