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 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.

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 as they relate to medicine and 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.

Instructor Bio: Danielle Stevenson is a fungi enthusiast living in Victoria, B.C., Canada, with a focus on community-based work towards food sovereignty and land regeneration. She launched D.I.Y. Fungi to offer education and mushroom cultures (a.ka. “spawn”) to empower folks to grow their own food and medicine. She also works on projects and research that address food and waste issues, soil contamination and toxic waste, and works on grassroots and municipal-scale bioremediation projects.