Merritt College's Mushroom Cultivation class, offered during the fall semester, is a general survey of all things fungal. From capture of wild- or grocery- forayed mushrooms, to ramping up mycelium on various media and substrates, to fruiting out or planting out mushrooms in sterile lab or natural woodland conditions, our course offers a variety of opportunities to learn both the theory and practical application of mushroom cultivation techniques. Highlights from the Fall 2009 course included:

A visit to local organic mushroom farm Far West Fungi for a tour and potluck Mendocino Woodlands Foray with the Mycological Society of San Francisco A table at the 40th Anual Fungus Fair at UC Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science Mycoremediation Workshop at the Biofuel Oasis in Berkeley

Whether you would like to start a small scale home mushroom farm, or you would like to grow commercially, or if you are completely new to mushrooms and would like to learn more, this course will provide you with all the information you need to direct your interests. Another great feature of this course is that it is repeatable (as Mushroom Cultivation B and C), giving students the chance to refine their focus and take on special projects, with the department's facilities at your disposal.

Pink oysters growing from a sawdust brick at Far West Fungi.

If you would like to participate in all of this for a grade you can get two community college credits for it, or you can take it as credit/no credit totally for fun and show up and participate as your schedule permits. The one thing you must do to participate is register for the class through Merritt to pay for the use of their facilities and all of this costs $53 for the semester. That works out to about 65 cents an hour, perhaps the least expensive and most fun activity in the Bay area if you’re a natural history buff.

We learn how to make spice jar and baby food agar containers for sterile capture. We also make dowels for log plugging and grain jars and bags of straw, wood chips, compost, manure, and other more specialized substrates for ramping up the captured mycelial mass using procedures and materials convenient to your home kitchen canning operation. We practice pressure cooker, microwave, and hydrogen peroxide methods. We also capture and grow out mushrooms by non sterile organic methods for funging directly in the garden or natural setting. We learn techniques for growing the usual saprobic mushrooms like oysters, reishi, chicken and hen of the woods, lion’s mane, garden giant, stinky whiffle balls, blewitts, or buttons and shaggies that grow on dead stuff like logs, mulches and compost. We also grow the more unusual substrates and specialized techniques for the parasitic fungi like luminous honeys, bug brain detonating Cordyceps, and corn kernel detonating huitlacoche. We also cover the secrets of mycorrhizal mushrooms like porcinis, chanterelles, candy caps, and truffles and the opportunistic species like morels that have multiple means of nourishment.

Since we assume you may know nothing about mushrooms when you start or may know a lot about certain aspects but want to know more about others, we cover all the associated reasons for growing mushrooms. We collect, ID, prepare, dry, and preserve mushrooms for culinary and herbal uses, cook and eat the edible ones, make infusions, decoctions, and tinctures from the herbal ones, and learn how to sample the questionable ones. Our death cap taste testings are to kill for. We learn about identification and taxonomic relationships of fungi to domesticate new cultivars. We make spore prints for IDing, culturing, and artistic endeavoring. We cover mushroom dyes, paper, felt clothing, and pyrotechnics, soil building, compost making, and mycoremediation, ecology, ethnology, and mushroom lore, lore, and more lore.

We utilize the facilities of the Merritt Community College Landscape Horticulture Department. We have classroom computer and AV equipment, lab and storage area with sterile transfer hoods, greenhouse space, organic and permaculture garden space, raised beds, and campus woodland and grassland acreage for collecting. We start the fall season with a straw bale mushroom igloo, part of our woodland Miwokian mushroom village that we build at the end of the spring semester and then ready for fall inoculation and cultivation experiments. In the fall we have special strains of corn patches planted at the end of spring semester maturing and getting ready for huitlacoche and corn grain jar experiments. We maintain a native mushroom trail through woodland, grassland, and chaparral. And we have lots of garden and wild patches laying dormant and waiting for the first rains. We also have special field trips and mushroom events.