The First Grow
From spore to flush, the whole way through
By Whathefungi · Start here · 3 chapters · free
The one book to read before you touch a jar. Everything a first-time grower needs, in order, in plain language.
Chapter 1: PF Tek or monotub
PF Tek is the method that taught a generation. You colonize small jars of a grain-and-vermiculite mix, pop out the colonized "cakes", and fruit them in the open air. It is forgiving of small mistakes, needs almost no equipment, and yields little. As a teacher it is unbeatable. As a harvest it is a snack. The monotub is what most people graduate to: colonized grain spawn mixed into a tub of pasteurised bulk substrate, fruited inside the same tub. More substrate means more mushrooms, and the closed tub buffers humidity so you are not misting all day. It asks for a little more understanding of fresh-air exchange, but it repays it. Our advice, unromantic as ever: do one PF Tek jar to l…Chapter 2: Colonizing, not contaminating
The most useful skill in cultivation is not building or sterilising. It is looking. A grower who can read a jar catches trouble a week before it spreads and never wastes a substrate on a lost cause. Mycelium advances as a defined front of white thread, sometimes fluffy, sometimes ropey and rooting. As it matures it can bruise blue where handled, and near pinning it forms small firm knots called hyphal knots. It smells clean. It does not move overnight. Contamination announces itself by colour and speed. Trichoderma sits white and innocent for a day, then flushes forest green from the centre out. Cobweb mould is grey and moves visibly, doubling across a surface in hours. Bacterial contaminati…Chapter 3: The first fruiting, and letting go
When the substrate is fully white and has sat a few more days to firm up, you change its world: more fresh air, higher humidity, and a little light, not to feed it but to tell it which way is up. Within days you see pins, tiny primordia that look like pinheads and then like nails. This is the part everyone waits for, and the part everyone ruins. The ruin is almost always too much handling. You open the tub to look, you fan it because a video told you to, you mist straight onto the pins, and the surface dries or the little ones abort. Fruiting is mostly leaving it alone in the right conditions. Harvest each mushroom just before or as the veil under the cap tears, which keeps things cleaner an…
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