My year abroad in a small South German town opened many doors, but one of the big ones was the access to online stores that finally shipped to my front door. Living in Australia can make ordering online a struggle, especially with products from America or Canada. My new location placed me in the heart of Europe and provided the convenient means of simple and fast shipping which was surprisingly stress free.
For my friends and me, that meant a stress-free opportunity to invest in our own shroom kit. Being relative amateurs on the shroom front, we had no idea how the process would unfold. If shrooms are illegal, could we so simply order them online them directly to our front door? Would some kind of law enforcement personally deliver it and bust us the moment we accepted the order? We had no idea, and went into it blind.
Strategically spelling my name wrong and addressing it to my neighbour’s mailbox got the ball rolling and within a week a magic box of potential was personally handed to me by a blissfully unaware neighbour. In hindsight, I totally could’ve just addressed it to myself.
To my dismay, the kit – a transparent container that looked like a four-litre ice cream tub – came with no instructions. Thankfully it’s 2016 and there was plenty of info on YouTube and the rest of the web, and we were soon strategically placing the tub in my room, flooding it with water, and leaving it in a plastic bag to hold the condensation in.
Nothing really happened for the first three weeks except a subtle build-up of necessary condensation in the bag. We thought we must’ve fucked it up somehow… until one morning we woke up to inch-high sprouts! After that they grew like Jack’s beanstalk and didn’t slow down. Once they grew to an appropriate length, we harvested them and dried them via a box lined with salt concentrate (you can google more specific instructions).
The whole process took about two months, cost about €50, and we had managed to collect over 25 grams of dried out shrooms.
On a warm late summer afternoon in August, what started as a simple cup o’ shroom tea soon turned into us making shroom smoothies. In our creative jam, we satiated ourselves with shroom pizzas, which further fuelled an afternoon of grating, blending, chopping and marinating our shrooms to perfection. In fits of laughter we explored both ends of the spectrum. Wrapping them in prosciutto with a drizzle of olive oil and artichoke hearts, we enjoyed the fancy side of shrooms. Once we were all spent and lying on the mattress pile we’d formed on the kitchen floor, we resorted to the simple but effective option of blending them with soft drink.
It takes patience, nurturing and a green thumb. From personal experience I’d recommend it to anyone who has an interest in shrooms, psychedelics and a little bit of indoor gardening. Definitely worth a go! Watching your food grow makes it all the more enjoyable to eat.
