Saturday, April 9^th from 10-5pm at Fernwood Community Centre, 1240 Gladstone Ave.

$85-100 sliding scale (1 work trade available)

Space is limited, please register by clicking here 🙂  

This course will introduce the art and science of mushroom cultivation by offering low-tech, low-sterility, home-scale methods for growing mushrooms for food, medicine and earth renewal. We will focus on less-sterile approaches to creating your own mushroom cultures (“spawn”), fruiting mushrooms for food and medicine, and working with fungi to build soil, boost your garden, and address contamination. Throughout this course, you will learn about setting up cultivation space at home, gathering materials and equipment, and gain experiential hands-on skills to make liquid cultures, petri cultures, grain spawn, sawdust kits, and more.

This course is intended for anyone interested in getting to know the fungal kingdom a bit better; folks who want to grow their own protein-rich food; build soil; and/or beginners to mushroom cultivation; and folks who have tried before without success. We’ll focus on Oyster, Shiitake, Lions Mane and King Stropharia mushrooms as easy mushrooms to start out growing, and overview broader options. If there is interest and time, we can cover some simple ways to grow mushroom medicine, digest household waste with fungi, and train fungi for remediation.

It’ll be an intense day, come prepared to learn! Each participant will take away their own mushroom cultures and a Mushroom Cultivation Manual to refer back to.

10-12:30pm: Approaches to Cultivation: Substrates, Equipment + Materials

This will introduce the cultivation lifecycle and detail approaches to cultivation (sterile and less-sterile), and then get hands-on in spawn production: we’ll prep the substrates (growing mediums) together- liquid culture, agar, bulk substrates- make a glove box, and go through a mushroom cultivation equipment and materials checklist.

12:30-1pm LUNCH + Medicinal mushroom teas and broths

1:15-3:30: Approaches to Cultivation: Spawn + Growing Mushrooms

This follows from the morning session with hands-on, supported inoculations of the substrates we prepped, and a discussion of next steps: incubating, fruiting (growing mushrooms for food and medicine), ‘training’ for remediation, and troubleshooting- what to do if it gets contaminated?

3:45-5pm: Applied Mycology: outdoor cultivation, mycoremediation, simple homescale food + medicine production through urban recycling

Hey look at this Mushroom Cultivation Intensive Poster !