In this moment I am grateful for Kerry’s support and for the excitement and inspiration I received from watching GroCycle’s latest video update.

Peace and Mush Love,

Chris Forest

In this moment I am grateful for the practical support of friends and my personal resilience in the face of so many challenges. I’m also grateful that skateboarding when I was younger taught me how to fall well.

The short story is that I was exhausted, carrying more than I had capacity for and fell down a step onto my ankle. I think its a sprain rather than a break. It hurts and I can’t walk or drive. I can upload videos and eat the amazing food that Kerry prepared for me today. This weekend I’m going to be on my own, in a house with my van abandoned. That feels daunting at this point and I hope I can get through it in a good way, get some rest and find the opportunities in this new situation.

Peace and Mush Love,

Chris Forest

In this moment I am grateful for all the people mentioned in the video above along with everyone I’ve connected with and am exploring collaborations with.

This one’s a short video giving some gratitude for lovely folk who’ve been supporting me recently.

I’m feeling very tired from hard work and lack of sleep a couple of nights ago. I got a big lift from dropping in to the Horrabridge Community Café morning today. I really enjoyed sitting in the corner playing some guitar too. I haven’t played much recently and it felt good. I was gifted a little cash to help with getting diesel and food which lifted my spirits and inspired this sharing of gratitude with you.

I’d like to pass on the gift I received today so there is now £30 in the sponsorship fund for my first Tavistock area Simple Mushroom Abundance workshop. I’m intending to get the details out for this workshop very soon and I’m excited that there is a little bit of sponsorship to support folk with low cash resources to join me. If you’d like to offer anything to the sponsorship fund then please do get in touch and if you’re keen to learn how to produce an abundance of mushrooms using simple techniques then look out for those details coming soon.

May the stirrings of Spring gently bring you all an abundance of vitality for the coming season.

Peace and Mush Love,

Chris Forest

P.S. The description I posted with the video is copied below in italics:

In this video I share some gratitude for a few of the people (and biscuits) that have been supporting me recently. Many more I could have mentioned so thank you to everyone who isn’t explicitly named in this short video.

The lovely Kerry Lane’s website I mentioned is: https://thepeaceofthewild.wordpress.com/

You can check out some of Ali Mansfield’s work and community projects in the lovely village of Horrabridge here: https://www.facebook.com/horrabridgelyn/

May the stirrings of Spring gently bring you all an abundance of vitality for the coming season.

Peace and Mush Love,

Chris Forest

In this moment I am grateful for the warmth of the Tavistock Library and a vegetable soup breakfast in Ivan.

I recorded this second video after I came across a stump that had a mass of Turkey Tail mushrooms fruiting from it. It inspired me to do this basic introduction to one of the medicinal mushrooms I will be supporting folk to produce. I also touch on a technique of inoculating freshly cut tree stumps that can be capable of producing mushrooms for many years with little or no input or work after the inoculation.

Enjoy and let me know what you think of these videos and feel free to send me questions.

Peace and Mush Love,

Chris Forest

In this moment I am grateful for the wilds of Dartmoor that have been giving me a lot of nourishment over the past few weeks and for continuing to make progress with The Lovely Fungus Company despite the current challenges of my life. Thanks also to all the lovely folk I’m connecting with and being supported by in various ways on this journey.

Celebrations! I’ve wanted to produce videos for a while and I finally got round to looking up how to use my laptop’s webcam to record them. So here we are, the first video update from me about where I’m at with life and launching The Lovely Fungus Company.

Let me know what kind of things you’d like to hear from me on these video blogs and if there are any other types of videos you’re keen to see. Maybe some practical mushroom production videos? There are so many things I could cover and create content for that it’d be great to know what you’re actually interested in.

Peace and Mush Love,

Chris Forest

In this moment I am grateful for a blue sky and bright sunshine. I’m also grateful for Monday’s vegetable abundance in the Tavistock Community Fridge.

The flyer above is for a 1 hour, online, session that I am looking to host for groups and communities around this beautiful island. The first one will be this Wednesday for a lovely group of fungi folk in the South of England. I’ll let you know how it goes and if you’re interested in one of these running for your local area and communities then please get in touch with me.

The sessions will be interactive and inspiring (that’s my intention) with opportunities to ask me questions and share your visions for creating a Simple Mushroom Abundance. Let’s get connected and see how we can support each other to have fun with fungi while producing food and medicine for ourselves and communities.

I look forward to meeting you fellow spores…

Peace and Mush Love,

Chris Forest

In this moment I am grateful for the warm sanctuary and internet connection of the lovely Kerry Lane’s house and for all the fungi folk in the world spreading the fungi love. Peace and Mush Love to you all.

These videos, created by fellow fungi loving folk, are a great introduction to one of the simple, low cost techniques of producing mushrooms that I would like to share with you. I hope you enjoy and are inspired by them to get your fungi on this year 🙂

Lots more videos from these folk so go check out their youtube channels if you’re curious to explore more. I’d like to create some videos myself so if you have any ideas or suggestions for what you’d like to see please send me a message.

Peace and Mush Love,

Chris Forest

In this moment I am grateful to my friend’s Ali and Sanna who are giving me a space to feel a little bit broken and for all the support I’m receiving in various ways as I climb this wild and beautiful mountain.

I received this poem from the lovely Kerry Lane of The Peace of the Wild and really valued the message I got from it at this point of my journey. Creating and launching The Lovely Fungus Company feels like a wild and beautiful mountain that I am climbing. There are beautiful views and steep rocky ascents that inspire and challenge me constantly.

I have been giving my all to this climb and a part of me does feel broken by it in this moment. I currently don’t have the money I’d hoped to raise to get myself to Hartlepool as I’d dreamed. I have very little to even meet my basic needs wherever I go and that brings up a lot of sadness and stress. I feel like it would be a massive support for launching this business to be at The Rebel Business School’s course, in-person. I’d also love the opportunity to support the other participants there. I am certain that I can and will launch my workshops and grow The Lovely Fungus Company even without attending the course and that keeps the fire of my passion burning enough for now. There are quite a few collaborations emerging with amazing folk who are keen to team up with me for workshops and events this year. I’m super excited to explore these opportunities and will keep you updated as they develop.

Over the weekend I met a group of folk my friend’s are a part of who meet to grow food together and connect. I offered a ‘by donation’ introduction to what I’m doing with The Lovely Fungus Company, including some of the activities and wisdom I’ll be offering in my workshops. We were all inspired by it and I’m looking forward to running the full workshops in this area. Thanks to the group for your encouraging feedback, donations and enthusiasm for giving the fungi some love. One of the group gifted me a medicinal mushroom tincture that she’d made and that’s another area I’d love to bring into some workshops in the future. We can very easily make these medicines for ourselves, families and communities with mushrooms that are very simple to grow or, responsibly, wild harvest. If you’re particularly interested in this subject then send me a message.

I hope you’re all feeling safe and well today.

Peace and Mush Love,

Chris Forest

In this moment I am very grateful for my friends and family who’ve given me a place to stay, called for a chat and supported me in many other way on this journey to launch The Lovely Fungus Company.

It feels good to be back on the blog again. Thanks for your patience during this little break from updates as I try to recover my energy for the last few steps to fully launching The Lovely Fungus Company. Although I’ve taken a break from the blog my work has continued and I will soon be announcing a series of workshops around the country for May, June and July. We will start with ‘Meeting the mycelium – An introduction to fungi and mushroom cultivation‘ and see where we want to deepen our explorations together from there. Its going to be fun, inspirational and empowering for us all – I am super excited!

I am working towards offering my workshops on a sponsorship model , much like The Rebel Business School, so that the lovely folk who attend them do not need to pay directly for their place. My intention is to make my workshops accessible to everyone while still allowing me to meet my needs and grow The Lovely Fungus Company. By finding individuals and businesses that would like to sponsor workshops to happen in their communities, as well as inviting participants to pay for their own place and/or sponsor another participant to attend, I hope that we can work together to make the workshops as inclusive as we can. If you’re interested in supporting me and your community with sponsorship then please get in touch.

I am currently a little North of Birmingham, staying with some friends whilst I balance the need to rest and recover with keeping up my work to launch The Lovely Fungus Company. I’m intending to get myself up to Hartlepool for the second week of the Rebel Business School course, in-person, and am grateful for the support of friends to re-ignite that dream. I’m looking forward to meeting some of the Rebel team and participants and getting some valuable support to build on the incredible progress I’ve made over the last few weeks. I’ve joined the course online a little bit this week and there are some great folk building amazing businesses that I hope I can offer more of my support to while I’m there.

I hope you’re all warm and well with lots of inspiration bubbling up for the year ahead as Spring gathers momentum.

Peace and Mush Love,

Chris Forest

In this moment I am grateful for the connection and support of more people than I will try and write in this blog post. Thank you to everyone I know and those I’m unaware of that support me to be in this life. Thank you for all the seen and unseen work that supports me, to be me. Thank you to all the other than human beings that support me. Thank you to life.

A special thank you to the fungi. It’s a pleasure to work with you friends.

Peace and Mush Love,

Chris Forest