The Love + Power of Medicinal Mushrooms
San Diego, California-
private address, location given upon registration, space limited
Together 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 in 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.
-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 talk about ways we can prepare and use these medicinals for both food and/or medicine.
-Tastings of long brewed Chaga tea and freshly extracted homegrown Reishi tea.
-preparation of the first part of our Double extracted Reishi mushroom tincture, this involves processing the Reishi and storing & soaking it with supplied grain alcohol.
-All attendees will enjoy will take home some dried Reishi mushrooms to begin your partnership with these healers.
BIO:
Olga Tzogas created & operates Smugtown Mushrooms in Rochester NY.
Her journey with Fungi and plants started over ten years ago. Working with these allies by foraging in both urban & more wild settings, and developing skills to identify for food and medicine. In 2011, Smugtown Mushrooms was established because there was a need for mushrooms & growing supplies, workshops, events & community based science in her area. While continuously learning more and embracing the never-ending, unlocked potential of mushrooms & fungi. Olga teaches workshops throughout the world about wild mushroom identification, medicinal mushrooms, biology, and mushroom cultivation. She was a core organizer for the 2016 Radical Mycology Convergence and the MycoSymbiotics Festival from 2015-17 and helped establish the first ever New Moon Mycology Summit in 2018.
