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Welcome to the Myco Wiki, a free mushroom-cultivation knowledge base hosted by Benesch Tech. It collects the techniques, recipes, and hard-won lessons of growers along the Front Range, written for people cultivating at altitude in dry Colorado air. It began as the wiki of the Pikes Peak Myco League.

Everything here is free to use and share (CC0). If you have a recipe, a tek, or a photo of something going right or wrong, add it.

Ready to grow? Order spores and cultures online: Denver Spore Company carries spore syringes, spore prints, and live culture syringes, shipped to your door. Browse the catalog and place your order at denversporecompany.com

New to growing? Start here

Read these in order. Together they take you from an empty kitchen to a first harvest.

1. Sterile technique — why most grows fail, and how to keep yours clean
2. Pressure cooking at altitude — the one thing sea-level guides get wrong for us
3. Grain spawn — preparing and colonizing grain jars
4. Coir and CVG substrate — the bulk material your mushrooms fruit from
5. Monotub fruiting — spawning to bulk, conditions, harvest
6. Contamination ID — what's growing in your tub, and what to do about it

Culture work

Spores

• Spore prints and syringes — collecting spores and making syringes

Agar

• Making agar plates — recipes, pouring, storage
• The three-transfer method — isolating a clean, fast genetic
• Cloning from tissue — keeping a great mushroom's genetics
• Storing cultures — slants, water storage, and backups

Genetics

• Smash tek — crossing two strains to make a new one

Liquid culture

• Making and using liquid culture
• Recipes:
  • Philly Golden Teacher LC
  • ClemGrows LC

Spawn and substrate

• Grain spawn
• Coir and CVG (includes the bucket tek)
• Manure-based substrates

Fruiting and troubleshooting

• Monotub fruiting
• Contamination ID

After the harvest

• Drying and storage

Reference

• Glossary — FAE, G2G, field capacity, and the rest of the jargon
• Pressure cooking at altitude
• Equipment by stage and where to buy

Computers

• Linux/macOS shell command reference

Contributing

Anyone can edit. A few house conventions keep things tidy:

• Put tutorials under Tutorials/ and recipes or lookup tables under Reference/.
• Write in your own words. If you learned something from a video or another site, cite it with <ref>…</ref> after the sentence it supports, and put <references /> under a References heading at the bottom.
• Add {{Cultivation}} to the bottom of cultivation pages so readers can find their way around.