Together we go through various ways we can access the profound ways mushrooms can help us build immunity and strengthen ourselves and our communities. We go over several varieties of mushrooms that are known for their beneficial properties. Learn techniques and recipes to take home with you.
We navigate the complex web & ancient world of medicinal mushrooms. Explore how they grow in nature then, how they nurture us in return. Explore the deep history humans have with medicinal mushrooms & their power to heal. Identifying uses, and ways to prepare them. We will demonstrate the vast options and diversity of properties within just a handful of selected varieties. The most common and popular we will look at & work with is the Reishi or Lingzhi mushroom, the legendary ‘Mushroom of Immortality.’
Journey through other divine healers of the wild; the Turkey Tail mushroom, Lion’s Mane mushroom, & the common culinary mushroom, the Shiitake. Learn about how each of these mushrooms exists in nature, how we can cultivate a working relationship with them in our health regimens and of course keep them sacred and wild where they deserve to remain. Raising awareness of the growing market for these healers and what it means for us to do our part to grow our own, and explore the ethics of this huge growing industry.
IN THIS HANDS-ON WORKSHOP, YOU WILL LEARN:
Learn the basic life cycle and biology of mushrooms and their Fungal relatives
Learn how mushrooms exist in nature to better understand how they grow, and how we can apply these methods to our lives, agriculture, health regimens and more.
Journey through a few varieties of medicinal mushrooms that are commonly found in stores.
We go over methods we can prepare and use these medicinals for both food and/or medicine.
Tastings of long brewed Chaga tea and freshly extracted tinctures + oxymels.
Each participant leaves with an in-process half pint jar containing 80% alcohol of reishi. After a week, you can extract that into a tincture and use it as-is or perform the double extraction step. We will demonstrate three ways to extract and will provide digital links to the step-by-step process.
ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR
Olga Tzogas started her love affair with Fungi and plants over 15 years ago, with the help and guidance of family, teachers and community. In 2011, Smugtown Mushrooms was started, which provides cultivation supplies to grow mushrooms, indoors or outdoors, for food or for medicine. Olga has taught hundreds of folks how to grow mushrooms, make medicine and learn about the glory of Fungi and the natural world. Alongside the collaboration of the collective, The Mycelium Underground, Olga helped create the New Moon Mycology Summit in 2018. She was a core organizer for the 2016 Radical Mycology Convergence and the MycoSymbiotics Festival from 2015-17. Annually, Olga returns to her ancestral homeland to guide small groups immersed in land based and traditional knowledge of the country of Greece, highlighting the fungi and plants there.
