Skills for Low-Tech Mushroom Cultivation June 2 & 3 from 10-5pm
~optional Friday night ‘Intro to Fungal Ecology’ for beginners~ @ Vic West Community Centre
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 waste and toxicity in our soil and water.
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. The course will involve a mix of lecture-style learning and a lot of hands-on both indoor and outdoor skill building. We will focus on growing Lions Mane, Shiitake, Oyster, Garden Giant and Reishi mushrooms.
Please join us for the whole weekend, but if you’d prefer, you can join for just one day. Saturday is about starting and maintaining your own mushroom cultures and building low-tech lab skills for culturing wild fungi for medicine and remediation. Sunday is a focus on growing mushrooms at home for food and medicine.
Course fee includes mushroom cultures- 1 liquid culture, 1 Oyster or King Stropharia mushroom grow kit +1 grain spawn jar and a 35-page Mushroom Cultivation Manual to refer back to.
A detailed breakdown of each day can be found at: http://diyfungi.blog/
Registration required: purchase tickets at https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/skills-for-low-tech-mushroom-cultivation-tickets-45951472090?aff=efbeventtix
Early bird prices until MAY 19th, sliding scale, and option to come with a buddy for a reduced price (second person comes for 1/2 price) or participate as a learner without taking mushroom cultures for half-price. Contact diyfungivictoria@gmail.com for more info.
