Specie: Psilocybe Allenii (a closely related specie to Psilocybe Cyanescens)
Abstract (TLDR)
This is a great species of mushroom that could be growned in many temperate and/or mediterranean climats. It grows on wood chips, which is a cheap and available ressource. Different strategies have been tried (directly spawning rye, expend the spawn on sawdust, using hot or cold pasteurization for woodchips, etc). Unfortunatly, wild boars messed up a bit the results. One patch was really successful, the one patch i didn't covered with cardboard and didn't water over the summer.
Place of experimentation : 41° Latitude North , Europe. USDA Zone 8.
In the bottom of a valley, next to a river, 300m above sea level. The climate is colder in winter than in the surrounding areas, because of the cold air coming down the mountains chain.
Summers are completely dry and really hot (30+°C , up to 42°C last summer)
Average yearly precip : 1000mm ( but I suspect that nowadays, it's quite less)
Modus operanti :
I order 1 spore print of
Ps.Allenii. This species was choosen because no
Ps.cyanescens were available. Allenii is from California, which enjoys a similar climate and similar latitude than our land.
Phase 1 : Petri dish.(All the sterile work is made in a 'still air box'
The spore print is inoculated on agar petri dishes with a home made inoculation loop. The left over of the print is mixed with water to make a spore syringe, which I used too to make more plates.
After a week or so, the best dishes were selected and transferred to other petri dishes.
Phase 2 : Liquid cultureThis 2nd generation of plates is then used to inoculate liquid cultures (0,2% malt agar extract). About 15 jars of LC are made. I added pieces of broken glass to later help breaking down the mycelium strings.
The LC are left to incubate at 20-24°C for at least a week.
Phase 3 : Rye grain bagsOnce ready, the best LC are choosen. The ones with blurry liquid are discarded (sign of bacteria).
I prepared some rye grain in culture bags (Unicorn type 3B if I remember). These bags can be sealed and THEN sterelized. One bag is beetween 1.3 to 2kg of wet grain.
The bags are incoluated with a syringe. Between 5 to 20ml of LC is used (I didnt notice much difference in speed, no matter the quantity). Once inoculated, I put some tape on the little hole made by the syringe, and let them incubate at 22-25°C (I was also doing cubensis at the time too, so that's what it was anyway).
I cannot recall exactly how long it took to colonize. It's definitly slower than cubensis, maybe 3 weeks for full colonization?
I got maybe 20% failure on the bags (don't remember neighter, but more or less).
Phase 4 : Transfer to wood base substratesWith the bags, I tried different transfers.
- inoculating pasteurized cardboard.
- inoculating pasteurized sawdust (different source, one was mostly Madronia, the other one mostly acacia dealbata)
With a 1.5kg bag of spawn, I would do maybe 2x tubs of 10kg (wet) sawdust
I got mild result.
The cardboard seems to colonize but not fully and not really healthy
Some of the sawdust mixes got contaminated (all green)
I think it was hard to get the right moisture in this close environement. Also the essence for the sawdust was maybe not ideal.
I had still many bag sitting on the shelf, fully colonized, but I was struggling to get the outdoor setting ready...
Phase 5 : To the Land! 
I bought a small tractor (20hp), and a woodchipper that you can connect to the PTO (much better than a woodchipper with it's own engine). It took a bit of time to get all of this in place, learn how to drive and connect and use … so I was running a bit late and the bags were waiting. But not too long affortunatly.
Around 100 overgrown apple tree have been pruned on the land. And I started the long task of woodchipping the branches (everything beetween 2cm to 10cm diameter).
So I tried :
- Pasteurizing woodchips (90% apple trees chips) in a plastic barrel by pouring boiling water on it. Let it sit 2 days then spawning with either directly rye grain bag ( 1.5kg spawn for 1 wheelbarrow woodchips) , or spawning with the sawdust
- Cold pasteurization of woodchips, and then, again spawning with rye or sawdust
(cold pasteurization consist in soaking the chips for 5 to 10 days (?), making the environment anaerobic and killing all aerobic organism. Then, drain the water, and kill the anaerobic organisms
)
- Spawning directly on unpasteurized, not soaked woodchips (the woodchips were absolutly fresh)
to make the bed, I just removed the black berry roots and put the woodchips on the ground.
All the beds were labeled, next to each other, in a shaded spot.
The colonization took off nicely on all of them. I had one bed made of 90%pine and 10%oak, and it worked too.
To our disapointment, the wild boars came, and kind of made a big mess, digging and mixing all up... and the labeling got lost.
To prevent further damage, I covered all the beds with cartboard, and put big stones on top. Anyway, summer was coming, it was recommended to do so, to keep moisture in.
I came every 1 or 2 week, removed the cardboard and watered the beds.
In the fall, when the rain came back, I definitively removed the cardboard
SIDE EXPERIMENTS (important) : To extend the probabily of good results, I also made isolated bed on other spots of the land :
2 beds next to the river (which i forgot about and didn't covered or watered), 1 bed in a wetzone, next to a tiny spring. I also mixed some spawn with the woodchips in the veggie garden beds, that were later used to plant tomato, aubergine, etc.
Phase 7: Results One sunday, I woke up and I knew. They called me. I made a last check online to remember how they looked like, and went for a family walk on the land.
I passed next to one of the
"side experiment", and my heart cheered with joy instantly! Around 15 mushroom on this little patch. I could recognize them easily : the bluing, the texture, the smell... even without ever seeing them before, I knew them. Without any 2nd thought, I ate one (and it was amazing!). This patch continued producing for 6 weeks and gave
30g dry mushroom this season
2 weeks later, the main beds (the one covered with cardboard and watered) gave a couple mushroom. But not much at all. Proportionaly to their size, around 40 times less mushroom than the side experiment.
The “90% Pine woodchips” bed gave 3 mushrooms, not worst than the others.
The bed next to the spring, and ones in the veggie garden beds didn't produced anything.
Note on T° : 1 week more or less before fruiting, we got a night of frost.. And over the fall the T° went beetween 6-18°C. At the end of the fruiting period, we got night frosts. It slowed down the growth of the mushroom but didn't kill or damage them (it changed a bit their color, that's it).
CONCLUSION My main intuition is : it was mistake to water in the summer! When T° went over 30°C, watering was just favoring the bacterias and other contaminants. The best patch didn't received one drop of water all summer and did fantastic!
Other parameters of course could have influence the results :
-the spot itself. Even thou they are only 50 meter apart, the main beds are not as close to the river and not as shaded. The successful patch is the most shaded and the river make a temperature buffer (less hot in summer, less cold in winter).
-Luck, quality of spawn, type of soil... ?
-I would not blame the boars, because they messed up with the successful patch too, at the time ^^
For the Future : I'm exited to repeat the experiment ! I will make new beds next to the river, and will try different spawns. I will probably not water them ^^
I would like to try also to use Acacia Dealbata woodchips, because in long term i'm gonna run out of apple, and this Acacia is an invasive species in this area, we got virtualy an infinite amount of it.
I will also update this post if I go production in the spring
My feels : This was absolute joy to try this. I consider it a great success because I learned so much.
Growing them outside would make so much more sense to me than in a box. If the production can be maintained over many years, it would actually be less work for me. And less 'Babylon' energy, less electricity and plastic etc etc... (just a bit to make new spawn)
The mushrooms grow with the Elements, with the Sun and the fresh air, with the sound of the river and the millions flavors of a whole ecosystem. They see the stars and speak with the moon. And they are 3x more potent than the Cubes
Please give me advices on thing I could do better, give me new ideas of things to try, etc etc !
Love
Quetzal
ps : anybody can send me some Ps.Cyan prints to try in parralel? I can trade for the allenii prints
thanks
Quetzal7 attached the following image(s):
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