About a month or so ago a smart customer commented on my Insta page something along the lines of “Hey why don’t you do a blog post about some of the myths in mycology?” – and you know what, I think it’s a great idea. There’s a lot of information out there (literally so many amazing mycology resources already exist), but there’s a ton of misinformation that gets propagated on social media. I’ve got no problem with people being new to the hobby and accidentally getting stuff a bit wrong, that’s half the fun (and sometimes you’ll find a rad new way of doing things), but these are some of the more frequent myths you’re likely to see on your travels. I’m obviously going to simplify things here for the sake of brevity as it’s a blog post not a scientific journal, but I’ll try and throw some useful videos in there that I’ve found on YouTube.

“I can grow magic mushrooms in the UK”

I suppose technically you could but you’d be breaking the law so you shouldn’t. Much like when piracy killed music and just like how no-one makes films or video games any more, haha nah I can’t do it. It’s a fuckin’ dumb law. However it is still the law so don’t do it unless you’re a politician and laws just don’t apply to you or you live in the Brazilian Embassy. Fun fact: you can buy spores for microscopy and other purposes, so just do that instead, it’s just as good.

“Mycology is an expensive hobby”

Nah. Or maybe yeah. Much like any hobby, it’s what you make it. You can get going with a few bags of rice, a plastic box, and a spore syringe. I reckon on a budget you could probably get started for about thirty quid if you wanted to keep costs down. On the other hand, you could buy yourself a nice big flowhood, some fancy beakers, and pay someone else to send you sterile grain – totally your call. It’s what you make it, and whilst the cheaper end of the hobby will have a higher failure rate, it is more than possible to be successful enough without spending the big bucks.

“Wow this mycelium is growing fast/slow, what a great/terrible syringe”

Again, it’s nothing to do with the syringe and it’s more to do with a lot of other factors. As much as I’d love to take credit for when it all goes right, I can’t! The speed of colonisation (in one of your lovely legal countries) will be governed by the ambient temperature in your growing space, the moisture content in your bag, the type of grain you’ve got in your bag, how well prepared your grain is, and then finally which two spores met up out of the billions of potential combinations in a syringe. Quite a lot going on there! You can even speed it right up by creating liquid culture if you want to spend a bit of time learning a useful skill.

“I can’t see many spores/yeah there’s lots of spores in this syringe”

Literally doesn’t matter what you can see with your beady little peepers! When making spore syringes, you scrape the spores from their nice little home on the tinfoil that they were printed on into some nice sterile distilled water. Sometimes these prints are, for want of a better descriptor, dry and thick. Other times they’re a bit finer. Imagine trying to scrape off some makeup vs trying to scrape off some dried paint; it’s a bit like that. The magnetic stirrer then creates a little vortex and distributes all the spores evenly throughout the water. Occasionally the water will just have a vague purple tint to it and you won’t be able to see any spores, but other times you can see big lumps of clumped-up spores.

The big lumps of clumped-up spores are actually less desirable because you only need a couple to meet up to get the result you want, so a big lump is literally pointless. It’s no detriment to the syringe, but it is super wasteful (and it can clog the needle sometimes). If you can see anything at all, it means it’s a clump of hundreds of spores at the very minimum!

The next annoying thing is that even if everything has been thoroughly mixed, a phenomenon called hydrostatic pressure can then make the spores clump up again given a bit of time. I use a vortex mixer to spin all my syringes during the packing process to try and keep things as useable as possible!

Anyway! Long story short – the visual appearance of a syringe really isn’t a useful marker of how effective it’s going to be, best thing for that is to find a spore vendor you know is reliable. Fuck me, I’ve got over 1100 reviews – I’ve just checked that out as I put that link in. Blimey. Thanks everyone!

My mushrooms are huge, what a great syringe!

This one is to do with the syringe contents in a roundabout way, but again it’s something that’s not in anyone’s control because it’s up to whichever two spores got together and started growing (this is bit more simplistic an explanation than the strict truth, because you will have multiple pairs of spores that have started multiple different sections of mycelium and they’ll all hang around together but whatever). In a multi-spore syringe you will have hundreds of thousands of spores, so it’s a bit of a genetic lottery. One of the most reliable ways of getting consistently big mushrooms is to clone bigger ones, as this way they have the genetic code “get big” in them and you’re off to a better start. Obviously you need to be living in Jamaica or Brazil to do this but it’s a great idea and it’s fun. You get to clone things and that’s what a mad scientist would do.

“These mushrooms are definitely B+/GT/KSSS/Whatever”

Countless times, I’ve seen people saying stuff like “Oh yeah that’s definitely B+” or “Yes those ones look like Golden Teachers” (for example) when looking at a picture of a Cubensis mushroom: in actuality, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between any two different Cubensis phenotypes by their appearance unless it’s one of the crazier-looking new phenotypes which seem to be getting popular (like Enigma, or Starry Night). Once again, if you’re using a syringe, there are millions of genetic combinations, so even the same syringe can produce different looking mushrooms in every tub you grow!

“Do X for more potency”

This is a weird one. Potency is caused by genetics, with mutated mushrooms likely to have more ‘fun’ in them. Thankfully all mushrooms are prone to mutation so after a few grows you will probably have seen some odd happenings. However, every Cubensis mushroom will have a broadly similar amount of active ingredients, this is just what they do. The main thing that you can do to maintain potency is to treat them right once you’ve picked them. Contact with the air is going to cause them to lose potency, so make sure they’re dehydrated (so that they don’t rot, they’re mostly water), and then vacuum seal them with some desiccant packs, and keep them somewhere cool and dark. If you dehydrate them and then just leave them in a jar they will just absorb atmospheric moisture and start losing potency – don’t get to the end point and then mess up all your hard work! There’s more advice on this in Part Four of my handy guide.

“Sidepins are caused by light”

Sidepins are not caused by light. Say it again. Internalise it. People out there who are painting your tubs black at the bottom, stop it (unless you just like the look of a goth tub). Sidepins are caused by that particular bit of your tub being in a lovely cycle of evaporation and reabsorption, which is why it happens on the sides, and often when your substrate has shrunk a little after the first flush. This will make your mycelium go “oh yo this is the best possible place to spend energy on making fruiting bodies”. Best thing to do is to tamp down the sides of your substrate properly, and use bubblewrap to make sure that the top surface of your tub is a more desirable area to grow. I have never once used a liner or painted a tub because there’s no point.

“The one best way of doing mycology is monotubs/bags/agar/whatever”

Agar’s awesome, liquid culture is awesome, but honestly it’s all good. Uncle Ben’s gets frowned upon in some areas of the mycology community but fuck it, if that’s what works for you then that’s excellent. I actually pretty much started off doing Uncle Ben’s and it was a great way to begin a hobby, especially considering the low cost. Dub tubs, monotubs, fruiting directly from the bag? It’s all good! Not everything in life needs to be min/maxed, and if you’re having fun and getting results then that’s all that matters really, isn’t it?

That’s about all I can think of!

If there’s anything else you think is a bit of a weird thing in mycological circles, feel free to send it over to me on my Insta page and once I have enough of them, I may well do another blog post about it all. Anyway, big love to you all, hope you’re having a great year, and remember, don’t vote Tory.