Mushrooms only have a faint smell (like regular eating mushrooms), unless of course they get infected, then they smell like garbage. Which is convenient, because that's where you'd be putting them.

All the molds that have grown in my rice have been on the surface, which leads me to believe that they were introduced after they were cooked. There was a bacillus contamination in a bigger jar that I started later, but the mycelia beat it back. If you want to avoid bacillus contamination, you can leave the rice soaking in water overnight, and the bacilli see all that rice and think it's party time, but then you cook it and they boil to death.

I ate like ten grams of wet mushrooms which is about 1 gram dry. I had some faint closed eye visuals (oddly enough, of nazis. i had been watching the history channel while i waited for it to kick in) and I was definitely not ok to drive. I spent a lot of time staring at the grass in the back yard, talking to the plants in my garden, and thinking of various inanimate objects as my friends. I was more or less in control; I knew what I was doing was silly and nonsensical but enjoyed it nonetheless.

Total time to get an ounce was about a month. And actually, it was more like five eighths of an ounce. Turns out the buggers weren't all the way done drying. There's still mushrooms coming up though, they're not done yet!

Salsa jars aren't ideal, I just had a lot of them lying around. The best jars would be ones where the mouth is as wide as the jar, that way you don't have to cut them in half in order to get them out. Even though I didn't use a lot of specialized stuff, I did make a good effort to be careful not to contaminate them. I didn't breathe on them or open them in a room where there was likely to be mold growing, (think kitchen!) for instance. Once the mycelia take over the top surface, they're a lot more resistant to contamination though.

They hardly need any light, they just don't like total darkness. I just put mine between my dresser and the wall, where the wastebasket used to be. There are other places I could put them, but I like looking at them. At the peak of their growing, you can notice their change in size every hour or so.

I also used cubensis B+ spores. I'm not sure if that makes a difference, but I've heard those are fairly easy to grow.

I'm not sure what the purpose of vermiculite is, since it adds no nutritional value. It must be either to hold water, or to create gaps for the mycelia to move through. Regular brown rice can do both of those things well enough, so I haven't been using vermiculite at all.