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dream, and down aisle after aisle of fruiting shiitake mushrooms growing on sawdust blocks. This was in-triguing, and overwhelming, and I had so many ques-tions running through my mind. My mouth opened all on its own and started peppering the owner with questions, so many that in retrospect I realize that my incredible inquisitiveness must have been annoying. But I was in shock. Amazed.

Ten minutes later the tour was over. The owner thanked me for stopping by and gave me a pound of shiitake mushrooms. I felt like I had won a miniature lottery. I walked out the farm door with my brain buzzing. It was love at first sight . . . with mushrooms. I sadly returned to my car and climbed in, cranked up the engine, and started pulling away when a sudden loud bang hit the rear of my vehicle. What I thought was a tire blowout was the owner of the mushroom farm, who had chased my car down the driveway and was trying to get my attention. Did I leave something there? No. I rolled down the window and asked what was going on. The owner, now panting, asked, “Would you like to work here?”

I often think back to that moment when the owner ran after me. If he hadn’t caught up with my car, he would have had no way to contact me. I was probably just seconds away from missing out on the future I would go on to explore with mushrooms—starting with a job at the mushroom farm. That entire tour had lasted ten minutes, but it triggered events that have lasted me a lifetime.

Over twenty years later, I now frequent food and sustainability conferences, lecturing and teaching the values of environmentally responsible, low-tech and no-tech mushroom cultivation projects that anyone can apply to their home or small farm. I am against the use of all chemical pesticides and synthetic fertil-izers; I think nature knows best. Using mycorrhizae

When someone asks me if I grow magic mushrooms, I always reply by asking, “Aren’t all mushrooms mag-ical?” I have been growing, culturing, researching, hunting, and learning everything I can about mush-rooms for the last twenty years. I work with all kinds of mushrooms, and I am fascinated by every single one. The more you learn, the more your belief in their magic will grow.

My journey with mushrooms did not start out auspiciously. Although I loved the outdoors as a kid, I was far more interested in walking down through the woods to my grandparents’ lake in North Carolina to go fishing than in paying attention to the mushrooms growing around me. By twenty, I was living with my parents—trying to balance college classes and singing in a band—and one day my mother suggested that I stop by a nearby mushroom farm for a tour. She knew I was interested in biology, it seemed like something different and cool to do, and maybe it was her sublim-inal way of telling me to get out and find a job.

I knew nothing about mushrooms. Zero. Not even basic varieties at the supermarket, which in 1994 were white buttons and, newly, portabellas. But I called the farm anyway. I remember it sounding very noisy and active and the owner sounded out of breath. “Sure,” he said, “come on by later this afternoon and I can show you around quickly if you want to see how mush-rooms grow.” When I arrived, the building seemed very plain, with cinder-block walls and a metal roof, and not very exciting. I wasn’t at all impressed with the looks of things.

The owner greeted me and quickly led me around, showing me the entire place, from the sterilizer unit cooking the growing media to colonization rooms and, finally, the place where the magic hit: the fruiting room. I will never forget the moment when I walked into that strange, foggy space, like something out of a

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a wonderful food using what most would consider waste or by-products of many industries. I hope this book serves you well in giving you the skills necessary to explore mushroom cultivation and empowering you to dream up experiments and ideas on your own. Part skill, part art, part intuition, mushroom culti-vation will give you a lifelong relationship with this incredible kingdom of life.

How to Use This BookThis book is designed to help you build skill and con-fidence, starting in part 1 with a thorough foundation in both indoor and outdoor mushroom cultivation using purchased spawn (a form of mycelium that is physically “plantable,” being packaged in sawdust, grain, or a wooden dowel). Although my eventual goal is to help you become more self-sufficient by culturing and cultivating your own spawn (as well as to teach you how to grow mushrooms perpetually on just about anything), using purchased spawn will help you develop your skills and gain experience with a va-riety of cultivation techniques before you make larger investments of time and money. While the informa-tion in part 1 can be considered more foundational than the material in the latter parts of the book, my hope is that even more experienced growers will find value in these chapters. Rather than simply focusing on yield as an end goal, I’ve strived for a more holistic approach, one that pays careful attention to the mush-room life cycle, to ecology, to fungi’s relationships with the other kingdoms of life, and to developing the kind of intuition that will teach you more about cultivating mushrooms than a book or a workshop ever can. The focus of this book is primarily edible mushrooms, but you will find a great deal of information on medicinal, industrial, and mycoremediation applications as well. Once you develop solid cultivation skills, you can apply them to grow whatever kind of mushrooms suit your goals, or fancy.

The chapters in part 2 are designed to help you apply that foundational information to incorporate mushroom cultivation into your life and landscape, in whatever way reflects your goals. It includes

and composted mushroom substrate filled with worm castings, my gardens thrive and are highly productive without compromising the soil and water quality. I believe in creating perpetual and circular food systems, using sustainable techniques such as water harvesting and no-till cultivation, and using passive energy or seasonal production to minimize the energy use on my farm.

My work has also evolved into research, such as creating mushroom rescue modules (discussed in chapter 12) for use in regions struggling with poverty or devastated by natural disaster, where shattered habitats and cultures struggle to recover. On a recent trip to Haiti, for example, I introduced mushrooms to a group of children I met in the village of Cange. They were intrigued when I told them that some of mushrooms I had with me tasted like chicken and that I could teach them how to cultivate these wonderful mushrooms on paper or cardboard that we collected in the street. The idea that they would fruit in just a few weeks seemed magical to them. That trip was one of the most memorable I’ve ever taken. Here, I felt, mushrooms could make a real difference as a potential food source. I later returned to help set up a commer-cial production facility and spawn production lab to keep the process perpetuating.

Through such experiences, I’ve found that sharing what I know about mushrooms has become an imper-ative. Mushrooms are an excellent source of protein, and they have a wide range of medicinal properties. With an estimated 1.1 million fungi on the planet and only 150,000 collected and described (never mind being screened for their potential), you can easily see the implications for food production and medicine. In these ways fungi have the potential to shape our future for millennia to come.

This book is a compilation of knowledge I’ve gained from my experiences, from when I cultivated my first mushrooms up to the present, in which I now conduct mushroom research and own my own mush-room business. As you are reading, I must warn you that you are embarking on a path that may change the way you see yourself fitting into this life. In choosing mushrooms, you have decided to cultivate

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at your goals is to learn the specific and subtle needs of each mushroom you grow. Treat each one as an individual, like someone you know (and want to know better), understanding its individual needs and differences. This takes time and patience and, inev-itably, some failure. Give yourself the opportunity to experiment before the stakes are too high. Seek hands-on workshops, attend mushroom walks, and join mushroom hunting clubs to meet like-minded people and share knowledge and experiences.

Many people have commercial aspirations for mushroom cultivation, and I have tried to include as much information as possible that can be applied to small-scale and environmentally responsible com-mercial operations (including a chapter on marketing your product). Again, weigh this decision carefully. Only you can decide when, if, and at what scale it’s right for you. But my hope is that you’ll have all the tools you need to scale up if you choose to.

As you proceed through the book, you’ll notice a focus on shiitakes and oyster mushrooms. This isn’t because those are the only mushrooms worth grow-ing! I use oysters and shiitakes frequently to illustrate specific phenomena or techniques because they are two of the easiest and most satisfying mushrooms to grow, and many people are familiar with them. If you are a beginner, they are great mushrooms to start with. But if you flip to part 4, “Meet the Cultivated Mushrooms,” you will also find profiles of nearly thirty mushrooms, with growing parameters and suggestions for each. While most of these mushrooms are primarily edibles, some have wonderful applica-tions for use as medicinals, in mycoremediation, or potentially in industrial capacities. Spend some time looking through the profiles and familiarize yourself with the possibilities. Although you may want to start with oysters or shiitakes, you can then apply much of what you learn to the other mushrooms, factoring in each individual mushroom’s needs.

To me, this book is much more than a cultivation guide. It is about healing the people and the planet, one mushroom and one cultivator at a time, reversing destructive cycles into creative forces. If we think with an opportunistic yet minimalistic approach,

information for both urban and off-the-grid growers, on making value-added products from mushrooms (including mushroom-infused beer, wine, and spir-its), and the incredible and largely untapped potential of mushrooms to provide high-quality protein for people in poverty- and disaster-stricken regions of the world. Part 2 is full of useful and largely low-tech ideas for bringing mushrooms even further into your life. The goal here, as in part 1, is not only to help you cultivate mushrooms successfully (though that’s a big part of it), but to help you develop an understanding of the complex relationships mushrooms have with bacteria, plants, and animals (including humans). I believe that the more we develop that understanding, the more potential we have for successful cultivation, and the more we focus on linear goals of maximum production, the more we risk failure—in more senses than one.

The chapters in part 3 cover more advanced and experimental techniques such as basic lab construc-tion, sterile culturing, and techniques for mushrooms that are extremely difficult to cultivate, like morels. While the material in part 1 and part 2 is mostly low-tech, requiring relatively small investments in infrastructure and equipment, the material in part 3 requires more refined skill and bigger decisions. Some of it is research-in-progress, which I’ve includ-ed in the hope that as you build on your experience as a mushroom cultivator, you will contribute your own experiments and experiences to the body of knowledge about mushrooms. There is still so much to learn, and the more we understand about mush-rooms and the fungi kingdom, the more we can use that understanding to grow high-quality food and medicinals, remediate polluted land and water, and replace plastics and other industrial materials with fungus-based textiles, building materials, and other consumer goods. Although many researchers and cultivators are protective of their knowledge, the only way we can really build a collective body of knowl-edge is through collaboration.

Don’t be too quick to rush to an advanced chapter or scale up your operation based on the information in this book. The only way to improve and succeed

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natural cycles of mushrooms, no matter how small they are. From old-growth forests to mulched urban sidewalks to fruiting growths on debris floating out at sea, fungi are everywhere, and there’s much to be learned from them.

much like a mushroom, taking what it needs to sur-vive and then returning resources to its ecosystem so they can be used by others, the future looks like somewhere I want to be. Spend as much time as possible cultivating, collecting, and observing the