MycoWizards

One of the best parts about 2024's mushroom festival jaunt was running into Max of @wumbogenetics at the @farwestfungievents and the @okmushroomfestival ... Max is on a mission from fungi, dedicated to perpetually developing a suite of myco-products, refining a variety of lab processes and protocols as well building connections in the cultivation community. The hustle it takes to get into any...

The last thing I thought we'd be involved in when I first started cultivated mushrooms was sending phenotypes to space! If I step back and assess how we got here it absolutely blows my mind. Many mushrooms farmers, many entrepreneurs in general, have a solid sense of imposter syndrome...but here we are, It's 2024 and we are awaiting the arrival of three commercial mushroom phenotypes aft...

Clint Jurek of Flying Saucer Farms has cultivated, conquered, fulfilled the desire and is on his way out of the mycological world! It’s always a challenge to accurately describe just how wild and intense the rampant growth rate of decentralized mushroom cultivators in the US has been. From 2008 until today the number of “commercial cultivators” within the US has grown by 5000% or more. Flying Sauc...

It’s easy to get pulled into the groundswell of hyper fixated myco-nerds at a mushroom festival. At some point after this conversation you are about to hear, Will Lockmiller of Sno Valley Mushrooms, Roger Rabbit and Robert Rogers, collected myself and Danielle Stevenson to go join Will and his partner for dinner at an obscure and hidden gem of an Olympic Peninsula Mexican Restaurant. Will and myse...

Lentinus Tigrinus AKA the "Tiger Sawgill" mushroom is something that has fascinated a handful of mycologists for a long stretch of time. From a fungal evolutionary standpoint, it is a mushroom with a long stretch of phylogenetic-flux. The current fruitbodies develop as a rather straight forward "agaricoid" form while simultaneously exhibiting a "secotioid" morphology...

We have spent an incredible amount of time thus far tearing into our infamously high yielding commercial dikaryons to develop a gourmet monokaryon culture bank here at Cap N Stem. The goal at the end of the day is to understand these monokaryons on a deeper level and to develop new breeding programs. Last week we launched our expansive episode on the process of mechanical dedi-kary-ot-ization over...

It took over a decade but I finally got the chance to sit down with Eliah Thanhauser of North Spore and discuss our long and interwoven histories in the Maine mushroom industry. North Spore has excelled in so many things through their explosive growth in the myco-sphere. Co-evolving alongside of them has been an amazing ride full of insight and challenges and tales for days! While Eliah and I just...

Become A MycoWizard today at  www.mycowizards.com ! Shane Schoolman and Michael Heim are going wild in the game of mushroom-extracts. Dual Extraction What???? Soxhlet Who???? They had me at Cordy-Crystals and Gnar-Tar, never-mind their in depth exploration of ultrasonically extracted myco-molecules suspended in cavitation bubbles. A few weeks after recording this weeks MycoWizards episode I hobble...

The age old tale, or so it seems in these fast moving times seems to be Mycelium vs. Fruitbodies ... but what if you simple added both into your products, built out and followed through with scientific studies for publication and actually collected data after proceeding to test, test and test again. Steve and Sam of OM Mushrooms have been doing just that and growing fast into the myco-obsessed mar...

Round about two years ago the entire Cap N’ Stem crew hosted a massive bonfire at our newly acquired property in Lewiston. Many joined in the insanity, many bailed, motorcycles broke down, did burnouts or wrecked into dark Maine gullies, but the fire raged on and the partying continued through to the next morning! One of the most mysterious characters to show, arrived in a feathered bowler hat wit...

Julian Mattucci, also know as @dedikaryotizationdaddy is a dedicated researcher and a talented mycologist. He has been in the throws of some of the more nerdy but important breeding work in the wild word of mushrooms. I came across his Dedikaryotization Protocol via a shroomery post offered up by the one and only @alan_rockefeller a few months back. Julian's work is focused on the development...

Welcome back the mighty Neil Brent of Columbia Mushrooms! There are a million and one hilarious things that can be said about Neil, but this batshit hero to the cultivation crowd knows how to grow gourmet mushrooms like the best of them. What I appreciate most about Neil is his split dedication to the stoke and the stone cold assessments of any given situation, object or attempt to avoid a phone c...

Mike and I ripped up the coast of California towards the never-ending boarder-lands between the sandy dunes of the hot as hell desert and the perfectly temperate pacific blue until we came to the land of Mighty Cap Mushrooms in Paso Robles.  Chris and Branden emerged from the first expansion of Mighty Cap, a super clean and well organized grow, to give us a tour around. There are two personalities...

Shortly before deciding to take the leap into commercial gourmet mushroom cultivation, I stumbled across a video of a young Hamilton Morris reporting on Magic Truffles in Amsterdam for Vice News.  In this video Hamilton visits a farm that had to quickly pivot away from fruit body production and into sclerotia forming p. tampanensis cultivation sometime around 2008 due to the prohibition of magic m...

Some of our favorite mushroom cultivators are of old punk origins. You know the ones, strapped and packed with an array of patches, CDs, books and leftover dinner all in that high resting backpack rippin’ uphill on a fixed gear or in deteriorating ox-blood doc martens hopping rails and riding free atop the boxcars dead set on the western sunsets. They stand for experience and true freedom in this...

Become A MycoWizard today and keep this show rolling over at www.mycowizards.com ! Support the show and be automatically entered into our monthly giveaways exclusive to MycoWizards Members!  Try to get Kyle Garrone to talk about anything but growing mushrooms and the emerging world of contemporary cultivators and it will ultimately snap back to mushrooms like an elastic band to itself. The draw an...

Become A MycoWizard today and keep this show rolling over at www.mycowizards.com ! Support the show and be automatically entered into our monthly giveaways exclusive to MycoWizards Members!  There were many things racing through my head when I first met Roger Rabbit, the OG king of Shroomery.org! But an almost decade long battle to get his stolen land back in Malo, WA was not one of them. I’ve spe...

Eric Pearson of Son and Skye is a myco-farmers dead set on the details of cultivation. His interests exist within the systems, controllers and concepts for keeping rooms regulated and running in the intense heat and humidity of the Florida summers. While his farm is small and seemingly off grid in its appearance, the dials are finely tuned and honed in on simplicity which leaves breathing room for...

Become A MycoWizard today and keep this show rolling over at www.mycowizards.com ! Support the show and be automatically entered into our monthly giveaways exclusive to MycoWizards Members!  On two wheeled deathtraps through fall sun showers and ever changing scenery, RR and myself sped north from the base of the Olympic Peninsula under a solar eclipse, all the way up to Port Angeles for the 2023...

Become A MycoWizard today and keep this show rolling over at www.mycowizards.com ! Support the show and be automatically entered into our monthly giveaways exclusive to MycoWizards Members!  The first time I met Cyrus Lester of Mushroom Maggie's, I had no concept of the entire story behind such a genuine and bright human. All I knew after a couple of days showing Cyrus around Maine and NH was...

Become A MycoWizard today and keep this show rolling over at www.mycowizards.com ! Support the show and be automatically entered into our monthly giveaways exclusive to MycoWizards Members!  It's easy to start something, It's another thing to carry it forward through time and space as it grows and morphs and develops its own definition of limbs allowing for an observed sense of autonomy....

Become A MycoWizard today and keep this show rolling over at www.mycowizards.com ! Support the show and be automatically entered into our monthly giveaways exclusive to MycoWizards Members!  Joseph Iovino is a man sculpted from pure badassery! From fire fighting, to actual fighting to mushroom cultivation. The man was a myth before Daniel and myself rolled on down to his neck of the woods to recor...

Become A MycoWizard today and keep this show rolling over at www.mycowizards.com ! Support the show and be automatically entered into our monthly giveaways exclusive to MycoWizards Members!  It was 2015 and in a flash I was kicked off Facebook, for reasons I suspect originated with my being on the terrorist-watch-list after starting numerous Food Not Bombs Chapters across New England throughout my...

Become A MycoWizard today and keep this show rolling over at www.mycowizards.com ! Support the show and be automatically entered into our monthly giveaways exclusive to MycoWizards Members!  There were only a few folks who initially went head over heals cultivating cordyceps in the US back in the early 2000's and Alex Dorr of Mushroom Revival was one of them! Now with a full line of mushroom...

Become A MycoWizard today and keep this show rolling over at www.mycowizards.com ! Support the show and be automatically entered into our monthly giveaways exclusive to MycoWizards Members!  It happened in a flash, we were out one master of the media and I knew I was not going to edit my own voice and videos for all the MycoWizard's out there! (no one can stand their own voice, can they!?) I...