Fiji: A Grow-Log Pictorial (1st Flush complete 39 days)

[mjshroomer]

Fiji, The Island of Shroomies

The first time I became aware of mushrooms on Fiji was from a letter to R. Gordon Wasson posted in an article he wrote in the Herbalist, issue 25, 1959 titled, "Wild Mushrooms, A World of Wonder and Adventure. I was inspired to read this paper after reading of R. Gordon Wasson's Original May 13th, 1957 Life Magazine Article on his discovery of a magic mushroom cult in the Mexican State of Oaxaca.

At the time, R. Gordon Wasson was interested in wild mushrooms through his Russian wife, the late Dr. Valentina P. Wasson, a New York Pediatrician.

In this article, Dr. Wasson wrote of four medical history cases of accidental ingestion's which caused disturbances of visions and feelings of euphoria. The causative actions were later determined to be from the ingestion psilocybian containing mushrooms.

After R. Gordon Wasson's article appeared in Life Magazine in May of 1957 and in June the International edition appeared, Dr. Wasson received hundreds of letters in regards to his discoveries. In his 1959 article in the Herbalist, Dr. Wasson discussed three cases of intoxications. One from Colorado, The second was from a Polish immigrant to the USA who was a relative of the author of Lolita and the third letter brings us to Fiji.

Wasson wrote:

Quote:
On April 19, 1958, Kennenth McKenney of the Emperor Gold Mining Co. Ltd., wrote me the following letter from Vatukoula, in the Fijis:

A Map of Fiji where Vatukoula is on the island of Viti Levu.



About Vatukoula, Fiji from Wikipedia

:
Vatukoula is a gold mining settlement in Fiji, 9 kilometers inland from the Town of Tavua on the island of Viti Levu. It was established in 1934.

The Emperor Mines Limited (EML)owned the mine but shut it down in December 2006 due to the high cost of mining and the level of capital required to sustain the mining operation, which made it uneconomical for EML to continue mining.

Both open-cast and underground mining were carried out in Vatukoula, with one tunnel rumoured to extend out under Tavua Bay. Emperor Gold Mines (previously a subsidiary of EML) pioneered the gold mining industry in Fiji, but has since been sold with its operations to Westech International, a private company based in Australia.
Settlements in Fiji|Vatukoula]vatukoula gold mine is being sold to River Diamond

The gold mine is however open now and is producing gold (2009).

And now I would like to present the letter written to Dr. Wasson by Mr. Kenneth McKenney after he read of Dr. Wasson’s mushroomic discoveries in Mexico.

:
Yesterday somebody handed me a June 10, 1957 copy of Life International containing your article on hallucinogenic mushrooms. It was given to me because of an experience I had on Sunday the 13th of this month when, for seven hours, I lived in a fantasy world as a result of eating local mushrooms.

I am a geologist, 29 years old, New Zealand graduated, and for the first time in my life my body and soul parted company and my mind leapt free.

I picked the mushrooms, which from your illustrations [JWA Note: Roger Heim's water color illustrations in the Life Magazine article] appear to be a species of Stropharia [JWA note: Stropharia = Psilocybe cubensis], about 4 o’clock in the afternoon. To me they looked innocent enough. Their yellow tinge I thought due to the sun they had been in all day.\

They grew in dung. That evening my wife fried about half a pound of them in butter and, as she does not care for mushrooms, I ate the lot, down to the last drop of thick brown juice.

They were delicious.

Twenty minutes later I had the most peculiar sensation of suddenly quivering to life; it was if a certain note, to which my whole being responded, was struck. Rapidly my perception reached a state of awareness beyond anything I have ever experienced. Each nerve vibrated with life; to pass from one room to the other was a sensation of extraordinary transport. My thoughts ran so quickly I was unable to converse with anyone. Between one word and the next so many mental explosions fired my brain I could not continue; often I would walk outside as if the house were not big enough to contain me. Once I said to my wife---“How could you understand, your world is so tiny.” For the first few hours I was held by the magic of the mushrooms in a condition of split-level reality. I could both see myself in the flesh and float in what seemed to be a pure state of mind. Later in the hospital when I thought I was going to die I had a distinct feeling of being “taken away.”

When I realized that these feelings were persistent and increasing, that I was in fact suffering from ”mushroom poisoning,” I rang up a doctor. He advised me to take an emetic. I mixed a strong glass of salt and water but such was my delight with these dark flowers even in the face of his serious warning that I spat out the first mouthful of emetic in ecstatic abandon. Even on drinking the glassful I was able to vomit only a little. By now the mushrooms had assumed a living entity of their own and my body was reluctant to be rid of them. I felt no illness neither than nor later, in fact at 4 A.M. when the drug had worn off I was consumed with an enormous sense of well-being.

Shortly after our telephone conversation the doctor arrived. He insisted I be taken to the nearest hospital, twenty miles away, and have my stomach washed free of the mushrooms.

The ambulance ride was heroic. Most of the time I was besieged with visions and hallucinations conditioned by the speed of the night flying past. On between my transports I became aware of myself in the flesh. My fingers were tingling and felt weightless; I was distinctly groggy; I thought of death. Finally I remember leaning back in the ambulance and placing my hands behind my head, where they immediately became wings on which I flew to the hospital, and thinking—“If I am going to die, I’m going to die grandly.”

I felt little pain while the stomach tube was in use. An hour or so later the doctor suggested I go to bed as there was no further danger and sleep off the effects, to which I replied that as the worst of it was over I intended on staying up and enjoying my poisoning. This I did. In a state of high excitement I laughed with my visions and enjoyed my hallucinations until five in the morning. I awoke again at seven quite fresh, suffering only from a tender throat where the tube had rubbed me sore. Now, six days later, I am still numbed by the enormity of that night.

As far as I have been able to determine the Fijians do not eat these mushrooms although they enjoy the standard variety. Their name for the mushrooms is viu-ni-tevoro which freely translated means devil’s parasol, tevoro being devil and viu the name given to the native fan-palm the leaf of which is used in the same way as a parasol. Nor have I unearthed any legendary power of ritual associated with fungoid growth but these secrets are hard to come by and such information will take time…

Then Dr. Wasson added the following comment following the letter by Mr. Kenneth McKenney:

:
Viu-ni-tevoro---Devil’s Parasol! How that name, redolent with the awe-struck emotions of countless generations of unlettered Fijians, reminds us of the mushroom names that recur endlessly in our common vocabularies all over the world!

Here is the single print I received from my friend on Fiji. It appears to have red spores in the print.

The Red Spored print of Psilocybe cubensis from Fiji:


Ten days after using PDA, I was able to slice two sections into two petri plates and grew mycelium within ten day.



Then I put the 10-day old mycelium slices into two baggies of rye berry seed. And in 4 days you can see the mycelium feeding on the rye berry.


Now we have ten days of growth and the mycelium has overtaken most of the seed and much is also attached to the plastic baggies sides.


And here is a partial 3-pound bag of pasteurized rice-paddie straw and buffalo (kwai) manure.


And so I mix the rye berry seed with the mycellium feeding off of it into a terrarium with the three pound bag of compost. Three images:






and finally 15 days later since I mixed the rye berry with the compost, we have rhizzomorphic strands developing on the mycellium and the compost:


Be cool, there are 5 more days of fruitings to post on this first flush and a lot more to come in the 2nd flush.

The next post will be day 35 of the growth since the spores came into being.

mjshroomer

[teesus]

thats pretty fast. great rhizos. i'm looking forward for this. never seen the fiji strain

[hyphaenation]

Nice post MJ. Looking forward to part 2.

Re: eating 1/2 pound of fresh cubensis to ones self ... would'nt that be somewhere along the lines of 20 grams plus dry weight ?

[mjshroomer]

Originally Posted by hyphaenation

Nice post MJ. Looking forward to part 2.

Re: eating 1/2 pound of fresh cubensis to ones self ... would'nt that be somewhere along the lines of 20 grams plus dry weight ?

I always doubt someones weight of fresh mushrooms when someone says they picked shrooms and say they ate a certain amount when they did not. There are 20-30 good doses in one fresh pound of shrooms (cubes) at one ounce per dose or 3-5 dried grams meaning between 6-10 good doses to a dried ounce or less.

However, Shroom Wizard who recently died claimed he ate a pound of cubes on his first mushroom trip years ago and while he was well known to shroomsters in Florida for teaching people how to pick and sharing locations of pasture lands, I really doubt his account of how many he claimed to have eaten. Any chemistry major and psychologist or psychiatrist involved in entheogenic drug research and/or medical physcians in emergency rooms will tell you that if you did consume a pound of shrooms, expecially cubes which is a lot of bulk since they are 90% or more of water would not leave one in a good condition and such a large dose would require emergency medical care.

Now, that aside. I am so ticked off sometimes with the new skin because of slowness in the pages loading when before they did instantly. I just posted a whole page with day 35 of the first flush of the Fiji shrooms and my computer disconnected and when I went to re log-in, this new method will not accept my username of password and then a message comes on telling me that my name and password are not right.

When I normally open mycotopia in explorer, I just type the letter M into the username box and mjshroomer pops up, I click it in and automaticaly my password appears as a aseries of asterix and then I am able to log in. However, when my computer disconnects, I cannot log in unless I close explorer and then reopen it to myctopia.net and then the username and password work.

I have had this problem ever since the system was changed. When I go off line and I am working on a page, I re connect my computer, but mycotopia automatically goes to a page telling me I need to log in. When I type m in the box, my name does not come up as it dfoes when I first re open explorer and type in my M letter and my name appears and then the password appears in asterix automatically.

so I am ticked. I spent an hour putting together the page now I have to do Day 35 all over again

So I have to post 11 images for day 35, only it seems now I can only post ten at time.

Then there is still day 36, 37, 38, and Day 39 for the first flush.

mjshroomer

Lost a good hour there I did!

[Ben Dover]

I was wondering the same thing hyph...

Maybe since his wife fired them in butter it hindered the potency?

[mjshroomer]

As I said above in the last post I made. More images are coming but I just lost this whole page of day 35.

It is also hard when you have 100's of grow images on a daily basis it takes time to rename and size them for posting.

Day 35 of the Fiji Cubes after mixing the rye berry seed mycelia with the compost.
11 Images of day 35.

Fiji 1st Flush Day 35-1:
[img][/img]

Fiji 1st Flush Day 35-2:


Fiji 1st Flush Day 35-3:


Fiji 1st Flush Day 35-4:


Fiji 1st Flush Day 35-5:


Fiji 1st Flush Day 35-6:


Fiji 1st Flush Day 35-7:


Fiji 1st Flush Day 35-8:


Fiji 1st Flush Day 35-9:


Fiji 1st Flush Day 35-10:



Fiji 1st Flush Day 35-11:


There are still Day 36, 37, 38, and Day 39 to post in the first flush and a 2nd flushing is coming your way in a 2nd post following this one some time in the next day or so.

At the end of this thread and after I post all the images of the growth, I want to add a commentary of another paragraph from Dr. Wasson's above noted paper from the 1959 issue of the Herbalist in which Dr. Wasson made a major error in misidentifying the mushroom in question as another species which is not found in dung.

Because of the Fijian word for the mushrooms, Dr. Wasson made a statement of other cultures and the words they had used in their past to identify such toxic shrooms which should be avoided. He used a word from another journal publication of accidental ingestion and because the author of the letter Dr. Wasson quoted in the article identified it as a Stropharia from Waspn's "Life" Magazine article, of which the only Stropharia in the "Life" Magazine article which was hand-painted in beautiful water colors by the late mycologist Roger Heim, was Stropharia cubensis and Mr. Kenneth McKenney had noted in his letter to Dr. Wasson that it grew in dung.

However, at the end of Mr. McKenney's letter in Dr. Wasson's article he names a mushroom from another country with the local name given to the mushroom as the one which Mr. McKenney had eaten.

I am surprise that after 60 years no one else has ever noticed this error and I am sorry Gordon is not alive so that I could bring it to his attention. But I will publish a short communication in a journal with the correct data.


mjshroomer

[Om shanti]

Nice story and pics, thanks!!

[mjshroomer]

Day 36 and Day 37 of the First Flush of the Fiji Cubes after mixing the rye berry seed mycelia with the compost.
7 Images of day 36.

Fiji 1st Flush Day 36-1:


Fiji 1st Flush Day 36-2:


Fiji 1st Flush Day 36-3:


Fiji 1st Flush Day 36-4:


Fiji 1st Flush Day 36-5:


Fiji 1st Flush Day 36-6:


Fiji 1st Flush Day 36-7:


Day 37 of the First Flush of the Fiji Cubes after mixing the rye berry seed mycelia with the compost.
6 Images of day 37.

Fiji 1st Flush Day 37-1:


Fiji 1st Flush Day 37-2:


Fiji 1st Flush Day 37-3:


Fiji 1st Flush Day 37-4:


Fiji 1st Flush Day 37-5:


Fiji 1st Flush Day 37-6:
[img][/img]

mjshroomer

2 more days of the 1st Flush of the Fiji shrooms to Come.

[mjshroomer]

Day 38 of the First Flush of the Fiji Cubes after mixing the rye berry seed mycelia with the compost.
7 Images of day 38.

Fiji 1st Flush day 38-1:


Fiji 1st Flush day 38-2:


Fiji 1st Flush day 38-3:


Fiji 1st Flush day 38-4:


Fiji 1st Flush day 38-5:


Fiji 1st Flush day 38-6:


Fiji 1st Flush day 38-7:



Day 39 of the First Flush of the Fiji Cubes after mixing the rye berry seed mycelia with the compost.
7 Images of day 39.

Fiji 1st Flush day 39-1:


Fiji 1st Flush day 39-2:


Fiji 1st Flush day 39-3:


Fiji 1st Flush day 39-4:


Fiji 1st Flush day 39-5:


And there are available, spore prints of the Fiji mushrooms of the first flush

Fiji 1st Flush day 39-6:


Fiji 1st Flush day 39-7:


And thus ends the first flush

Stay tune for the four days (Day 46, 47, 48, and Day 49) of the 2nd flush I will post in a few days.

mjshroomer

[SunShine47]

Wow, those cubensis have a different look to them. They have twisty stems which seems that it cant hold it self up.

Holly shit great grow never seen anything like that, and boy are they fast...

[SharkieJones]

Very cool

[trips6928]

Holy buffalo shit batman!!!!!!
I'd love to try that Fiji strain. is there a vendor that sells that print?
great grow, and many happy trips to you.

[seedlessstinky1]

Nice grow MJ. Fiji? Well those look delicious. And i can't believe the locals used to call em devil.....whatnot. Anything but devilish.

[M&M420]

Nice work mjshroomer!What's strange is I've had shrooms with that exact ribbon looking effect on the stems when I got a bacterial infection on some B+.

[Arabesque]

If I get something worthy of a trade from my grow I'll let you know. It's a great colonizer and a prolific fruiter. Agar really shows it's worth in those results. Keep up the impressive work.

[mjshroomer]

Originally Posted by Arabesque

If I get something worthy of a trade from my grow I'll let you know. It's a great colonizer and a prolific fruiter. Agar really shows it's worth in those results. Keep up the impressive work.

2nd Flush posts in a few days.


mjshroomer

[roc]

Nice MJ - Nice!

Looking for a vendor of the Fiji...

I notice they were not cased... when the dung dealer delivers I think Roc Villa may do a round of shit and not case them.

Best Regards

[kcmoxtractor]

that's some sexy cubies :P fairly fast to...

[mjshroomer]

Originally Posted by kcmoxtractor

that's some sexy cubies :P fairly fast to...

I'll be posting day 68, day 69, Day 70, and Day 70 - 6 hours later of the 2nd flush today or Sunday

mjshroomer

[buteo]

wow nice! I enjoy the caps on those! so long before they open up. Thanks for this wonderful information.
New mycotopia skin messing up? Hmm idk what that could be mine works good. Perhaps your browser maybe?

[roc]

I like your shit MJ...

[kcmoxtractor]

whatever happened to the second flush pictures

[The Truth.]

What a beautiful story.
LOL!
At first I was thinking, "penis envy on viagra"

Great work though.

[mycospora]

nice grow

mycospora

[mjshroomer]

Originally Posted by roc

I like your shit MJ...

Roc says he likes my shit.

My thong is a nice size 10.

And here is my shit.



mjshroomer

[eatyualive]

cool looking strain. and one big turd.

[mjshroomer]

Originally Posted by kcmoxtractor

whatever happened to the second flush pictures

2nd flush was posted here on March 31, 2009 at this URL covering day 46-49:

http://forums.mycotopia.net/forum-in...y-46-49-a.html (Fiji: A Grow-Log Pictorial (2nd Flush complete Day 46-49))

The 3rd and 4th flush only produced a few shrooms, nothing special, then I posted the 5th flush here in April 25th (25 days to flush because it dried and I dunked it) and this is day 69 of the grow for the 5th flush:

http://forums.mycotopia.net/forum-in...-day-69-a.html (Fiji 5th Flush Day 69)

I will post the 6th flush in a few days which happened on day 76 and day 77 of the grow on April 25th and April 26th.

And on day 95 of the grow, a 7th flush of one scraggly shroom grew ending the Fiji grow. will post these in a few days.

Day 77 of the 6th flush produced a nice small flush of about 8-10 shrooms. I mean, 77 days later I stil had a good fruiting and then day 95, one mushroom.

Funny thing is the Tak Mountain Cube produced 9 flushes and some were really nice lookin' fellas. Check those threads here in this forum.

mjshroomer