The Phantom
Member
If I was anyone just starting out and knew I wanted to grow a few (let's say 4) mono tubs or shoe boxes, I would buy a print of any cubensis type variety, they are all the same except a Penis Envy (PE), as the saying goes. I would also buy ingredients to make agar petri dishes and a SAB. Inoculate a few dishes (you only want a small drop, the point is to separate spores and contaminates, the less is better) select clean mycelium to transfer to more dishes. Keep doing this process until you have a clean culture with no contaminates (you can also pick the faster growing mycelium if you want). Then copy this culture to other dishes. Congratulations you now have copies of a clean culture that you can use to inoculate grain spawn or make liquid cultures with and have not needed to buy a pressure cooker/canner (PC). Now if you want you can either buy a PC and make your own spawn with or you can buy pre-sterilized bags/jars and hope whoever sold you them did a good job (always wait a few days and see if anything starts growing before inoculating). Make your own substrate using the bucket TEK, it's ridiculously easy and cheap. The key to growing really lies in getting clean cultures to work with and you can really only do that using agar. Once you have a clean culture and a sterile procedure down you'll be batting .950, easily, with full canopies if you picked a fast grower and use 1:2 spawn:substrate ratio (don't go more, it's a waste).
Using agar that initial syringe you bought will last you the rest of your life. There is absolutely no need to buy more than 2 syringes of cubensis, 1 of normal cube like Ecuadorian and a PE. Then buy some panaeolus cyanescens and learn how to case or azurescens if you want to learn wood substrate, maybe even some semilanceata or cyanescens (not to be confused with Panaeolus cyanescens) for some magic truffles/philosopher stones and you'll have everything you'll ever want.
Using agar that initial syringe you bought will last you the rest of your life. There is absolutely no need to buy more than 2 syringes of cubensis, 1 of normal cube like Ecuadorian and a PE. Then buy some panaeolus cyanescens and learn how to case or azurescens if you want to learn wood substrate, maybe even some semilanceata or cyanescens (not to be confused with Panaeolus cyanescens) for some magic truffles/philosopher stones and you'll have everything you'll ever want.
