Cultivation guides

The standard first method. Brown rice flour and vermiculite in half-pint jars, sterilised in a pressure cooker, colonised, then fruited as bare cakes. It is slow and low-yielding compared with grain-to-bulk, and it is forgiving of the mistakes beginners actually make, which is the trade it exists to offer.

Duration:

6 to 10 weeks from inoculation to first harvest

Steps:

8

Grain spawn into a bulk substrate in a plastic tub. Yields an order of magnitude more than PF Tek for roughly the same work, and demands better sterile technique because a contaminated grain jar can take the whole tub with it.

Duration:

7 to 11 weeks

Steps:

7

Growing mycelium on nutrient agar in petri dishes, to isolate a clean vigorous culture from a contaminated or mixed one, and to store genetics indefinitely. It is the step that turns cultivation from repeatedly buying syringes into keeping a strain.

Duration:

2 to 4 weeks per isolation round

Steps:

5

What the thing in your jar is, whether it is recoverable, and what caused it. Most cultivation failures are one of six organisms, and telling them apart is mostly colour, texture and smell.

Duration:

Reference

Steps:

4