More and more shrooooooooms!

drutter (69)in #fungi • last year

Current conditions here are just right for fungi - moderate temperatures and plenty of moisture. Beautiful magic mushrooms keep popping up all around me!

My wife @MediKatie spotted these ones down the street, and we went out and grabbed them! I'm interested to try microdosing these amanita muscaria (fly agaric) mushrooms, a treatment for PTSD, chronic pain, and insomnia.

I really liked that cute little button (in the center of the picture), so I decided to place it at the top of our dehydrator, whole. The rest got sliced up and laid out in the lower levels.

I took a photo every hour or so...

It's almost totally dry in the last photo.

This species contains ibotenic acid and muscamol. It is usually dried, to convert some of the ibotenic acid into muscamol. Both are psychoactive, but the former tends to be associated with unwanted effects like nausea, while the latter tends to be associated with therapeutic effects like relaxation.

I did a post a couple days ago here, showing off some foraged amanita muscaria, including several of the yellow "formosa" variant:

Update!

That first batch is completely dried. A lot of moisture was removed, but the yield was still quite impressive. Should keep me in microdoses for a while! Maybe even a few macrodoses, who knows...

And a closeup of the dried strips in that jar:

Please note! I am not trying to encourage anyone to use medicinal mushrooms. But if you do, make sure you know what you're doing before you forage ANY mushroom. This post is meant to show my appreciation for this part of our natural ecosystem, that also has interesting and potentially-healing interactions with our bodies and minds.