Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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77 of 78 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Keep up-to-date with the most successful techniques for mushroom growing at home, July 11, 2006
Mushroom cultivation techniques are improving fast, especially with the advent of Internet discussion boards where new techniques are being discovered every day.
This book is very recent (as of 2006), and is the clearest and most easy to read book I have seen on the subject. It gives a clear and concise summary of many of the best techniques for growing the most popular type of hobby mushrooms, and discusses where to go to learn more about mushrooms of all types.
Compared to doing research directly from the Internet, this book is clearly organized, well written and authoritative. But perhaps the most valuable resource in this book is its list of reputable web sites and forums on the Internet, which helps you avoid the unreputable sites. Scams on the Internet are abundant, and anyone new to this hobby needs to be careful to find trustworthy sources for discussion and for purchasing equipment and culture spores to experiment with. There are many sites that will make big claims and then not deliver, leaving many beginners frustrated and much poorer with nothing to show.
The importance of finding clear and reputable sources of information and supplies cannot be understated. This book will help you get started safely and quickly. Buy it, read it, then go to the forums listed and compare what you have learned with what other people have already been through. Use this knowledge to avoid the common scams and pitfalls. Follow this plan and you will be happy.
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33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent. Begin here., June 12, 2006
An update on simple accessible grow techniques is long overdue. This is book is perfect for newbies. I recommend supplementing this book with other available information on the web, just to get a thorough scope of what's ahead of you, and what came before the improvements the authors present in the book. There's a surprisingly well written and researched Wiki page on psilocybin for those of you who are curious about its history and chemistry. Excellent color section, resource list and appendix.
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21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Okay book, but not detailed enough, January 13, 2008
I bought this book having no experience with growing mushrooms and hoping to start for a small investment. Most mushroom growing methods (it seems) require a pressure cooker for sterilization; however, purchasing a pressure cooker could be quite expensive. For this reason, I wanted to start with the PF Tek method, which only requires a boiling water bath for sterilization. This method is covered in the book and the book even gives some improvements to it. This is the method I tried and so it is the main focus of the review of this book.
Primarily, I will say that the authors' descriptions were lacking in detail. They outline the steps, but they were not precise enough to execute the actions without having questions and doubts. In my opinion, if you buy an instructional book, it should be all-inclusive and cover you 100% from start to finish. Otherwise, you could just research this stuff online for free. Because of a few steps that could have been performed better or different, this method ended with the bacterial contamination of most of the jars.
If you are a beginner like me, and just want to try out growing mushrooms without a huge investment, then I would definatley recommend trying the PF Tek method to start because it does work. You just have to be very careful in your execution of the steps. I would recommend going on Youtube and typing "PF Tek" in the search field. There is a four part movie on there entitled "Let's Grow Mushrooms! pf tek part #". That instructional video will give you more information than this book does on the PF Tek method. Also, it actually shows you how to perform the steps so that there is no doubt. Furthermore, it's free.
As for the rest of the book, it is informational as a primer guide, but definatley not as thourough as it could be.
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by Paul Stamets
by Paul Stamets
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