Telluride Mushroom Festival

Basic Home lab equipment and techniques for isolating and maintaining mushroom cultures - Interested in building your first lab? Already have one and need a few valuable pointers to minimize contamination and maximize your mycelial potential? This is a beginner to intermediate overview of everything you need to get started culturing mushrooms.

Mark Jones and Kris Holstrom will demo growing mushrooms on cereal straws, but also be discussing Ailanthus, thistle and introduce the Eat Your Weeds project to convert invasive and opportunistic plant species into edible mushrooms, while also focusing on community based systems for stroring and sharing information to improve the education of the processes in developing novel food production system for humans and livestock alike.

Learn from experienced tissue culturists the basic transfer techniques, cloning strategies, and culture collection maintenance tips that will help you minimize contamination and strain loss.

Making your own spawn is the ultimate freedom for any mushroom grower, and it saves a lot of costs in production, however there are many pitfalls that can be avoided by taking this session taught by experienced spawn producers who will show you all the tricks. Learn how to go from pure cultures to grain, sawdust, dowels, and more!

Mark Jones and Kris Holstrom will discuss growing mushrooms on Ailanthus, thistle and introduce the Eat Your Weeds project to convert invasive and opportunistic plant species into edible mushrooms, while also focusing on community based systems for stroring and sharing information to improve the education of the processes in developing novel food production system for humans and livestock alike.

Oyster mushrooms will grow on just about any agricultural by-product. In this session attendees will be able to learn the skills needed for both hot water bath and cold lime treatments for pasteurizing cereal straws for oyster mushroom production. Take home items will be small bags of inoculated oyster kits!