So yeah, fungus. Funny enough I pretty much only grow koji and some other food molds. I like to talk shop with mushroom growers though. The techniques are really different but we share a lot of experiences and... mindset. People end up with an almost spiritual admiration for the mold. Which is self-evident for psilocybes of course, but koji growers seem to develop it too.
This.
- You get sterilized substrate, which requires special equipment to produce on your own (large enough pressure cooker, mainly).
- Sterilizing rye is a bit of an art. Not too mushy, not too hard, properly sterilized, get the moisture right. Might take a couple of attempts.
- Financial investment is negligible either way.
- You’re hedging your contamination bets with 200g packs, because creating lab conditions at home isn’t that easy. (Plenty of tutorials claim it is, and then show you their special mushroom tent, which you won’t recognize as a beginner, and then you wonder why you’ve got orange fluff a month later.)
It's a fun hobby. It motivated me to go back to school and pursue a biology degree. I think there's a lot we can learn from fungus, and not even in some kind of spiritual mumbo jumbo way, they're just better than we are at a lot of tasks (e.g. if you want to talk about 9's of availability, mycorrhizal networks are way ahead of us: they don't tend towards single points of control/failure like we do).