Gardening

I bet that’s hard to get right. Lots of ways it can go wrong I would think, right?

Relatively sterile conditions are needed because the gourmet fungi tend to grow very slowly relative to common molds and bacteria, and if spores of a fast growing species gets into the growing medium they will quickly grow and deplete the resources. So you can easily end up with a block of mold or of bacteria instead of the intended fungus! It takes some practice and a bit of equipment to prepare the agar, grains, and fruiting block under sterile enough conditions. But now that I have some experience and that I have the materials at home it is not hard anymore.

How did you get into that?

I was in college and I learned about the lifecycle fungi in biology class. It was fascinating, so I looked into how to grow fungi online and discovered a trove of resources about growing psychedelic mushrooms (Psylocibe cubensis), as well as learned that their spores were legal to sell and buy online. So I bought some spores. After growing these I ended up with the problem of having too many mushrooms that are illegal to have. I had no intention of selling them, there was no way I could eat all of that myself in a single lifetime, and I did not have enough friends experienced with psychedelics to gift them to. Most of them were simply tossed out. So I faced the problem: I want to grow mushrooms, but the output was a liability. That's when I started branching into the world of "gourmet mushrooms", and found several interesting species to grow. So you can say that hallucinogenic mushrooms were my gateway drug into the world of gourmet mushrooms.