Have you wanted to try your hand at growing gourmet mushrooms, inoculate wooden logs to produce delicious perennial mushroom yields for years to come, or simply improve your garden’s soil health? Whether you’re a mycophile, gardener, forager, veggie farmer, chef, or simply a lover of all things life; come join us at the Loyola campus farm for two weekends of instruction & activities. Participants will learn, hands-on, the basics of both indoor and outdoor mushroom cultivation. This course is fit for newbie-intermediate mushroom growers. Everyone will leave class with $155 worth of mushroom cultivation products and a mushroom cultivation certificate (value breakdown: liquid culture bank of blue oyster genetics $35, one additional mushroom liquid culture syringe of your choice $20, jar with DIY lids $10, log inoculation kit $40, red wine cap inoculated woodchips $50).
Mushrooms are the often unrecognized/unsung janitors of the world, breaking down waste products to fruit into delicious mushrooms. In this course, you will understand the basics of both indoor and outdoor mushroom cultivation techniques, tools, and processes. To begin the course, you will receive online resources and how-to video to broaden your cultivation knowledge before the first in-person class meets. Each class will focus on a few main cultivation processes. We will meet for two weekends, and students may come the following sunday for supervised processes. This optional sunday meeting is to further guide you along your mushroom cultivation journey, and as an opportunity to trouble shoot, ask further questions, learn from mistakes together, etc. to boost your confidence within the skills learned throughout the course.
In woodchips beds, logs, buckets or baskets of pasturized straw, around trees and annual garden beds, and how to best select outdoor areas for potential cultivation.
Outdoor skills: understanding the best microclimate to begin growing mushrooms, incoulate & seal logs with various mushroom strains, growing oyster mushrooms in straw, cultivate red wine cap using woodchips, and generally how to improve soil web health & water retention using mushroom mycelium.
Starting from the basic genetics of mushroom liquid culture, how to make a nutrient broth for you liquid culture, how to prepare grain spawn and plug spawn, high-tech production using mushroom grow bags (like most commercial mushroom farms) and autoclaves, low-tech cultivation using monotub fruiting chambers, mini greenhouses, and low-tech humidity & air exchange methods.
Indoor skills: how to turn a liquid culture syringe into a nutrient broth bank of genetics, how to create grain spawn, how to transfer grain spawn to substrate, and learn about fruiting conditions & contamination troubleshooting.
FIRST WEEKEND
Day 1 – Indoor cultivation: liquid culture, plug, and grain spawn… tools/vocab/sterility during pressure cooking times
Day 2 – outdoor cultivation: outdoor substrates, build garden beds, straw buckets, and incoluate logs
SECOND WEEKEND
Day 3 – indoor cultivation: substrates, pasturization/sterilization, inoculate bags
Day 4 – indoor cultivation and outdoor cultivation: fruiting conditions, troubleshooting, garden beds, log innoculation
By the end of the course, students should be able to…
$400 per person
Loyola Farm
May 18 & 19 and May 25 & 26, 2024
Two weekends 12-5pm
20hr total
An enthusiasm for growing mushrooms indoors or outdoors! And a couple of free weekends to attend class. Useful materials to have before class begins based on your interest of indoor vs outdoor cultivation:
For indoor cultivation: large mason jars with their 2-part lids, 99% isopropyl alcohol & lab gloves/reusable dish gloves, cloth micropore tape, heat resistant silicone click here for an example :), instant pot (lower-tech/cost effective) or pressure cooker, mushroom grow bags, one large plastic organizing tote to use as a “fruiting chamber/DIY green house”
For outdoor cultivation: wood chips (any deciduous tree, no cedar), hardwood logs, straw, drill, large 5gal buckets. Addition materials: laundry bags for straw pastureization, reused cardboard with little to no ink for outdoor bed water retention.
Additional reading material: Radical Mycology by Peter McCoy
Nico Schutte (they/them) Nico Schutte (they/them) has been producing gourmet mushrooms for co-op CultivAction since 2021. They are well-versed with indoor and outdoor cultivation for years and have learned through low-tech DIY methods, and plenty of trial and error. Since co-founding co-op CultivAction, they have ran and managed an indoor mushroom grow op July 2022 – April 2023 and outdoor grow op 2021 – present. Nico also leads urban foraging courses and workshops throughout the city and provides foraging tips for plants and mushrooms, as well as herbal medicine preparations and general recipes made from foraged goods. Their mycology methodology is deeply intertwined with their love for permaculture, ecology, biodynamic farming, sustainable and accessible food systems, and food sovereignty.
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