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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: 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).