Skills for Low-Tech Mushroom Cultivation – Weekend Course

November 25 & 26 from 10-5pm

Fernwood Community Centre, 1240 Gladstone Ave.

This course will introduce the art and science of mushroom cultivation by offering low-tech, 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 soil and water 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. You will learn simple ways to grow and make mushroom medicine, grow mushrooms in your garden, digest household waste with fungi, and work with fungi for remediation.

Each participant will take away their own mushroom cultures (1 liquid culture, 1 Oyster or King Stropharia mushroom grow kit + 1 grain spawn jar) and a Mushroom Cultivation Manual to refer back to.

Please join us for the whole weekend, but if you’d prefer, you can join for just one day. Saturday is a focus on growing mushrooms at home for food and medicine, Sunday is about starting and growing your own mushroom cultures.

 Saturday breakdown: Grow your own mushrooms for food and medicine
*this is intended for folks who want to grow mushrooms to eat and/or for medicine at home and/or in their farm or gardens who have little to no experience growing mushrooms.

10am- Intro to fungal ecology + overview of mushroom cultivation
11:30am- Mushroom companions to the garden 
Hands-on: make King Stropharia mushroom pathway at orchard
12:30-1:15pm: Lunch * bring a lunch or go to eat nearby. There are 2 cafes within walking distance (Cornerstone and the Parsonage) and a number of other little restaurants.
1:15-1:45pm- Growing mushrooms on logs + Mushroom logs demo
1:45pm- Growing Oyster mushrooms + everybody make their own 4 gallon grow kit to take home
2:30pm- Break with medicinal mushroom tea
3pm- Growing Lions Mane, Reishi, and Shiitake mushrooms overview + medicinal and nutritional properties + how to prepare for food and medicine
4pm- Other cool stuff you can do with Fungi – working with fungi to address household waste and build healthy soil (if time and interest allows: intro to Mycoremediation)
+ Q +A
5pm- finish

Sunday breakdown: Low-tech skills for growing your own mushroom ‘cultures/spawn/mycelium’

*this is intended for folks who have either taken the previous days’ course, and/or have some experience growing mushrooms and/or are interested in getting seriously into mushroom cultivation. If you’re unsure if this day is for you, please email me at diyfungivictoria@gmail.com 🙂 

10am-12:30pm: Approaches to Cultivation

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, grain, bulk substrates (straw, sawdust, woodchips).

12:30-1:15pm LUNCH

1:15-2pm Equipment + Materials: make a glove box, and go through a mushroom cultivation equipment and materials checklist.

2pm: Starting Cultures – cardboard, liquid culture + agar

 3pm break with medicinal mushroom tea

3:15pm: Making grain spawn + everyone inoculate a grain jar in the glove box

4:15pm: Sawdust kits + next steps: incubating, troubleshooting- what to do if it gets contaminated.

5pm: close

*everyone will leave with 1 liquid culture, 1 grain spawn jar, and a detailed mushroom cultivation manual to refer back to.

** if you’d like to build your own glove box after the workshop, please let me know by Thursday and I will purchase the materials needed and support you in building one after the day finishes (5-5:30pm). The materials cost about $100.

Cost: $200-275 sliding scale *Please pre-register and purchase tickets here: https://growmushroomsvictoria.brownpapertickets.com/

1 work trade available. Partial trades available, please contact me if cost is a barrier and you’d like to join.