wassonova

Rock1084, i do the colonising of cardboard inside the house, to remind me to check them every few days to see that the cardboard is moist. i do this duing the winter season when the myc is available. this season i have layers of wet cardboard sitting in an open glass dish. the layers of wet cardboard are between a folded piece of cardboard on the outside that dries out before the inner layers do. i periodically pour some collected rainwater on the inner and outer cardboard to keep it all moist. my outer cardboard has some spots of mould or something on it now so i'm gonna get rid of it and start making the "lasagne" that myco mentioned in OP and will do that inside a plastic container. i hope to transfer the lasgne to prepared beds in early spring / september, or by october (ive read on the forums that people reckon myc grows well in spring) then i guess it's a matter of keeping it moist throughout the year and see how you go by the following winter.

question for myco: when you eventually prepare the garden bed for your cardboard and woodchip lasagne, i notice you say to lay down cardboard in the bed, then put pieces of your lasagne down, then cover it with woodchips. Is this mostly about keeping out grass from underneath? why not have a layer of woodchips in contact with the soil and then put down the pieces of "lasagne" on this ground layer and then cover with more woodchips? what is the thinking about putting down a layer of cardboard and then the pieces of "lasagne"?

ive never read much on king stropharia shrooms, other than seeing them named. Are they some giant form of stropharia cubensis?

ive spent the last three or four days gardening (for work) and listening to Terence McKenna podcasts from recordings made of him in 1994. these podcasts are available on the "Psychedelic Salon" podcast. Ive listened for hours as Terence discussed all manner of things relating to psilocybin and intelligence, conciousness, extraterrestrialism, biology, physics, mathematics, world history, digital technology... and the character of the psilocybin entity itself. it was still a massive surprise though to pull up at a lunch bar in an industrial area of suburban perth today, buy some rubbish from the baine marie and then sit back in the work car only to then notice a paperbark tree on the front lawn of a business that looked to have some pinky/orangey brown growths coming from it that i thought warranted further investigation - i found several clumps of massive purps, with bigger fruiting bodies than ive ever seen. there were young ones, middle sized ones and monsters. after hearing McKenna's thoughts on an entity, an intelligence, that is psilocybin and how it is happy to communicate with you if you only ask... this discovery was freakin hilarious and strange and surprising and not surprising and still surprising have a look at these.

third photo is the freakin' business. theyre so gregarious!! (which hasn't really been my experience to date.)

holy sheet Sideways. i thought i'd hit the jackpot today (and i kinda did in a different way to your pictures above) but your photos here are freakin' amazing. i've never seen that many going off together like that. and all the coloured dots on them! ive spent the last month or two scouting the odd local banksia and paperbark forests and only come up with a few little specimens but what youve found here is freakin rad. watch my next post in this thread. PS i just tried to post my next message with photos but i'm in a hurry and notice my photo size is too large so once ive sorted that i'll post piccies; but may be a few days

they definitely look like P.sub. to me. dunno about 3rd picture, too blurry. take another walk to your friend's farm and take a piccy of the patch for us. i wish i had a friend with a farm...

couple o' big ones i saw the other day:

here's a couple of pics of what i thought might be an omphalotus species... in the last photo, you can see a smaller mushroom at front right that looks more akin in colour and size to the specimens in Idiot's photos in the first post of this thread.

Things I saw out walking. I walked in some places where these mushrooms were absolutely thick on the ground, I had to be careful where I walked to avoid squashing them underfoot. These are just a few photos... so pretty to look at, I love the colour of these mushrooms, the shape - sometimes so perfectly round or flying-saucer shaped, or nipple-shaped... i think of them as "the saucer people", which is just me amusing myself, hearing the words of Milhouse Van Houten talking with the Springfield kids in Bart's treehouse as they try and summarise the adult conspiracy they believe is occurring (with the x-files theme song in the background)

This sign has been giving me a wry smile for a few weeks.

Wow, Idiot, that is cool that you found a bioluminescent 'shroom! I thought I had found some too walking around in my local bushland a couple of days ago. I went back that night with my son (it was on Tuesday night, we went during half time of the Australia v. Jordan soccer match) and we took torches. I suggested we walk there in the dark but the young fella wanted to put his torch on. When we got to the spot where there were about 8 clumps of 'shrooms each with three or four mushrooms in them, we got our torches and shone them on the cap of one specific mushroom - the thinking being that we would charge up the mushroom's luminescent properties much like we do as kids charging up a glow-in-the-dark watchface, or star stickers or any other glow in the dark thing.... when we turned the torches off we couldn't really discern that the mushroom was glowing, much to my disappointment. then we tried shining the torches at the underside of the mushroom, on the gills. again, there was no discernable glow. we tried another mushroom. same thing. we left all the mushrooms in the ground and went home and ate soup. i was a bit disappointed but you have restored my faith, my hope! good to hear you can find them in Perth and I am still determined to see one. maybe i should try again without a torch? the ones i found that i suspected were omphalotus were quite a bit bigger/older than the specimens in your photo. i have photos and will endeavour to post when i can. Perhaps the species you found is actually omphalotus nidiformis. I only say this because in a recent Climate Watch e-newsletter I received (citizen science, yeah!), in addition to them requesting info from citizen scientists on the flowering of marri trees, you can also report your sightings of oblong turtles and Ghost Fungus (O. nidiformis, according to them), amongst other things. here is the link to reporting your sighting of your bioluminescent fungii http://www.climatewatch.org.au/species/plants/ghost-fungus?utm_source=ClimateWatch&utm_campaign=7700df2442-CW_May_2012_WA5_17_2012&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fbbc1468e0-7700df2442-410784409 I encourage you to let them (whoever they are, exactly) know! I renew my search. Nice one Idiot, thanks for the report.

HM, how's the egg carton tek from last year looking now, some nearly 12 months on and with the season upon us?

Cool!

PD, did you take any photos of your morels? Love to see a pic of a little bunch of them.

in reply to Nut's comments and questions, based on my observations from a walk taken yesterday (and in seasons past), the G.purps seem to have a much lower occurrence than the G. allantopus. (and here i am mindful of an earlier comment in this thread from Occidentalis about the still tricky realm of identifying the Gyms to species level, so, i guess i'm referring to what i think are G.allantopus and what i think are G.purp - though, i have sent a couple of PMs to members on this thread who have confirmed the activity of those on the thread that we are agreeing on referring to as G.purp). i reckon i'd be finding one or two G.purp for every fifty G.allantopus i find... it's also the case that once these mushrooms get quite mature i'm not sure whether i'm lookin at allontopus or purpuratus - so i guess it's best to find them when they look like little purple phallic nipples! I'm curious that members are reporting a distinct bluing reaction on the purps (some reporting bluing on every specimen they find) as this is not something i have seen a lot of. i reckon i've seen the odd bit of blue/green coloured spot on the cap, and will endeavour to upload photo here of one that has a slight blue at the base (but you have to look hard)... with regard to flush frequency, i have found purps on the same log in consecutive seasons, but not more than a handful on this particular log... and not sure whether the same log has had a second or third flush each season...

everybody else has already said it, but "holy shit!". i second Zen PBG's query as to whether this patch had a little help along in getting established and am stunned to read Shroomeup's answer that they popped up of their own accord. Ridiculous!

anyone got any homegrowns they can post pictures of for this season? i was hoping to have some pics to post myself but not sure the myc is gonna fruit this season. if it doesn't, i'm going to transfer it back to some grain jars or something to ensure i've got a decent amount of spawn, and then begin the patient process of waiting out another year nurturing the myc.

holy sh*t Mycot !!!

Idiot, you are right to caution about Galerinas - reading about this species over the years has caused me a few uncertain moments. With regard to your refernece to eLwAds photograph #4 and the different coloured gills, I have wondered if the gills haven't ended up a darker colour not because they are a different shroom but because they are some days older and the spores are colouring the gills? if you look at the ones with the more waxy yellow coloured gills, you will see some darker, cinnamon-coloured patches on them, which i think comes from the spores... however, it is wisest to exercise caution and do-away with ones that appear different to the kinds we have seen in this thread. one way of getting rid of them would be to go place them on some fallen paperbarks or banksia and see what springs up in that place the following year??

so, i didn't pick all the mushrooms that i have photographed, only some, as i was not ready to do a fresh bioassay and also because i wanted them to do their thing and be around for seasons to come. i have dried the specimens collected with a view to conducting a later bioassay on the dried specimens. i am not certain that their purported properties will remain after drying, so if anybody can attest to this, or share their experience of bioassay of dried specimens, i'm sure we'd be interested to hear. this photo series shows the spore prints of suspected G. purpuratus. In my previous post you can see in one or two of the photos some orange spore deposits on the annular zone of the stems. The first photos here show the orange spores left on the paper bag in which the specimens were collected. Later photos show the spore prints made on paper - they appear somewhat darker, perhaps because of moisture content.

I have more to share with you, hope you are enjoying the pictures. i think these mushrooms look beautiful; that rich, velvety purple of the fibrillose/floccose caps... picture me lying on the moist floor of some of our lake/swamplands to bring you these images...

ok. reacquainting myself with how to upload photos. here's some pictures i took when out surveying for G. purp. photos were taken in mid-late June. No bioassays done as yet, so I could be taking photos of this particular mushroom for the jolly heck of it, but photos and reports from sidewayschef and Idiot (in this thread) seem to indicate i'm on the right track. Not many of these species that i have seen have shown much sign of staining, but you will see in the first, third and fourth photos some signs of blue/green colouration. In the last two photos, have a look at the colour at the stem base.

nice pics Sideways. i have some of my own i'll put in this thread as soon as i come to terms with the technology.

sorry. inebriated when wrote last post (and still now). i was writing in response to HM's post of 30 june 2010 - which is actually a year ago to the day, by coincidence. read further along the thread and it just gets better. this is where it's at for mycophiles.