5.0 out of 5 based on 1 reviews. – Customer review on 13/01/2007

If you were to buy only one book on mushroom cultivation, this would be the best choice. It can certainly stand-alone in that it provides all the info the reader needs to cultivate mushrooms. Although psilocybian mushrooms are included these are by no means the exclusive or main focus of this book. For the most part, the book is concerned with legal edible mushrooms that can be grown in the home or yard. Absolute beginners can certainly start with this book and no other book will be necessary to provide all that the reader needs to know from beginning to end of the mushroom growing process.

It must be mentioned that this book does not cover the popular "PF tek" (the "Psilocybe Fanaticus technique" also known as the "jar tek"), the simple technique utilizing canning jars full of substrate and inoculating them with syringes of spores suspended in water. Readers interested in this technique (which, after all seems the easiest and most practical) would find all they need to know on this technique at the Shroomery.org web site and others like it. This book was originally published in 1983, years before the "PF tek" was innovated.

Among the technique that this book does cover are the use of agar petri dish culture, culture slants, casing, grain spawn, composting, log-plugging and more. There is also a wealth of info on mushroom contaminants - how to spot them and how to deal with them. Therefore we can say that while this book does not cover the most simple of techniques, it certainly covers all other techniques suitable for absolute beginners and for those looking to expand their hobby beyond the beginners' methods.

The authors are obviously sincerely interested in mushrooms in general and in the cultivation of edible mushrooms. The info on these edible mushrooms is not included as an excuse to also include info on the cultivation of psylocybian mushrooms, nor are psilocybian mushrooms cryptically referred to. Rather, psilocybian mushrooms are merely presented as one of many types of mushrooms that can be grown with simple techniques at home. This is by no means a drug manufacturing guidebook disguised as a book on edible mushroom cultivation nor is it one that distances itself from the cultivation of psilocybian mushrooms.