It’s Magic Mushroom season in the UK!
Yeehaw, it’s that time of year again, Magic Mushroom season! I’m just gonna get this in here real quick – I absolutely do not advocate that you go out and break the law, no matter how monumentally dumb that law is. Don’t go doing crimes. Anyway, it’s Magic Mushroom appreciation season!
It’s time to go “walking the dog”…
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, the time where Tory Island decides to cough up some goodies that make the sky look like it’s melting!
Quick primer for the newer dudes out there – the funky mushrooms that you’re gonna find out there in the next month or so are called Liberty Caps (due to the bell shape), but the scientific name is Psilocybe Semilanceata (people often just call ’em Libs). They contain the same active ingredients as Psilocybe Cubensis (which are the type of spores I sell), but they’re a fair bit stronger.
“Why don’t you sell Psilocybe Semilanceata spores then, Mr Orangutan?”, I imagine you’re asking? Simple! I have a few customers who live in Brazil (hi dudes!), and they like to grow mushrooms from my spores. It’s totally legal for them, but not for me in the UK, so they can do whatever they like. They’ve told me that Cubensis are really easy to grow, it’s quite a low-effort thing once you’ve got your technique dialled in, and there’s great resources out there on Reddit, and also sites like the Shroomery! Semilanceata, on the other hand, are virtually impossible to grow in a domestic setting. In terms of effort-to-yield, it’s just a complete non-starter, even if you could somehow recreate the right conditions (spoiler: you probably can’t).
But that’s okay, nature provides. Depending on where you’re living in this utterly bizarre country, mid September to late October has usually been the ideal fruiting conditions, but thanks to climate change if there’s a really mild winter, you could still be finding Liberty Caps all the way up till Christmas. Lots of factors affect this – the temperature, frost, and rainfall all have big parts to play in convincing that lovely underground mycelium to start delivering up some tasty Party Shiitakes. Now, the important thing to remember is that when was just a young Orangutan, it was legal to pick Liberty Caps (you weren’t allowed to “prepare” them in any way but picking was fine). This ain’t the case nowadays, so don’t go picking them, just take a nice walk through wherever you may find them and admire them. Make sure you take a nice paper bag but make sure you don’t put any mushrooms in there. It’s still a Class A drug. Even if everyone’s decided that that’s ridiculous, all it takes is one bored jobsworth copper to notice you and you’re going to be having a shit time.
There’s a really cool website called Magic Mushroom Map, which, unlike the rest of the internet where it’s just tits and various flavours of fascism, is a handy map of where Libs are likely to be found, based off various bits of science like the weather, land cover, soil acidity, elevation, and historical grow records. It’s quite frankly fucking amazing and I wish I’d thought of it first. If you want it even more fancy-pants, you can throw the devs a fiver and you’ll get access to a ten-day forecast, and maps of where the public rights of way are. Noice!
Other, less good, Tory-related news
Fuck me we’ve got another one running the show now, and she’s bringing with her an absolute barrel of nonces. A Health Secretary who is against abortion and gay marriage? Check. A Business Secretary who’s dad literally wrote a book on how to profit from the country being fucked up? Check. A new Home Secretary who wants to be more right wing than fucking Priti Patel? Check! Buckle up motherfuckers, because this next season of Tory Island is going to even fucking dumber than the last.
Anyway, stick together, we’ll get through this, and maybe one day we can start rebuilding a better, fairer country that actually looks after those that need looking after. That’s the hope anyway. Cheers now, don’t vote Tory.