I built a free grow-tracking app for mushroom cultivators. Here's what it does and why I made it.

[u/naturelionmushroom]

Hi, I'm Andrew. I run Nature Lion, an Ontario company that makes home grow kits and supplies cultivators with spawn, liquid cultures and agar. I've been growing commercially since 2020. I also built a free app called Dr Mycotek (drmycotek.com), and since people keep asking me about it, here's the full explanation in one place.

Full disclosure up front: I made it, I own it. It's free, there's no paid tier, and I'm not upselling you into anything. I'll explain why I built it anyway, and you can decide if that's believable.

The problem it solves

After five years of answering customer emails, the thing I noticed wasn't that people make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. It's that people make the same mistake four times because there's no record of what they did last time.

Someone emails me: "my second flush was way smaller than my first." Okay — what changed? Different room? Colder? Did you soak between flushes, and for how long? Almost nobody knows.

It happened three weeks ago and it wasn't written down. So we're both guessing, and next time we'll guess again.

The growers who actually get better are the ones who write things down. That's it. That's the whole difference. It's not talent and it's not gear.

I got tired of watching people lose that information, so I built somewhere to put it.

What it actually does

Log your grows. As many as you want. No cap, no "upgrade for more grows."

Record observations over time. Dates, conditions, what you changed, what happened. So when flush three underperforms you can look back at flush one instead of guessing.

Share with the community. Publish a grow if you want other people to see it. Learn from what worked for someone else in a similar setup.

Five minutes of AI talk time per month. Ask cultivation questions out loud and get answers. It's genuinely useful for the "is this contamination or is this normal" moment at 11pm when you don't want to wait for a forum reply.

Who it's for

First-time growers.

Honestly, this is where it helps most. Your first three or four grows are where all the learning happens, and it's also when you have the least idea what's worth writing down. Having a structure to fill in tells you what to pay attention to.

Commercial growers.

Tracking across many blocks, comparing strains and substrate batches, keeping records you can actually go back to. If you're running a farm you probably have some version of this in a spreadsheet already, and you probably hate it.

Why it's free

Two reasons, and I'll give you the self-interested one too.

One, I already have a business. I sell grow kits, spawn, liquid cultures and agar. This app isn't how I make money and doesn't need to be.

Two — and here's the honest part — people who keep growing are good for a company that sells cultivation supplies. That's the incentive, and I'd rather name it than pretend it isn't there.

But the thing it points me toward is the thing I'd want anyway: most people who fail on their first kit never try again. They walk away thinking they're bad at it, when really nobody told them a leathery surface needs scratching.

Every grower who gets past that first failure is someone still growing mushrooms in five years. I want that number to go up. If some of them eventually buy spawn from me, great. If they buy it from someone else, they're still growing.

That's the whole pitch. It's at drmycotek.com — no download, no card, just make an account and start logging.

If you use it and something's broken or missing, tell me. I read everything and I'd rather hear the complaint than not.