Permaculture Skills: Growing Mushrooms!
November 7 @ 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Hillsborough, NC
This workshop is part of our 2026 Permaculture skills series. In the morning before this workshop, we’re teaching a separate class on propagating your own trees. Come to one or both!
Mushroom Logs are One of the Easiest and Most Rewarding Elements to Add to Your Permaculture System
When I moved to totally wild land to homestead in 2017 in Cedar Grove, mushrooms were the very first food I grew.
Being too busy building our shelter and learning to live off-grid, I didn’t have time for a garden. Though I pined for to plant my forest garden, the necessities of a first year homestead made me have to wait.
Yet while I carried lumber and swung hammers, the mycelia were silently “gardening” for me, turning some of the wood we cleared into the source of some of the most delicious homegrown food I could ever imagine.
If you’re too busy for a full garden or just want to add some different, healthy food into your forest garden, mushrooms are one of the best and simplest things you can do.
If you have a lot of shade and don’t know what you can grow in it, Mushrooms are a terrific answer.
The cost of a pound of organic shiitake mushrooms ranges from $12-$24. In practice, that means I’ve rarely been able to buy them. Yet after innoculating even a small number of mushroom logs which took one day of work, I filled bag after bag of mushrooms. There was enough to share with neighbors and friends.
In this workshop, we’ll make our own mushroom logs to take home. We’ll also experiment with mushrooms you can grow IN your garden beds for another amazing crop that’s especially compatible with mulched perennial food forest beds.
Workshop Topics:
- Grow your own mushrooms on logs and take one home!
- The easiest types of mushrooms to grow and what trees to grow them on
- Growing edible mushrooms in garden beds that also make great soil!
- Foraging mushrooms – the easiest ones and a few intermediate as well
- Medicinal and edible uses of some of our commonly grown and found mushrooms
- Sampling some Turkey Tail tea and tincture and how to make your own
- The wisdom and mystery of fungi
- …plus the many benefits of fungal soils and how to cultivate it for healthier plants and people
Venue and Workshop Details:
Our Saturday afternoon workshop will be held at Jubilee Healing Farm – a beautifully tended small farm located on 10 acres in Hillsborough, NC that supports volunteer and community-building activities and workshops for people seeking healing.
We’ll have the workshop outside unless the weather is truly extreme. Please wear comfortable clothing for the day. If it’s going to rain a little, bring rain gear.
We may do a little forest walking. Good to wear compatible footwear. If you’re concerned about ticks or other itchy expressions of the local ecology, please bring non-toxic insect deterrent.
What to Bring:
- Journal and pen
- Water bottle
Also:
- Openness to different ways of seeing and living
- Kindness towards the plants, animals, soil, water, and other people here
- Inclusivity and welcoming spirit towards the people in the workshop
- Willingness to put your phones away and tune into your senses
- Curiosity about life and what each other and the land has to say
Sign-Up
This year, we’re offering sliding scale tickets at two different prices. Please only take a reduced price ticket if you are in significant financial need. Full-price tickets make it possible for us to continue this work.
This workshop costs a little more than our others because you’ll be taking home a mushroom log of your own and some innoculated spawn for the garden.
In the morning before this workshop, we’re also offering a class on Propagating Your Own Trees. Come to one or both workshops that day and check out our full list of Fall 2026 Workshops here.
Check out the other workshops in our Fall 2026 Permaculture Skills series
About the Facilitator:
Matthew “Watersong” Tracy started practicing Permaculture in 2011 and received his design certificate from Wild Abundance in 2015. He has been consulting and teaching as a Permaculture Designer since 2018.
Along the way, he learned from numerous Permaculture teachers, tended land with minimal inputs, worked with around 70 clients on their land, lived off-grid for a decade, and made (… and still makes!) a whole lot of humbling and valuable mistakes on his way back to life in harmony with the earth.
Matt is also an herbalist (…in training, like all herbalists..!) and has been putting strong-tasting plants in bottles to make helpful things happen since 2007. He prepares dozens of local herbal medicines for his community every year.
With all that experience, Matt is ever a beginner and student of the land. Nature is infinite. What can we do but listen and try?
Matt is honored to be a Permaculture guide to anyone interested in coming a little closer to the earth. Becoming a father in 2023 has made passing down these teachings that always consider future generations more important than ever.
Read the rest of Matt’s bio here.
