Fungi Friends in the kitchen

In this moment I am grateful for eating lunch outside in a patch of sun and for being around familiar faces here at St Johns church.

Our cookery themed Fungi Friends session was lovely opportunity for me to do a little less talking and something more practical with the group. I really enjoyed demonstrating a way of cooking mushrooms and simmering a medicinal mushroom tea (which could also be used as a stock). Thanks to Tim for going on a mission to forage some fresh rosemary to add a herbal element to the tea. Everyone seemed to enjoy the end results and I hope to have inspired at least some of the participants to incorporate more fungal goodness into their diet. There are so many ways to work with fungi in our cooking and drinks that we could do a whole series of workshops on the subject. Maybe in the future?

Birch Polypore, Reishi, Turkey Tail, Shitake, Ginger and Rosemary simmered to make our tea

These Fungi Friends sessions have been a valuable experience for me to practice and promote my work of offering workshops to inspire connection with fungi. To have been able to offer free spaces for the local community to meet each other and learn is something to continue doing, here and with communities further afield.

Finding at least one person to work with who can support me with the administration and organisational elements of running The Lovely Fungus Company is a vital part of what I need to keep building on the success of Fungi Friends here at St Johns Church. I feel very strongly that there is a great opportunity for me and someone else to create a profitable business that offers valuable and accessible workshops (many could be free to participants) that empower communities to work with and appreciate fungi. I hope to find that collaborator soon.

Peace and Mush Love,

Chris Forest

Fungi Friends is mushrooming

In this moment I am grateful for warmth, sunshine and birdsong outside the little hut I’m living in.

The second Fungi Friends session at St John’s Church went well and brought some new participants along with some from the first session. Lots of good questions were asked, as always, and we focused on working together to set up our first practical cultivation session to produce Oyster Mushrooms. That session will be happening on Thursday 30th of May and the spawn and substrate have been ordered so will arrive in a couple of weeks. If you’d like to come along and see how we do the cultivation you’re very welcome to join us and if enough people are interested we could do more practical cultivation work in the future.

The next Fungi Friends session is happening on Thursday 16th of May and we are looking to have a practical element to the session to practice cooking and brewing medicinal mushroom teas. I feel it’s important, and fun, to learn how to use the mushrooms we’ll be producing so I hope participants find this valuable and inspiring.

I’m really appreciating how these Fungi Friend’s sessions have developed (or mushroomed) and this could be the start of more practical workshops to learn new skills, informative talks to inspire and many other valuable community supporting projects, all with a fungi theme. Come along to a session or get in touch if you’d like to support and/or join our group of Fungi Friends.

Peace and Mush Love,

Chris Forest

A successful first gathering of Fungi Friends

In this moment I am grateful for a hot drink and a space to sit and work on my laptop at St Johns Church in Bridgetown.

The first Fungi Friends session was a lovely opportunity for me to meet a few local folk who are keen to learn about producing mushrooms. I talked a lot about many things fungi and mushroom related and there were some great questions and comments from participants. Thanks to everyone who came along and I look forward to the next session in a few days.

I’ve had a tough time trying to run workshops and events where I could share some of my fungi knowledge and experience and I’m grateful to have managed to offer something. These simple and free offerings are a start and I hope to build up to offering things that will pay for my time and effort. I really need some help to build this enterprise and I strongly believe there is a great opportunity for someone with good communication and organisational skills to join me in creating a lovely and successful fungus company 🙂 Please get in touch if you think you’re the person I’m looking for.

The next Fungi Friends session at St Johns Church, Bridgetown (Totnes) is Thursday 2nd May 2024. See you there.

Peace and Mush Love,

Chris Forest

Fungi Friends – Come and connect

In this moment I’m grateful for the Stepping Stones team providing me and the local community with tasty soup made and served with love.

I’m looking forward to gathering with some local Fungi Friends next Thursday (18th) here at St johns Church in Bridgetown (TQ9 5AE). This will be my first public offering for a long time where I share some of my fungi knowledge and experience. Thanks to Kit from Stepping Stones for giving me a space to do this.

My intention for this first Fungi Friends gathering is to provide space for people with an interest in fungi and mushrooms to meet each other and me to explore what we can create together. I’ll introduce some of the low tech cultivation techniques I have used to produce mushrooms and will be happy to answer any questions you have about fungi more generally.

If there is interest then we can run this gathering every two weeks (and potentially more) to deepen our connection with each other and play with some practical cultivation. I’d love to empower this community to be producing mushrooms with and for each other and if we really get inspired perhaps we could work together to provide mushrooms to the wider community. Being able to produce our own mushrooms to use in the Stepping Stones Cafe would be really lovely and there are so many other creative ways we could work together with fungi.

I’m keen to listen to next week’s Fungi Friend’s participants, to hear some of your stories of connecting with mushrooms and fungi. Perhaps you’ve been out foraging, grown some mushrooms at home already or have a craft skill that you’d like to share that we can incorporate a fungi theme to. I’d love to try embroidering some mushrooms onto my clothes so if that’s a skill you have then I’d love to chat with you about that.

Thanks for your interest in this offering and I hope to see you on Thursday 18th April 2024 for a lovely gathering of fungi friends. We start at 1pm and finish at 3pm – you’re welcome to join at any point. Also, if you’d like to come and get some soup, a cheese toastie and whatever other tasty treats are on offer from the Stepping Stones Cafe then you’re very welcome to come along from 12 midday.

Peace and Mush Love,

Chris Forest

Rekindling The Lovely Fungus Company

In this moment I am grateful for being able to light my log burner this morning and for the sun shining through the rain clouds down here in Devon.

With so much having happened since I was last posting here and working to share my gifts through The Lovely Fungus Company I’m finding it challenging to know how to start this. I’m not intending to tell the whole, or even much, of the story since I was working full time on this project. It’s been a rough journey with many beautiful moments in between – such is life. What feels important and reason for me to celebrate is that I’m back, full time, on this project and there are some exciting developments happening.

I’ve been working hard to find opportunities to collaborate and offer a space to learn and grow with fungi in the Totnes area where I’m currently based for a few months. That endeavor has brought valuable connections and plenty of challenges that have been rich in learning for me.

I’m grateful to now be able to offer a free space to meet me, some fellow fungi friends and to get creative together exploring how we can work with fungi to support the local community here. I hope to meet people in this area who have experience or interest in producing mushrooms, learning about fungi more generally and to have some fun with some creative activities. One creative thing I would personally love to do is make paper with mushrooms and do some fungi themed painting and drawing on that paper. We could even make ink from mushrooms to draw with 🙂

What’s most exciting for me is the opportunity to meet local fungi friends who have there own ideas for what they’d like to learn and create together. Perhaps you have a craft skill that we could bring a fungi theme to? Perhaps you’ve been using medicinal mushrooms to support your health and would like to share your experience and knowledge? Perhaps you’ve written a poem or a song that features fungi that you’d like to share with us – I’d love that.

There are plenty of things, fungi related, that I can and will bring to my workshop spaces and I’m grateful for all the opportunities to share my gifts. What I feel will make the workshops I’m offering so much more valuable are the gifts that participants can bring and share with us.

Thank you to all the fungi friends I’ve connected with on my journey and I look forward to meeting new ones over the next few months, and beyond.

A post will follow shortly that more formally introduces my first offering to emerge out of the freshly rekindled fire of The Lovely Fungus Company. For now there is a poster on the home page of this website and below my sign off here.

Peace and Mush Love,

Chris Forest

Connecting with Harewood Farm

In this moment I am grateful for the rain bringing life and refreshment to the land around me. I’m also grateful for how welcome I feel in the lovely village of Horrabridge.

I’ve loved my two recent trips over to Kernow and I’m excited about the possibilities of working with Jo at Harewood Farm to bring mushroom production into her growing activities. Shaggy Parasols and Wood Blewitts already pop up amongst the veg plants of her garden so I think it’s a really good spot for it. There are some great facilities at Harewood Farm and Jo teaches yoga and retreat chefs so there are a lot of workshops and events we could collaborate on. I look forward to having more of a chat with her about that and seeing where it goes. I feel like some delicious and nourishing fungal foods will almost certainly be part of any collaboration and my tummy is rumbling already at the thought of it. Yum!

Peace and Mush Love,

Chris Forest

Workshop: Simple Mushroom Abundance in Tavistock

In this moment I am grateful for the support to get this workshop out into the world and for the amazing healing power of my body working it’s magic with my ankle.

I am super excited to be offering this workshop to the community of Tavistock. I am in the process of securing the venue and will announce where we will be gathering as soon as that is completed. I will also record and publish a video giving a little more detail about what we will be doing together on the day.

We will get hands on with some mycelium and you’ll be able to take home some substrate that you’ve inoculated during our session. Mycelium grows fast so you’ll be able to watch it grow in just a few days. I’ll tell you how you could expand that mycelium to get to a point of producing mushrooms and you’ll be very welcome to get in touch with me after the workshop to ask any questions that come up as you deepen your connection with your mycelial friend.

We will also do some nature connection practice to support us to be in good relationship with our fungi friends. Look out for upcoming videos that will introduce you to some of these practices. I find these practices to be very nourishing and support me to integrate and embody the lessons and learnings from working with mycelium.

I really look forward to gathering with this first little fungi tribe in Tavistock. The spore of a second workshop in Kernow (Cornwall to us English folk) has also germinated so we’ll see if that’s destined to make it to the full mycelium of another event. I’m focusing my efforts on offering my work in the South West of this lovely island at the moment and this Tavistock workshop is just the beginning. We’re going to have a lot of fun with The Fungi and each other this year…

Get in touch if you’re interested in coming to this Simple Mushroom Abundance workshop in Tavistock (Saturday 11th of June) and ask me about sponsored places if you are unable to pay the cost of your place.

Peace and Mush Love,

Chris Forest

What is my heart asking of me and how do I gather with my community?

In this moment I am grateful for these two videos bringing me the questions I used in the title of this blog post.

This major pattern disruption I’m experiencing with injuring my ankle is giving me the opportunity to pause, reflect and enquire as to how I choose to move forward with my life and The Lovely fungus Company.

I have shared Charles’ sense of barely keeping my head above water for a long time now. Although I’ve recently felt that I have sited land that gives me a direction to start swimming towards, I still feel an unmet longing to see my community around me and for us to support each other to stay afloat and make it to the shore, together.

I intend to be with the questions: What is my heart asking of me? And how do I gather with my community?

I may hold off posting videos and blogs for a little bit as I explore these questions and choose my path going forward. Thank you for catching my stories recently and I hope you’ll be there on the other side of this enquiry to catch more of my stories and swim with me, for a little while at least, towards the more beautiful world.

Peace and Mush Love,

Chris Forest

Ivan is back in the village!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h46hry5MnL0

In this moment I am grateful for having Ivan back in the village and for support from the lovely folk of Horrabridge.

It feels good to have Ivan back in Horrabridge and I hope to be able to have a restful day today. I have no idea what I’ll be doing this coming week or beyond and that’s quite unsettling. I’m just going to take it one step (or hobble) at a time and keep paying attention to the opportunities within this situation.

I’ve loved Beans on Toast’s music for many years and was grateful for checking out Jay’s latest tracks to find the one I’ve shared above. I also found out he’s going to be playing a load of gigs down in the South West at the end of May. I hope I can catch up with him at one, or more 🙂

Peace and Mush Love,

Chris Forest

Video: Second morning ankle update and GroCycle’s free resources

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uwyvhOUaRE

In this moment I am grateful for blue skies, sunshine and the smell of the vegetable stew I’m cooking gently creeping through Kerry’s house.

The ankle seems to be recovering well and I’m managing to keep myself positive enough in a house on my own. I’ve been using some daisy flower oil that Kerry made to support my ankle to heal and am trying to keep moving without doing too much. So far so good.

I’ve been enjoying a little bit of reading and connecting in with some of the free resources that GroCycle have produced. I’m getting a very strong longing to be meeting and collaborating with the lovely fungi folk of this land. Getting this far, mostly on my own, with The Lovely Fungus Company has been a very rewarding experience. It has been hard and lonely a lot of the time and I’m reaching a point where I feel the need to be working alongside the right people for me to progress and really give my gifts to the world. The latest Rebel Entrepreneur Podcast episode was partly on this theme so the message seems to be coming at me from multiple directions.

We’ll see where things go from here. This injury and the forced stopping and reflection time it has offered gives me a valuable opportunity to consider and choose where I put my energy going forward. I’ll let you know what comes from that.

Peace and Mush Love,

Chris Forest