How to F*uck up growing mushrooms:An unofficial field guide to sabotaging your own grow

How to F*ck Up Growing Mushrooms: An Unofficial Field Guide to Sabotaging Your Own Grow

Want to waste your time, burn your cash, and end up with a tub full of fuzzy green disappointment? Great. Let’s walk through the top-tier methods for completely screwing up your mushroom grow. Whether you’re cultivating Leucistic Golden Teacher or some random syringe you found on the internet, these steps will ensure failure at every turn.

So grab your spores, forget everything you’ve learned, and let’s f*ck this up the right way.

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1. Don’t Research Anything — Just Wing It

Why read a guide or watch full videos when you can half-read a Reddit comment from 2012 and go for it?

• Skip the science.

• Don’t learn the mushroom life cycle.

• Don’t bother understanding what terms like “colonization,” “F.A.E.,” or “substrate” mean.

Who needs facts when you have vibes?

Guaranteed outcome: You’ll misidentify every stage, panic when mycelium looks “too fluffy,” and open your tub at the worst possible moment.

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2. Treat Sterility Like a Suggestion

Contamination? That’s a myth, right? So go ahead:

• Breathe directly into your jars.

• Skip gloves because “you washed your hands yesterday.”

• Touch your grain bag with fingers you just used to roll a blunt.

• Reuse syringes, skip flame sterilizing, and open jars in the living room with the dog sniffing around.

Bonus points if you sneeze into your still air box.

Guaranteed outcome: Green mold, wet spot bacteria, mystery goo, and the realization that mold grows faster than mushrooms.

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3. Buy the Cheapest Sh*t You Can Find

Why spend money on quality genetics or equipment when eBay and wish.com exist?

• Buy spore syringes from that one guy on Facebook.

• Use a random plastic tote from the garage (bonus if it smells like motor oil).

• Skip inoculated grain bags and just use Uncle Ben’s from Walmart, five months past its expiration.

Guaranteed outcome: Poor colonization, stunted fruiting, and tubs that smell like gym socks dipped in vinegar.

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4. Mix and Match Teks Like a Frankenstein Chef

Can’t decide between PF Tek, Monotub Tek, and Shoe Box Tek? Why not combine them all?

• Inject spores directly into bulk substrate (why not?).

• Use a tub with no holes, then fan it twice an hour.

• Forget the liner, casing, and pasteurization, and just toss everything in together.

It’s DIY! It’s “experimental”! It’s a disaster!

Guaranteed outcome: Nothing works, and you’ll never know what went wrong because you changed 10 variables at once.

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5. Rush Everything

Time is money, baby — so force it.

• Inoculate grain and check it three times a day for growth.

• If it’s not colonized in 3 days, shake it and pray.

• Birth your tub before full colonization because you’re “too excited.”

• Pick your mushrooms the moment they pin, or better yet, while still blobs.

Guaranteed outcome: Contamination, aborts, small yields, and heartbreak.

Patience is for cowards.

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6. Ignore Environmental Conditions

Fungi evolved in forests, so they’ll grow anywhere, right?

• Keep your tub in the dark corner of a cold basement.

• Or put it next to a sunny window where it bakes all day.

• Don’t measure humidity or temperature — just “feel it out.”

• Never mist, or mist 20 times a day. No in-between.

Guaranteed outcome: Either a desert-dry tub or a soggy swamp. Spores won’t even want to germinate. Your mushrooms might, at best, look like spaghetti noodles.

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7. Misdiagnose Every Problem Like a Pro

Once you screw things up, the best move is to misread the signs and make things worse:

• See green mold and think it’s “bruising.”

• Mistake cobweb for mycelium and fan it aggressively (spread it everywhere).

• See healthy pins and rip them out thinking they’re mold.

• Or even better — throw away the entire tub over one fuzzy corner.

Guaranteed outcome: Zero harvest and permanent confusion.

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8. Be Super Inconsistent

Your grow should reflect your personality: chaotic, unpredictable, and full of mood swings.

• One day you’re misting like a rainforest; the next day, nothing for a week.

• Keep the tub open sometimes, closed other times, depending on your schedule.

• Shake one jar, forget the others.

• Skip steps in the tek if you’re “tired that day.”

Guaranteed outcome: Uneven growth, stalled colonization, contaminated spawn, and the joy of starting over.

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9. Harvest and Store Mushrooms Like Trash

Let’s say, by some miracle, you do get a harvest. Here’s how to ruin it:

• Pick them late, after spores dump everywhere.

• Don’t dry them — just leave them on the counter in a paper towel.

• Dry them with a hair dryer or fan in a humid room.

• Store them in a plastic bag under your bed with a banana.

Guaranteed outcome: Moldy, semi-rotten fruit that smells like a compost bin and does absolutely nothing if consumed.

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10. Ask the Dumbest Possible Questions Without Any Context

And finally — when it all fails, go to Reddit or Discord and post:

“Help plz. Is this mold??”

(Includes blurry photo, no context, no tek, no timeline, no explanation.)

Refuse to read the wiki. Argue with people trying to help. Get defensive when they ask for details.

Guaranteed outcome: Zero help, community annoyance, and maybe even a ban.

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Final Thoughts: The Mushroom Gods Have No Mercy

You wanted to know how to fail — now you do.

If your grow fails, and you followed any of the steps above, don’t blame the spores. Don’t blame the tek. Blame the fact that you treated mushroom cultivation like a joke — and mushrooms don’t play.

Fungi are older than trees. They’ve survived mass extinctions. They’ve evolved to conquer bacteria, insects, and time itself.

They will absolutely destroy your weak, half-assed attempts if you don’t come correct.

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So what now?

You can keep messing up. Or… you can flip the script, read the How to Not Fck Up Growing Mushrooms* guide, and try again with intention.

Your call. But the mycelium is watching.