Mushrooms reproduce using spores. This sounds all nice, and a lot of people will grow mushrooms never quite understanding what is going on! So, in order to first understand how to germinate magic mushroom spores, let us take a closer look at what a spore is.
I often find when helping others understand a biological fact, it helps to start off with ourselves. We sort of know-how we work and do things. Boy meets girl. They sleep together. Gametes have been stored and are ready for this event. The boy has sperm cells, which contain half as many chromosomes as are needed to make a human and the girl has egg cells, which also contain half as many chromosomes as are needed to make a human. Gene transfer happens through various sex organs. Sperm meets egg. Baby happens and this baby has half its chromosomes from Mom and half from Dad. That is how humans and much of the biological world work. Fungi, however, being fungi, do things rather differently.
How mushrooms do it
I’m not going to go into this in too much detail. If you want to do so you can look here. But basically, the way a mushroom reproduces is that the mushroom produces spores – and that is what this article is about – how to germinate spores. Spores can grow and produce mycelia – the white mushroom growth we see in the ground, or a mushroom grow kit. However – in order for a spore to take it to the next level and be able to produce a mushroom, two complementary mating type mycelia need to meet and mate.
To compare this to a human, it would be like if we went to a club and then we produced thousands of genitals that floated around and looked for a place to settle and grow. These genitals would then be able to grow and do their thing. If they met another genital that was appropriately attractive to them they could mate and reproduce and produce a mature mushroom. This is very different to our way of doing things but now that you understand that, the basics of “How to germinate magic mushroom spores” is a lot easier to explain.
How to germinate magic mushroom spores
I find that the easiest way to do this is to order a spore print set. Typically, these will be sent as two spore prints. One from one mushroom and another from another mushroom. The reason for this is that there is a slightly greater chance that you will have complimentary mating types if the spores are from different mushrooms.
Under very sterile conditions you would then take a few spores from one spore print and a few from another and place them on a petri plate. A petri place is a plastic plate with a lid – it is designed to enable us to cast a layer of nutrient solution into the plate. Typically we would use agar to make the nutrient solution solidify. You would normally sterilize the nutrient solution in an autoclave at 121°C for at least half an hour and then once it cools enough, pour it into the plates. This is a pretty difficult process and requires a lot of equipment.
You can buy prepoured agar plates here. This can be quite a lot of fun. Again, you need a pretty sterile environment to work in, and this is beyond the scope of this article to explain. If you are lucky, then some of your spores will germinate and you will begin to see a bit of white fluff growing.
In this photograph you can see the spores that have not germined circled in blue. Some have germinated outside that circle and produced the clumps of loose fluffy unmated growth. When these meet complimentary mating types, they will change.
In this picture a mated strain of Psilocybe is evident. You can see how the mycelia take on a more organised ropy look, and become a lot less fluffy. When the mycelia do this, if you sub-culture these and innoculate them into some grain you can grow magic mushrooms.
Germination and contamination
Typically, the germination of spores happens best at around 20-30°C depending on the type of mushroom. This process is however not easy. Mushroom spore prints are frequently contaminated with bacteria, and our natural environment is filled with spores.
There is a rather irritating fungus called Trichoderma that is present everywhere. It is present in the soil, grows in the bin, in towels, sometimes on your skin, and pretty much everywhere else. If you are not very good at sterile procedure, and equipped with the right laboratory equipment, this stuff just gets out of hand! You will find that, as a beginner, for every twenty petri plates your prepare you will probably get three or so through without contamination with “green patches” of Trichoderma.
In this regard, if you do decide to try and cultivate from spores, I would suggest buying a lot of petri plates. You will see many people suggest that you can use parafilm to seal the plates after you innoculate them. I actually just use insulation tape – as do many of my friends. It is cheaper, and less irritating.
I built myself this little semi sterile work space. It has a perspex front and a fitting equipped with one of these UV C bulbs in the roof. The UV C light cleans the surfaces of most spores and bacteria. Turn it off when you work in the hood space. Wear gloves and a face mask and spray your hands and arms and surfaces with sanitizing alcohol. Turn the light off when you work – it will burn your skin and blind you. UV-C is evil. But it does kill Trichoderma so it has some good aspects.
Once you have germinated your spores and have a few agar plates that show signs of having mated strains of mushroom you can use these cultures to continue your growing. If you find that this all sounds quite easy to you, then I invite you to take the next steps and get going!!
If this overwhelms you and you start thinking – I cant do that so I cannot grow shrooms
Luckily there are kind folks out there who have completed the above steps for you if this sounds a bit overwhelming. Typically, what would happen in their labs is they have really fancy equipment to do all the above steps in a very sterile environment.
Once super clean cultures of mushrooms are obtained, these can be grown in Liquid Culture. This is normally just a dilute solution of organic honey – believe it or not magic mushrooms thrive in this. If the mushroom cultures are grown up in liquid culture, some of this pure mated culture can be harvested in a syringe.
How to Grow Shrooms without a fancy laboratory
I grow shrooms in my fancy lab – but I have been growing shrooms for nearly thirty years. I have made a lot of mistakes and wasted a lot of time. If you do not really feel like going through all this pain, you can just buy a kit. The kit contains a syringe with liquid culture, and a bit of growth medium (grain) that has been sterilized. All you have to do is to mix the two, and fruit the mushrooms.
What this allows you to do, is to learn how to fruit mushrooms in a low stress environment. Once you have mastered this, you can walk back a step, and fruit some shrooms and take spore prints. From the spore prints you can then go and play with growing your own cultures and get more and more into the whole cultivation adventure.
A Warning
I used to have a guest bedroom – and occasionally guests. My guest bedroom is now a lab in which I grow all sorts of mushrooms (not just magic ones) and I experiment with distilling mead and mead rum and just have fun. Growing shrooms can change the way you view reality, and it can also change the way you use your reality.
There is a saying that Absence makes the heart grow fonder, absinthe makes the heart grow fungus, and fungus makes the heart grow. The choice is yours. I suggest growing fungus!
