We hope you’re as excited as we are about the upcoming Northeastern mushroom foraging season! While you wait patiently for morels, in the mean time you can get excited about the 2012 workshop season with The Mushroom Forager. This upcoming week, The Mushroom Forager’s 2012 workshop season will be kicking off with a fun-filled workshop at the Horticulture Society of New York in New York City called Mushrooms Wild and Cultivated. Participants will be introduced to the region’s most distinctive and delicious wild mushrooms, as well as inoculating a shiitake log to take home. 

The ground may be frozen, but a mushroom menagerie has popped up in Cornell’s Mann Library. “The Other Side of What? Adventures in Fungal Wonderland” features photographs taken by members of the Ithaca community during 2011’s bountiful wild mushroom season. Several of The Mushroom Forager’s photographs are displayed in the exhibit, which will be up until April 30. 

Over 35 high school students gathered outside Cornell University’s Plant Science building on a sunny late June morning for “Mushroom Cultivation for Fun and Profit,” a workshop I co-led at the 2011 Youth Grow Summit with Steve Gabriel – a Cornell Garden-Based Learning co-worker and Program Director for the Finger Lakes Permaculture Institute.