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Mushroom Power
March 14, 2010 | Author: Charles Wilson |
Rafter Sass knows mushrooms. A graduate student at the University of Vermont who teaches sustainable farming practices, he can list Latin names of different varieties without a moment’s hesitation. His love affair with the edible fungi began as a forager. “I can’t even count the number of times when I told people that was a hobby of mine,” he said, “and I was told ‘You’re going to die.’”
Sass led two workshops on mushroom cultivation at Growing Power’s Milwaukee headquarters in late February. Will Allen recruited Sass when he recognized that mushrooms could be grown with materials already available onsite: food waste, straw, wood chips, waste paper, and spent grain from breweries. Sass managed to make the sessions both useful and amusing. “It’s important to eat fungi,” he told his students, “because they are competing with us for air.”
Click to see photo gallery on Flickr
Sixty people attended Growing Power’s hands-on training workshops on February 20th and 21st. They joined forty students in Growing Power’s Commercial Urban Agriculture program who were returning for the second of five weekend sessions. Will Allen mentioned the addition of mushrooms to the hundreds of other crops at the Milwaukee headquarters when impressing upon the participants the necessity of building their farming projects a step at a time. “We’re always adding pieces that assist other pieces of what we do,” Allen said. “The main thing we want to see is for you to get started. Don’t stand around for two years doing some planning.”
Allen also stressed the necessity of perseverance, and he told participants not to be shy about taking a single workshop on composting or aquaponics multiple times. “You have to practice the art of farming,” Allen said. “It took me five years to learn vermicomposting before I took it out to the public. Repetition is really important; it’s like learning how to shoot foul shots. Farming is an art form that should be respected.”
Register online for workshop. www.growingpower.org/workshops.htm
Tags: Feb 2010 Workshop, Mushroom workshop, Rafter Sass
Category: Community, Conference, Outreach, Training, Workshops
[...] And lately, as a part of Ecological Learning Institute, I’ve been working with the flagship urban agriculture project, Growing Power, out of Milwaukee, WI, to incorporate mushroom production with their integrated urban ag model. If you don’t know their work already, check them out. Their combination of sophisticated ecological design and a grounded, inspiring, community development model will blow your mind. I’m so excited to be working with them. Check out a post on the Growing Power blog about the first (of five) workshops here. [...]