Magic Mushroom Spore Swabs? Yeah, go on then!

I’d been thinking for ages about getting some (magic mushroom) spore swabs in stock, and to be honest I’d been dragging my heels a bit about it. A heady combo of ADHD and just being busy as all fuck meant that I just simply did not get around to it. I finally managed to carve out the time to shove some words together, get all the product pages up, and hassle my favourite photo monkey to take some lovely product shots, and here we are, in this brave new future – at the moment I’ve got Yeti, Jack Frost, and Tidal Wave available in the form of spore swabs!

It’s like a trifecta but with four bits

That’s actually a quadfecta, but quadfecta sounds shit. So when it comes down to it, there’s a few ways to transfer the genetic material of mushrooms about, and they’ve all got various levels of difficulty.

The first one is liquid cultures – I’m not going to dwell on this one too much, because in the UK it’s illegal to have or sell liquid cultures of the fun type of mushrooms. Anyone who is doing that won’t be in business for very long (although people sometimes try and do a bit of false advertising and claim they’re selling liquid cultures when it’s actually just spores – pro tip, pretending you’re selling something illegal gets you in the same hot water with the cops, and also makes you look stupid as fuck). Liquid culture is rad and easy to use, and could easily be made yourself with spores if you lived somewhere legal, but here in the lovely (shhhh) UK it’s not something you can or should do.

The second way is spore syringes. Easy enough to use, still a bit of a learning curve (it’s not quite as simple as just “spray them at your microscope slides”, you need to be very organised and clean), but on the whole it’s a fairly user-friendly way of being able to muck around with spores. If you keep them in a nice cool, dark place, they’ll last for years too, so hopefully by that point the law should have changed and you could go about growing some awesome magic mushrooms with them.

The third way is spore prints! This is another slight difficulty increase over a pre-made spore syringe, because now you’ve got the genetic material, you are going to need to find a way to get it on your microscope slides, because it’s on a bit of foil; this will probably involve you making your own spore syringes, or mucking about in some other way. Again, it’s not complicated as such, and it’s great value for money, but it does require a reasonable bit of learning. The internet’s your friend on this one, there are lots of ways of doing it. Eh, I might write a guide on it next time, it’s not like I haven’t had enough practice!

Fourth, and finally – spore swabs! So there are tonnes of mushrooms that drop enough spores to make spore printing viable, but some of the funkier types (just like Yeti, Jack Frost, and Tidal Wave) don’t often have a pileus (the posh name for a cap) that supports the growth of a big enough hymenium (the part that holds the spores). In this particular line of work (I don’t mean out in the wild), they’ve often been cross-bred and isolated over multiple generations to sort-of-engineer desired traits. The best way to get spores from these is to get a sterile swab and get it right up in the gills, give it a few turns, and hey presto! You’ve have got some spores on there. Not loads, but because you only need a few for your microscopy, it’ll be enough. However, given that your spores are now on a cotton stick that has been on the underside of a mushroom (and thus has a slim chance of picking up some contaminants), there may be a bit of work to do to make sure it’s just spores on your slides. Once again, it’s not hard, it’s just a bit more complex.

Yup, I know there are other cool ways of doing things like cloning and various other interesting teks, but I’m still calling it a trifecta with four pieces because I want to.

The future…

Ooooooh look at me I’m all cryptic, whatever could the future bring… nah, I’ll just tell you. If these sell decently enough, I’ll get more phenotypes in, if they don’t sell that well I will have a think about it. I reckon it’s a good thing to have available for the slightly-more-advanced microscope fan, and maybe it’ll tempt people to explore the world of mycology a little more, which is also a win as far as I’m concerned. Anyway, that’s my bit of waffling done for now, you could go and buy some cool spores in whatever you need if you like, I’d be over the moon!