Psilocybe azurescens (Astoria Ossip) Submitted by Walter

I started to make spawn from a home made agar plate with healhy mycelium. Every handling Imade was about two inches from a gas flame without a gas spreader. The air above the flame is sterile so i could innoculate agar and grain easely.

After three weeks by room temperature my agar plates were ready for the next step. I innoculated brown rice and small bird grain, which was first mixed with water (45% vol.) and than boiled in a pressure cooker. After some five days of storage atroom temp. and no oxygen I shook the grain jars for several minutes and gave them some fresh filterd air.

I placed each bottle in a plastic bag an closed the bag with a cotton filter (air and gas exchange). After three weeks my grain spawn was ready for the next step. I mixed it with presoaked sawdust (28 hours) used for home pets like rabbits, Note: use hard woods not soft. Two weeks later I mixed this with fresh alder chips. (They need to be fresh so azure mycelium can take over the substrate).

When the wood chips were all covert with hail white mycelium Itook it outdoors and mixed it with fresh chipped hardwood(hazelnut) 1 to 3 inches long;0,3 to 0,5 inch wide. I mixed two liters of white chips with aprox. twelve liters of fresh chips on 10 April 2000. The planting depth was about five inches. The place was grown with a lot of weeds and was not in direct sunlight. On one of the photo's you can see that it was rather dark there during summer period the whole morning is was very humid there. The first flush(yield) was halfway through October, the first pins showing near the end of September.

Fifty-five m/m of water fell in one week prior to the first pins. The minimum length of a mushroom was three cm. The maximum seven. I harvest 45 mushrooms in 1 1/2 square foot. There was no second flush because a dog had dug up the patch and was playing with it. I had about four mushrooms(dried) in one gram. This year iIprepared everything better, more spawn, more chips, more mushrooms.

I think the most important things are: Mix all the ingredients very well! Wait untill all the grain spawn is completely white! Cover the chips with leaves, dirt (small parts of wood and soil); and plant with herbs or grass without adding to much soil. Harvest one time, they grow slow but when touched they become black. Don't put a small bottle of collonised wood chips under a mountain of fresh chips, because the mycelium has to take over the substrate as fast as possible.