Growing mushrooms can look incredibly daunting. Anyone who has glanced through books like “The Mushroom Cultivator” by Jeff Chilton and Paul Stamets, or attempted to wade through Stamets’ “Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms” (GGMM), will know what I am talking about: The technical terminology, expensive equipment, building a growing environment…“omg, I just want to grow mushrooms!”
Luckily, to make growing mushrooms easier and more accessible, a variety of Guerrilla techniques exist that allow beginners to quickly start the journey of mushroom cultivation. You could opt for a mushroom grow kit—but growing from scratch can be a lot more rewarding and cost effective so that’s what we’ll cover here.

Working with spore prints or spore syringes that are not sourced from, or made in, clean environments can invariably result in contamination. They can be a source of frustration for the beginner and expert mushroom cultivator alike. When reading about mushroom cultivation, chatting in fungi forums, or talking with mushroom cultivators about mycelium or how to solve contamination problems, often the discussion will come around to agar—making “cultures” or trading “plates”.
This article is a brief introduction to the sometimes intimidating and mysterious art of agar. Working with agar does require a little dedication, determination, and blind faith, but is well worth the investment. It allows you to take your mushroom growing to a new level, from germinating spores via your spore prints or syringes, and making tissue cultures, to carefully cleaning mycelium from that dirty spore print of a rare magic mushroom.

Every mushroom grower at some point experiences the disappointment of moldy mushrooms. Even in professional environments, mushroom growers will occasionally have problems—for instance, when someone is careless, working when tired, or takes a shortcut and then two weeks later the spawn, or casing layer, is blue-green! The important thing to realize is: It happens! Try to identify the source of the contamination if you can, and try again.
All mushroom businesses have strategies to mitigate contamination, knowing that it is likely to occur and creating steps to minimize outbreaks when it does. That includes having a plan to contain and control contamination with log books, tracking which inoculant was used for which grow, and appropriately labeling syringes, jars, and containers.

Spores are a significant topic in introductory mushroom cultivation, including how to obtain them, store them, and how to deliver them to the substrate upon which you are going to grow your mushrooms. After sourcing a spore print, or making one yourself, the next step is learning how to make a spore syringe.
Robert Mcpherson, a.k.a. Professor Fanaticus, the author of the magic mushroom grow guide called “The PF TEK,” claimed to be the first person to sell spores syringes. He started selling them in 1991, advertising his business “Psylocybe Fanaticus” through High Times Magazine (I bought my first High Times magazine in 1991 and I still remember those adverts!).

A spore is like a seed. As you would collect seeds from plants you grow, or from wild plants, you can collect and store spores from fungi in the form of a spore print. A spore print is formed from the accumulation of spores as they are ejected from the mushroom cap and collect on a surface. You may have noticed the discoloration caused by spores if you ever left a mushroom on a bench, a book, or in a paper bag. Often spores from larger mushrooms are deposited on the caps of smaller mushrooms, making them a different color and leaving some beginner cultivators wondering what has gone wrong!
If you are new to foraging, it is a good practice to do spore prints to aid in identifying the shrooms you have collected. Or if you have successfully grown from a spore syringe and harvested your first mushroom crop, it is recommended to store spores from your cultivated mushrooms—you never know when things are going to go wrong, especially when you are starting!

Mushroom hunting, or more formally mushroom foraging, is an age-old practice, and even today in urban areas you will often see people out foraging for choice edibles. Being able to recognize the smells in the air, or knowing the right time of year or the necessary number of chilly dewy mornings for a flush of fresh sprouted mushrooms to naturally occur all lend to the wisdom passed down from generation to generation about how to forage for shrooms. And with it came myths, rules of etiquette, and most importantly, a sense of wonder and mystery. Sometimes, the mystery isn’t where or whether you’ll find some magic fungi, but instead whether they might find you.
Mushrooms grow in a variety of climates and habitats. In this article, we’ll discuss key points such as how to identify the best climate in your region for mushroom foraging, ways to find out what magic mushrooms grow in your area, and hints on where to look. Mushroom hunting can be a rewarding and satisfying adventure, a time to meditate on your own or share a fun day with friends, with the bonus of coming home with a backpack or basket of fresh magic mushrooms.

The most well-known of the Genus Psilocybe is Psilocybe cubensis (Earle) Singer, a tropical/sub-tropical species which often grows in cow dung. They have a thick stem, a broad brown/yellow cap, and a skirt-like annulus. P. cubsensis are very easy to cultivate, and publicized most notably by Terrence McKenna and his “5 grams in silent darkness”, something you probably wouldn’t want to do with Psilocybe azurescens!
Psilocybe azurescens are often referred to by a variety of common names: Azzies, Astoriensis, Flying Saucers, Blue Runners, Blue Angels, or Indigo Psilocybe. With their caramel-colored caps, bright white stems, and broad umbo (the “nipple-like” structure in the center of the cap), Azurescens are quite distinctive in appearance, once you “get your eye in.” To the untrained eye, many Psilocybes can look like any other LBM’s (little brown mushrooms) hiding amongst the undergrowth. The general advice is to know the features of the species you are looking for, but also the ones you are not. Members of the genus Galerina, for example, can be deadly, and many other lookalikes can be poisonous.