We are certainly blessed here in the UK, looks like it's going to be a great season. I agree with Trav, pick just enough each season. Enjoy the process and enjoy our wild bounty, sensibly and sustainably. You can always take some spore prints.

Peace

Macre

After several weeks wandering around looking at the floor they finally seem to have appeared in my climes. I have found two patches of libs in my garden so far and Amanita muscaria too!

I hope the season lasts a while as it has been quite late starting here in comparison to a lot of areas.

I almost shared the location with a couple of people but thought better of it, just for the record I didn't hoover up every one that I saw, well not after I got an idea of how many there were anyway! For sustainability i left hundreds of wet caps, pins & many half eaten/rotten ones behind, towards the end I was just picking the chunky flesh coloured mushrooms that I could spot easily from a distance, there's simply too many to pick all of them.

What's your opinion on pinching rather than plucking? Have you personally seen a field get ruined by pulling the mushrooms out rather than pinching them?

I used to just pluck them out of the ground anyhow they came, with little thought to what happens underneath. Over the years, I never saw any harm in what I did. There are local "known" fields where people turn up, out of the city in their droves, year on year. They hoof and trash the places, with absolutely no care or concern. Yet these fields still regularly produce. So I'm sceptical that little me, can do much harm to the shroom.

Mushroom organisms are by far the largest living things on earth. They're also some of the oldest living things. I imagine my shroom fields to be an organism, thousands of years old, with the biomass of tens of oak trees, all most all of it underground and unseen. I'm plucking the fruits of something that was already ancient by the time they’d started building the pyramids. It's weathered and survived all sorts of things in that time. Think about plucking a leaf of an oak tree and then tearing a leaf of an oak tree. Plucking will obviously cause less damage but in the general scale of an oak tree, it's negligible. That is how I think of shrooms.

But over time, my attitude changed. I am only picking for me and they are a little treat, to be savoured. I'll only find the time and space in my life to have a proper deep play on them, four or five times a year. So I don't have to pick that many and I'm under no pressure to do so. I enjoy climbing up onto the tops of the hills above where I live, most weeks throughout the year. Being up there, nourishes my sole and I don’t need the shrooms for an excuse to make that journey. So I take my time and gently, respectfully, pinch them and I feel good about myself, for doing so.

snip snip

With a few finds already being reported the anticipation for the new season is growing

When i returned to this field last year i caught some nice pictures, to get in the spirit of the season here's the best of the bunch...

Yummy.. such cuties! This spots seems to be pretty fruitful.

tseuq

Such a magical place...

I'll be enjoying the fruits of the harvest shortly

That yellow lib at the bottom sure does look strange

Sitting here in 105 degrees in the great Pacific Northwest, Autumn seems but a myth dreamt up by a hot sweaty old man searching for relief.

But i found several ACRES of hardwood chips that fruited several non active species throughout the spring-all indicators of majickal goodness down below...

Doing my rain dance...

Goodvluck, Null! Happy harvesting, Chronic!

Nice find chronic, good pics too

Making me hope my azurescens fruit this year

Oh My Stars!

Those are beautiful!

Keep in mind to pass it on to (y)our children.




All the best! I want to start my first p.azur balconygrow in the end of august. The mycilium is already ready to be put in the flowerpots and motiviated to generate as many fruitbodies as possible. *mush mush*


tseuq

It will be passed onto some fortunate soul someday

I'm surprised i've seen noone else pick there yet, i did once speak to a passing older couple that were interested though. She was telling him to go and pick but he said it's all in his past... when they walked back through the field he had a look around which was great to see, hopefully he'll come back and pick some this year. Another time some parents were out walking with their teenage daughter and i could hear her father say to her 'they'll make you go crazy'

Great score!

Ill bet they grew there in England during the middle ages too where kings and queens and the people enjoyed them too!

Like finding mana in the desert.. the bread of the earth!

The earliest evidence of any use in the UK was in the late 17th century and that was accidental, it seems not many people knew about them until almost 200 years later when Albert Hofmann analyzed liberty caps and identified the first European psilocybe.

I find it really strange there isn't any artifacts related to liberty caps, they seem so befitting to celtic culture but there's no evidence of any use, apart from maybe the folklore. I think either there was a mass cover up by crusaders or maybe they are even a fairly recent introduction into the ecosystem, i can't see how we've lived alongside these things for thousands of years and only discovered them recently.

How many of your.. liberty..caps equals a good visual dose??

I've found 1 gram dried to be surprisingly strong but very manageable, with some visuals and lots of empathy, ~1.5 grams is where they start to get going and anything above 2 grams is a visionary dose. I haven't gone past 3.5 grams yet...

Although liberty caps have the highest recorded psilocybin content ever recorded for a mushroom (2.37% of the dry weight) they average ~1%, so they're quite easy to measure dosage wise, 1 dried gram equals ~10 milligrams of psilocybin.

I have experienced some variance in potency, that first picture i posted recently was the first cluster of the season to appear, a few white caps that turned out to be some really potent lil pixie hats!

Highest average psilocybin content can be found in psilocybe azurscens (~1.78%), while panaeolous cyanescens/tropicalis (~?%) are in the middle range compared to p. semilanceata (~0.98%).

[Source: Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin & Erowid https://www.erowid.org/plants/mu...s/mushrooms_info15.shtml]

2.37% to 0.98% seems to be a high fluctuation to keep in mind while dosing up for p.semilanceata-mushi-trip.

These are the beautiful fields around the city I live in for the last 4 years, my former hunting grounds which provided me with the flesh of god when I first came to this place. Mushroom and I are symbiose, I am connected. We meet all the way, down my way.



tseuq