It's finally here: The Psilocybin Mushroom Bible Second Edition!

And its a chunky lad

If you follow us on Instagram you might have noticed that we’ve been a little quiet for the last… well, three years or thereabouts.

Yes, we’ve been making blackberry wine and running mushroom courses and fermenting every available vegetable. But we’ve also been cooking up something a little more exciting. And it’s finally here: The new, massively expanded, physically enormous Second Edition of the best-selling Psilocybin Mushroom Bible!

We first published this book in 2016, frustrated with the lack of science-backed, accessible grow guides focused on psilocybin mushrooms. The most recent versions had come out in the mid 00s, and the most-influential ones were still from the 70s, years before either of us were born.

We’d had to learn to grow through old books, online forums, our own education and knowledge (Dr K having worked extensively in microbiology labs), and through trial and error that was often expensive. Knowing how long it took to build a working knowledge like this, we wanted to write the book we wish we’d had.

The Psilocybin Mushroom Bible was born: an accessible, sometimes funny, always scientifically-backed, photo-heavy and full-colour indoor psilocybin mushroom grow guide that took you through your very first steps in mycology right through to agar work, bulk substrate and beyond. We wanted not only to inform but to entertain and inspire. We wanted dozens of step-by-step photo essays to illustrate exactly how these processes should be done. We wanted, most of all, to make it easy.

150,000 copies later, we think we have done just that.

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So why do a second edition?

A lot has changed in the ten years since we starting writing this book. The mushroom growing community has flourished, encouraged by legislative changes in many countries regarding the legality of magic mushrooms, and emboldened by the psychedelic renaissance: the turn back towards the psilocybin-assisted therapies that were first discussed and used in the 1950s and 60s, before the War on Drugs curtailed that research for decades.

Indoor mushroom growing has undergone its own renaissance, with new techniques, better spore suppliers, and a hell of a lot of people who want to sell you products to grow with. We developed new ways of doing things, and learned from the many growers we worked with in both commercial and non-commercial spaces. We also learned a lot about outdoor growing methods, which require you to throw away almost everything you thought you knew about sanitising every surface and fighting off mold.

The internet is full of information about how to grow mushrooms. Some of it is good, and some is a bad. Some is written by people who want to convince you to grow with expensive bits of kit or grow materials from them, when in reality you can build or make your own for a fraction of the cost. Some of it is written by those who’ve had one or two decent grow in perfect conditions but have never had to grow in sub-optimal temperatures, or with limited access to materials.

We’ve spent the last few years supporting growers through Doubleblind’s online courses and their Discord server, and by doing so we’ve come across almost every issue that a grower might face. We’ve learned and we’ve taught and we’ve discussed and we’ve changed how we do things, so that we can present our knowledge and learning in a way that is the most accessible, the most reliable and the most inspiring. And we have also taken about one hundred thousand photos—one thousand of which have made it into the bumper new edition of the book.

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What’s new in this edition?

Well, one thousand photos, for a start. No other grow book has this level of visual information, nor this many photo essays. We take you through all the necessary processes, including making your own liquid culture jars, loading your grain bags, pouring agar plates, preparing wood chips for inoculation and how to make your own tincture, to name just a handful of many.

We’ve updated and expanded on every single bit of information we could. Out-of-date processes have been replaced with their modern equivalents. Our bulk processes have been streamlined and the information completely refashioned: this chapter now includes a recipe-builder, so you can understand your ingredients and adapt you bulk substrates to what’s abundant in your area, without the need of us holding your hands. Like proud parents, we want you to spread your own wings and fly!

We’ve also written several new chapters tackling brand new topics that weren’t included in the first edition: Spiderman Tek (also known as Ben’s Tek, after the popular brand of microwave rice bags often used as substrate), Sclerotia (also known as magic truffles), Wood-loving Psilocybes (a new challenge for formerly indoor-only growers) and Connections Built with Mycelium, which discusses mushrooms as a social substance, and how we can and should move forward with this incredible medicine.

We still, of course, cover everything from the very basics to the eventual harvest: sourcing your spores, making your hardware, understanding sterilisation, pasteurisation and sterile technique, gathering your supplies, PF Tek, agar work, liquid culture, grain, bulk substrate, contaminants, storing spores, drying and consuming, microdosing and more. All of this content is now fully up to date, and expands on what we had written in the previous edition. And it’s all, of course, fully illustrated with photos.

To help you navigate all this information, we’ve created a few ‘pathways’ through the book, depending on what you, personally, want your mushroom grow journey to look like. Do you want to grow mushrooms cheaply and quickly, with no messing around? You’re the Speedrunner, then, and want to follow chapters 1-7 then 11, on bulk substrate. Are you the kind of person who wants to grow on a neglected patch of land near your abode, reclaiming the land back for the mighty mushroom? You’re a Guerrilla Gardener, and you’ll want to look at agar, liquid culture, grain and wood-lovers. What about the Geneticist, who craves control and optimisation? If that’s you, there’s a path through agar, grain, bulk substrate, sclerotia and wood-lovers just waiting for you.

More than anything, we wanted this second edition to be the mushroom grow bible for every single grower (and here’s a secret: if you want to grow non-magical mushrooms, just ignore the word Psilocybin in the title; these methods work well for any type of shroom!). Whether you’ve taken shrooms once and want to make your own, or you’re a thirty-year psychonaut building a lab to provide safe tinctures for your friends as you age, we wanted to write a book that will give you exactly what you need—with a little humour and a lot of science too.

And as an additional plus, this book can also be used as grow room protection. It’s heavy enough to take out a small assailant in a pinch. When this thing arrives through your letterbox, you are going to NOTICE it.

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So how do you get one?

The Psilocybin Mushroom Bible Second Edition is available from all good bookshops, or from Amazon via the button below. We hope it’s the only mushroom grow book you’ll ever need.