https://uproxx.com/life/diy-magic-mushrooms-uncle-ben/
There's a subreddit for just about everything, but if you're a legit Uncle Ben's fan who is also a serious Redditor (that's a lonely island), you might be disappointed to find that the subreddit r/UncleBens isn't so much a gathering of hardcore pre-cooked rice fans, as it is an online sub-community of DIY psilocybin cultivators who are using Uncle Ben's and other supermarket staples to grow magic mushrooms.
[...] What makes Uncle Bens the perfect vessel for psilocybin, according to the r/UncleBens crew, is that mushroom cultivation "requires a sterile, nutrient-rich environment in which their spores can grow," and since Uncle Ben's rice is pre-cooked, sterilized and vacuum-sealed, it provides the necessary environment for cultivation.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by richtopia on Saturday July 04 2020, @06:03PM (12 children)
I enjoy gardening and have wanted to get into mushroom cultivation (for cooking, I've never tried the recreational ones). There are kits of pre-inoculated grow bags for oyster or shitake, but they feel overpriced. I might see if the Uncle Ben's formula works for culinary mushrooms.
Does anyone here have experience growing mushrooms and any beginner's advice?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @06:17PM (1 child)
Keep 'em in the dark and feed them bullshit?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @08:59PM
No, no, no...that is the MBA advice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @06:28PM
If this [reddit.com] is any indication, shiitake mycelium could start on brown rice. But you would want to transfer it to sawdust bags or something for fruiting.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Saturday July 04 2020, @07:17PM (2 children)
Beginner's advice was implied in the summary: keep every thing sterile. That includes worrying about the air circulating around your project, there are a lot of particles in the air including dust and various spores. Afterall, that's how sourdough and many cheeses gets started.
As the AC mentioned you can probably get the expensive bags and use them to innoculate the whole grain rice or rye bags before transferring the mycellium to bags of sawdust or grain.
I wouldn't touch Reddit with a barge pole, though. There have to be higher quality sources. I'd expec the recent decades have brought at least a few to quality books on farming mushrooms, since it has become a commercial activity.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @07:32PM
Not expensive bags. A spore syringe. You can poke right into the Uncle Ben's with the syringe, inject a tiny amount of spores, and cover it up with Nexcare micropore tape. Shake it up mid-way to colonize faster.
https://www.reddit.com/r/unclebens/comments/el1d8q/part_2_inoculating_uncle_bens_for_colonization/ [reddit.com]
Everything that happens after the rice bag is colonized is specific to your type of mushroom and should be researched somewhere else.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday July 04 2020, @10:15PM
Those won't eat cellulose (but will gobble starches).
It's the molds that you need to keep away for the entire lifecycle - from mycellium development stage all the way to fruiting - after all, those are fungi themselves [wikipedia.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday July 04 2020, @07:29PM (3 children)
If you're feeling bold, and live in a swampy area, you can get plugs inoculated with shitake and other varieties which you can put into fallen tree trunks... I had limited success the year I tried it, but so did the "professional" growers that year too - a lot depends on rain, temperature and humidity.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Sunday July 05 2020, @09:07AM (2 children)
The shiitake farmers I read about when the farming process was developed used particularly arranged stacks of cut logs and sprinkled them periodically to maintain the right moisture level. They kept everything under net canopies to let in some light but keep in a lot of the moisture.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday July 05 2020, @12:43PM (1 child)
I only played casual mushroom farmer the one time, a couple of years later I ran into another mushroom farmer who took it seriously - as you describe with the stacks and nets and sprinklers. When I described my pitiful crop results he asked "what year" - when I told him he said: "oh, yeah, everybody's crop was pitiful that year." So, apparently something happened that went beyond moisture and sunlight, probably a lot to do with temperature profiles, but maybe other things too. When I described my "setup" which basically consisted of fallen trees under a canopy in a swampy area the farmer said: "Oh, yeah, if you've got that naturally you probably won't get much better with the stacking and all - maybe just water them in a drought, but chlorinated city water isn't what you want to use..."
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Sunday July 05 2020, @04:29PM
Some municipalities will run a fungicide through the drinking water lines once a year, unannounced. So anyone serious has an alternative source year round.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @07:48PM
For culinary mushrooms, start with oyster mushrooms. Pretty easy to grow on woody garden waste like old bean, pea, etc. plants. Straw is commonly used by commercial growers. Lots of info online about them. Note that there are a ton of mushroom varieties that are sold as oyster mushrooms, but the above will work as a substrate for all of them. Oyster mushrooms will also grow on waste oil, cardboard, all kinds of stuff that you probably do not want being incorporated into your food-- one of the foods that buying organic is probably a good idea.
All mushrooms I've dealt with require light to grow properly. The dark cave for mushrooms seems to be a myth. This includes psilocybe cubensis (magic mushrooms), button, oyster, etc.
Cleanliness is the number one thing with all of these. Everything needs to be pretty close to sterile. You will flame your tools, work under a makeshift hood (a clear-ish storage box upside down is good for a start; add long sleeve gloves to holes in it for v2), sterilize growing media/containers in a pressure cooker. But, it is not difficult to grow most mushrooms if your conditions are suited.
Typical if growing from spores:
1) start spores in agar based growing media in a petri dish / shallow glass container with a lid. Inoculate with spores in a few locations around the outer edge.
2) cut out area that has mycelium growing into it from at least two of the original innoculation points. This mycelium will be the product of two of the inoculations you did growing together, and joining to create a dikaryotic mycelium. Dikaryotic is required for fruiting (making mushrooms).
3) drop these agar mycelium cubes into a growing media made of sterilized grain. Allow mycelium to fill the grain.
4) use the grain to inoculate compost, straw, sawdust, etc. depending upon mushroom type.
5 never let the grain mycelium mix die, so you don't have to go through these steps again.
Or, sanitize the outside of a mushroom, cut out a cube from within the mushroom without any of the surface bits and use that as starter in either grain or agar.
From here, things are different depending on where the mushroom lives in the wild. E.g., in the ground, in decaying wood, etc. For the in-ground ones, you wait for the mycelium to grow through the compost growning media, then case them by putting some fresh compost on top-- this triggers the fruiting. For the decaying wood ones, you seal the growing media (straw, woody garden waste, sawdust, etc.) in a bag / container until the mycelium has grown through it, then you expose it to air and light to get it to fruit (slash the bag, open the container, etc.
For collecting wild mushrooms, if present in your area, start with chanterelles (in Cali, these mostly grow on living oak tree roots usually in the middle of poison oak). Unless you are half blind, they don't look like anything else that grows in the same conditions, and the closest thing they look like (they don't really look like them), will taste bad / maybe make you a little ill-- not seriously so. But, if you cannot tell a chanterelle from a jack 'o lantern, you should not even consider collecting wild mushrooms. You probably shouldn't be driving either. First rain is the time to go out and look.
Hope this helps with your journey (mainly keywords for you to google for more info).
(Score: 2) by SlimmPickens on Sunday July 05 2020, @08:45PM
I would buy at least one or two of those ready-to-go grow kits first, just to see if you enjoy it and get an idea for how much you will need to spend creating an environment for them in your area. A proper environment is required to get good yields.
Culinary mushrooms (I've only ever grown shiitake) will grow on a pretty wide variety of substrates. People tend to pick what's available cheaply in their area and then adjust the nutrient profile/water retention/PH etc with things like lime and perlite from a supermarket or garden store. For you it might be sawdust, brown rice, barley, coffee grounds, kitchen scraps etc. Stumps and logs can be a good option if you have the space. You can buy spawn or cultures online from companies that sell grow kits.
I would suggest getting as much as possible done in a system of wide-mouth mason jars is a pretty hassle-free way to go about it. They're available, cheap, re-usable and useful in many other ways. You can use the S/S mesh lids for mushroom growing, sprouting and making vinegar. If you use the vacuum adapter with a canning lid you can make lacto-pickles, suck the air out to prevent mold and then have it transform itself into a self-burping lid as it begins to create CO2. Ball has the largest ecosystem of accessories.
I've seen the mushroom luminary Paul Stamets say in TED talk that he eventually learned it's better to brine the substrate rather than sterilize it because you end up with a controlled culture of beneficial microorganisms which is more healthy for the mushrooms but the cultivation community doesn't seem to have embraced this. Knowledge I have from my fermentation hobby and studying food science suggests to me that Stamets is probably right however I haven't tried this yet or read any of his books.
Good luck!
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @06:37PM
Many of the stories Fnord lets through are low-tier clickbait I'd only hope to find on Fox News or CNN. But the occasional off-the-wall stories like this are why I still keep coming back here, despite the large amount of filler political crap that soylentnews lets through. Let's see more like this.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @06:37PM (9 children)
Where are the hipsters going to grow their 'shrooms once the SJWs cancel Uncle Ben's?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @06:45PM (3 children)
This whole #BLM thing is going too far... Uncle Ben was a real person, known for producing the highest-quality rice in the Houston area, and he was a positive role model who showed little pickaninnies that anyone can succeed in the corporate world with enough hard work and a good attitude. Now he's going to be unemployed and Aunt Jemima's going to have to support the family by herself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @07:31PM (1 child)
Aunt Jemima was also a real person, known for producing the highest-quality flapjack syrup in the Louisiana area, and she was a positive role model who showed little pickaninnies that anyone can succeed in the kitchen with enough hard work and a good attitude.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @04:15AM
Uncle Tom was a real person who was really nice and shone the best shoes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @11:09PM
Ha!
Ya got me good. @TMB could learn a thing or two about trolling from you. I can safely assume you are not TMB posting AC since he swears up and down he never posts AC or uses sock puppets. Who can doubt him?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @06:45PM (3 children)
Easy. You get the generic version:
https://www.kroger.com/p/kroger-90-second-whole-grain-brown-rice/0001111083733 [kroger.com]
It's cheaper than Uncle B's too.
(Score: 1) by Zinnia Zirconium on Saturday July 04 2020, @08:23PM (2 children)
Kroger won't let me in their store because I'm a granola girl and I insist on using my own reusable shopping bag and Kroger people insist my reusable shopping bag might be full of chroma virus. I gotta buy my granola at CVS where CVS people can hide behind their chroma virus shield at the register while I fill my reusable shopping bag at the self checkout machine. I'm totally cereal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @08:48PM
I went in with a backpack on a couple weeks ago and didn't get any grief. I pulled a reusable bag out of the backpack at self checkout and used that too. Maybe they just don't care anymore.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 04 2020, @10:11PM
Granola girls? Weren't they the generation preceding the Flapper girls?
I salute you, great, great, great grandma!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @08:52PM
Uncle Lee's. Or Uncle Nguyen. Or Uncle Prasad.
All kinds of uncles.
No, not that creepy pedo uncle.
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by Frosty Piss on Saturday July 04 2020, @09:08PM (2 children)
Reddit is a sewer. Looked at it once many years ago, and threw it in the pile with instagram and Twitter.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @09:22PM
The Ribbit doesn't matter. All that matters is that consumer laziness has granted us an unlimited supply of cheap sterilized precooked brown rice for easy mushroom cultivation.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @11:12PM
Waah, they canceled The_Donald and other hate groups waaaaa.
It is infested with bots and "sly" grass roots advertising, but there is plenty of good shit on reddit. Frosty Piss might want to find the real sewer, I suggest starting with voat and pulling that thread till the feds knock on yer door.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Webweasel on Sunday July 05 2020, @01:06PM (2 children)
I tried growing shrooms about 10 years ago. Quite easy as long as you keep everything sterile.
However, I did make a mistake. I read online that 5 grams should be the dose. I misread it as 5 mushrooms.
That was one hell of a roller coaster of a trip. Within 30 mins I came up hard and fast. Everything looked like I was looking through crystal.
Ego death came rapidly, within 45 mins. I had to keep reminding myself I'd taken shrooms. Your ability to think dies rapidly at this level of high. "remember your on shrooms" I repeated to myself over and over... soon it was just one word "shrooms".
The true ego death came and I.... no longer existed as a person. I just floated in a black void of brown fractals. Like being in a brown Mandelbrot set.
Shroom trips end suddenly. I went from not existing then rushed back into full awareness in a split second. No longer high.
Whole thing lasted about 4 hours.
I tried lower doses later on, but on a medium trip your left and right hemisphere stop talking to each other. Things got echoey in my head, must be what schizophrenia feels like I think. Very unpleasant.
Priyom.org Number stations, Russian Military radio. "You are a bad, bad man. Do you have any other virtues?"-Runaway1956
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @02:43AM
Wow, nothing like my experiences with from 1g to 14g trips. Visual effects varying with dose, but even half an ounce at one didn't being me close to the visual effects of an acid trip. Emotional response is heightened, but empathy and social inhibitions are reduced. Always prepare a vomit bag, you will need it (and it /always/ kicks in stronger /after/ you puke!).
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @04:20AM
I'm looking forward to the day they legalize this drug. That and MDMA. The world will become so much chiller.
MDMA kicks the butt out of getting drunk. Or do a bit of both. Why do we have to be miserable and drink to oblivion every night? I mean, not me. Other people too probably.