Just a quick final reminder: The Cultivar Cup Is OPEN for entries (Patreon)

As you can see in the vid, I no longer have a shortage of prints, so if you were waiting for one, hit me up ;) and a very big THANK YOU & SHOUT OUT to those who helped out when it was needed!

Just wanted to let everyone know the Summer Solstice Cultivar Cup is OPEN NOW for any and all entries with a deadline of June 1st.  There are numerous sponsors of the event this time around, and thousands of $ in prizes which is pretty cool.  I myself have pledged to give away a new laminar flow hood to the winner of the cube category and the exotics category.  I don't do cubes so that's wide open, but you will have to "take me down" to win in exotics - I know someone out there can do it! ;)

Results of the Cup will be posted on June 21st.

There are entry forms here: https://magicmyco.org/ and I believe the old code "GordoTEK" is still good for a discount, but the steepest discount goes to anyone that joins his patreon (MagicMycoFam), members get 50% off a cup entry and can submit two entries for the price of one from what I've been told.

I don't have any sort of affiliate relationship with MagicMyco, in fact this is going to cost ME now that I'm giving out prizes, haha.  But the reason I try to help him out is because I think it's important to have testing labs around the country that people can use to fully understand what they are consuming, this raises both safety and awareness and also keeps the community more tied in with the science in my opinion. Amazingly, mushroom testing was even recently brought up on the Dr. Phil show!

The lab results will give you a very good indication of exactly what's in your particular mushrooms.  But of course there is more to it than that.  We can answer so many questions by analyzing samples.  For example a new test Myco is doing will tell you the exact purity of your DMT extract, you could test different TEKs to improve purity for example.  You could also test different food grade extraction methods to see which work best.  With mushrooms you could test the impact of using different substrate ingredients, drying temperatures, preservation methods, etc.  You could test wild collected specimens to see if they are worth cultivating or safe to consume at all.  Countless psychedelic mushroom cultivars have never been tested, especially the non-cubensis species.  There is a lot of interest in learning which species and cultivars are high in minor alkaloids, and which seem to have the most consistent alkaloid levels. The more testing that is done, the better off the community is.

I'm also told that MagicMyco has successfully crossed TTBVI genetics with PHV and NEC-D so I'm looking forward to seeing how that tests out (it is reportedly very aggressive on agar and can go from agar to harvest in just 18 days):

He has also branched out into cannabis testing, and even gourmet/edibles testing (like the medicinal compounds in cordyceps).

If he doesn't get more participants, this might be the last Cultivar Cup!!  That would be disappointing to me because the mushroom testing industry hasn't reached maturity yet and there are no real widely accepted published standards for doing proper extractions.  Doma/Myco has been leading the way in doing research on extraction techniques having published the results of numerous different methods.  Most of the other labs won't even reveal their methods.  I support open standards because that is what best serves the community overall and moves us closer to the goal of widespread, accurate, and hopefully low cost testing.

Note: my entries to the cup will always be testing something to hopefully contribute in some small way to the science of mycology.  I used a coir substrate for this one and dried at the highest temperature I could to see what impact that might have.  I also hope to submit two new cultivars that have never been tested before (if I can beat the June 1 deadline).

I am working on pan cyan genetics from South Africa (Weza), as well as a wild find from Texas (never before tested) that someone sent me (picture below) known as "XL".  I've been working on this one for a bit, it is capable of producing huge caps but for the most part they've been pretty "normal" looking despite the print itself that I started with being huge.