The Cultivation Committee of the MSSF sponsors courses, seminars, and events on the topic of mushroom cultivation. At MSSF events like the Mendocino Woodlands Foray in November and the Fungus Fair in December we provide displays, demonstrations, and seminars on mushroom cultivation.

Facilities

We have mushroom cultivation facilities in the Landscape Horticulture Department of Merritt Community College. There we have laboratory equipment for sterile capture of wild or grocery foraged mushrooms to agar and sterile transfer and ramping up to grain jars, spawn bags, dowels, and other substrates. We also have a woodland mushroom garden and mushroom nature trail and organic orchard and vegetable gardens incorporating mushrooms with the crops. In these facilities we study the saprobic, mycorrhizal, parasitic, and opportunistic modes of fungal lifestyles.

Using these facilities we teach a one semester, 2 college credit, mushroom cultivation class from 11 to 3 each Sunday from August through December. It also covers the basics of identification, taxonomic relationships, toxicology dangers, culinary, medicinal, dye, and fiber uses, and lots of mushroom lore. During the spring semester we have individual single afternoon seminars at Merritt and at other institutions and gardens in the San Francisco Bay Area.