Westfir | Oregon

6-Day Hands-On Course

Food and Mushroom Cultures Included – Lodging and Camping Options

 2023 Course Dates Now Open

Join us to learn the practices of mushroom growing in this unique 6 day course from a team of experienced cultivators on a dedicated farm school. 

This course is an excellent primer for anyone thinking of working with mushrooms for food and medicine, sustainable agriculture, ecological landscaping,  soil building, or business development.

Themes of the Week:

• Laboratory set-up and Skills
• Low Tech and High Tech methods
• Mushroom Mycelium (spawn) Growing
• Growing Mushrooms in the Greenhouse
• Mushroom Gardening
• Identification, Nutrition, and Cooking
• Medicinal Mushrooms and Use
  
• Mushroom Farm Development
• Growing Mushrooms on Organic Wastes
• MycoRemediation
• MycoPermaculture

This is not just an overview, we will be cultivating mushrooms from start to finish, with a wide variety of species at various stages of development, and we will perform every step.

Learning Experience:

The daily classes are held in a mix of indoor and outdoor spaces, and are mostly hands-on, with a few power-point lectures throughout the week. Mushroom cultivation is a mix of very clean and very messy activities, and we will be teaching in a variety of spaces including a professional laboratory, mushroom farm, homestead gardens and indoor classroom.  Every process and activity is presented for you to engage with as much as you wish, with emphasis on helping you develop skills and understanding.

Course size is kept fairly small (20 people) to ensure that everyone can participate in every stage and be able to have any questions addressed.  Typically we have guests who travel from all over the US and Canada, Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America, so expect to learn a lot from the diversity of unique people who will also be joining.  We will have a French and Spanish interpreter on staff for this course as well.

The main instructor is Ja Schindler, the director of Fungi For The People. He has been a mushroom cultivator and student of fungi for over 15 years, in both research and production scales, and has facilitated hands-on mushroom workshops to over 5,000 individuals since 2009 as an act of social and environmental activism. Ja brings together progressive cultivation methods, environmental research, rich cultivation history, a vast knowledge of fungal ecology, and creative approaches to connecting with diverse peoples into an engaging learning experience.

This Course Also Includes:

 100+ Page Workbook: Details on a variety of cultivation techniques, material choices, glossary of terms, and technical references.

Mushroom Spawn:  You will receive 8+ varieties of edible and medicinal mushrooms to leave with! 6 of these will be of your choosing in pure culture petri dishes.

Wholesome Meals:  Lunch and Dinner will be provided daily, and is included in the price. Vegetarian, Gluten Free diets are accommodated for, and most of the food is organically grown right here in Oregon, with Gourmet Mushrooms and Medicinal Mushroom Teas.

Location:  We are located along the upper Middle Fork Willamette River in the mid-elevation village of Westfir, Oregon. Some of the finest forest trails run along our mountain ridges and river edges, providing plenty of options for hiking, mountain biking, and fly fishing (barbless permitted). We recommend carving out a bit of time to enjoy some offsite adventures. Exact course address to be provided upon registration.

Free Tent Camping On-Site:  Tent camping is offered on our 17 acre property here in Westfir, Oregon. A shared camp kitchen is available for your convenience, with shower available for use.  This is specifically tent camping, not RV, see link below for a RV host within walking distance of our site.

Offsite Lodging:  The course is located within short distance to a variety of accommodations in the city of Oakridge, at your cost and arrangement. The course site is in Westfir, Oregon.

• Air B-N-B Westfir / Oakridge
• Blue Wolf Motel
• Oakridge Inn
• RV Campground within walking distance : Casey’s Riverside RV Park

Class Time:

9:00 am to 6:00 pm Monday – Saturday

Additional evening presentations and open laboratory hours are optional (but strongly encouraged!)

See SAMPLE Course Schedule by clicking HERE

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Registration Information:

Course registration includes:

• All course Fees and Materials

• Mushroom Starter Cultures
• 100+ Page Course Manual

• Lunch and Dinner Monday – Friday

• Tent camping options on-site

Course price: $1100

Full registration or $450 Deposit

Fine Print: Deposit remainder due by 1 month prior the start of chosen course date. 20% of the tuition is nonrefundable. Course refund can given 90 days prior to course start with transfers to alternative dates possible up to a month before the course begins. Course dates are typically full 4-6 months in advance.

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Register Here:

March 27th – April 1  2023

      Session is Full   (waitlist is open) 

June  19 – 24th  2023

      Register        Deposit

September 25th – 30th 2023

      Register       Deposit

November 6 – 11th 2023

      Register       Deposit

Additional dates will be announced in the future.

If you experience any difficulties with the above links, please contact us through the form on page bottom

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Partial Worktrades are now offered for 2022-2023, see HERE if interested.

For schedule of upcoming courses Follow our page to get first announcements

Details of the Course:

Basic Lab set-up and Skills | Mushroom Mycelium (spawn) Growing

We will walk everyone through the basics, from introducing sterile technique and building starter laboratories, to starting cultures from of cuttings and spores, all the way up through small scale commercial spawn production.  This includes preparing and working with petri dishes (Agar), grain, wood products, liquid cultures, and fruiting substrates.  A depth of information is presented, but the pace and language used also accommodates folks unfamiliar with mushroom growing.

 The techniques are presented in a simple format, and everyone will be able to practice hands-on.  We will also be covering a simple open-air technique which I have developed to save you from spending thousands of dollars on equipment and start growing mushrooms as soon as the course is over!

Mushrooms in the Greenhouse

Indoor mushroom cultivation techniques can vary from passively growing in the shower, to building dedicated grow houses for mushroom production. In this segment of the course we will be covering how to create artificial growing conditions for a variety of mushrooms, both in the soil and through the use of bags and containers. Irrigation strategies, air circulation, temperature control, and natural pest abatement will also be covered.

Mushroom Gardening

A multitude of How-To’s for growing mushrooms right along with all of your vegetables. We will cover companion plantings, mushroom mulches, simple and free mycorrhizae applications, as well as identifying common edible mushrooms already in your garden.

Growing Mushrooms using Appropriate Technologies

There are plenty of ways to grow plenty of mushrooms, and we will be covering many of the standard routes of mushroom cultivation as well as employing some more recently adapted techniques for making better ecological and economic decisions.  Some of these include working with rocket stoves, generating and working with bio-char, passive solar technologies, as well as anaerobic processing. These are all simple real-world approaches which have found their way into many sensible operations, we will be unfolding some new ways to integrate them into mushroom cultivation during this course.

Food Forest Integration | MycoForestry Practices

Eugene has a diversity of food growing sites where we will study the fungal social interplay, uncovering the layers of spaces where we can encourage healthy mushroom societies of our choice, in both the soils and the trees.   Topics of parasitism prevention, mycorrhizal applications, leaf matter mushrooms, and specific mushroom habitat zones will be covered, as well as making appropriate mushroom patches. There are many applications for growing Mushroom Food Forests!  This will involve taking the techniques of mushroom cultivation into the bigger picture of ecological stewardship.

MycoRemediation

We will work the skills developed during the week into the deeper realm of detoxifying soils and waterways with the help of fungi. Introductions to site reading, pollution pre-filtering, bacterial effluent buffering, and soil rebuilding will all be covered through the course.

MycoPermaculture | MycoResiliency

Growing mushrooms for food and medicine at physical Permaculture interfaces such as Bioswales, Hugelculture beds, Greywater systems, and natural structures. Getting more return from our work output, as well as working with fungi to solve problems are themes carried with each step of this course, the intent being to make mushroom cultivation an easier transition for your life.  We will also open up the concept ecological biodiversity conservation opportunities available through mushroom cultivation.

Some Mushroom Varieties we will work with:

White Elm Oyster – Hypsizygus ulmarius 

Phoenix Oyster: Pleurotus pulmonarius

Golden Oyster:  Pleurotus citrinopileatus

Reishi –  Ganoderma lucid sensu auct.

Garden Giant –  Stropharia rugoso-annulata

Shiitake – Lentinula edodes          

Shaggy Mane – Coprinus comatus

Shaggy Parasol – Chlorophyllum rachodes 

Chicken of the Woods – Laetiporus conifericola

Enoki – Flammulina velutipes

Lion’s Mane – Herecium erinaceus

Maiitake – Grifola frondosa

Feel free to contact Ja Schindler with any questions by submitting this form: