Name: Texas Mushroom Festival 2023
SKU: 4721
Availability: InStock

Texas Mushroom Festival 2023

$100.00 – $130.00

SKU: N/A Categories: Classes, Events

Description
Additional information

Description

Summary

Join us for our 2023 Texas Mushroom Festival! Tickets are $100 each. For just $30 more you can join us for our cultivation workshop

Join Founder of Texas Fungus, Jordan Jent, as he details the basics of mushroom cultivation in this workshop! All attendees will get to walk away with a Cordyceps grow kit as well

Date: May 19th-21st

Location: Canton, Tx

Price

$100 for basic admission, $130 for basic admission plus cultivation workshop

Details

The North Texas Mycological Association is proud to present “MushFest 2023”, the first Texas Mushroom Festival entirely focused on the mushrooms! This event will be centered around all aspects of mycology including mushroom identification, cooking, and cultivation, and will be held at “Feed Our Neighbors: Learning Gardens” located on 100 beautiful acres of private property in Canton, Texas from May 19th-21st.

MushFest 2023 will be a Potluck & Gathering style Mushroom Festival where we will be setting up our kitchen in the woods to feed folks and are asking participants to please bring something to share, whether it be a prepared meal, finger foods, fruits/veggies or desserts. We hope that collectively we can come up with some amazing meals just like we did at our Member Appreciation event and make the experience better & more affordable for our attendees

The festival is limited to 100 tickets in order to be able to feed everyone at the Mushroom Cooking demonstration hosted by Graham Steinruck. Tickets are $100 and includes the meal as well as camping on the property over the weekend. As a non-profit, we strive to provide the best experience while keeping cost of admission as affordable as possible, and may end up hosting this event at a loss once everything is done with. That being said, we are pouring everything generated from ticket sales back into this experience, making it one to remember for years to come, and are asking those who will be attending to help by bringing a meal to share with fellow mycophiles!

Participants also have the option of attending a mushroom cultivation workshop hosted by Jordan Jent from Texas Fungus that will cost an additional $30. Those who take the workshop will get to learn all the basics of mushroom cultivation and walk away with a Cordyceps grow kit as well! The first 50 people to purchase the weekend pass for the festival also receive a FREE Amanita T-shirt with DNA strands donated by one of our speakers, Dr. Britt Bunyard!

Once you purchase a ticket you will receive a follow-up email with additional instructions, the festival schedule, and the address of the venue. We have a jam-packed schedule with seven presentations from some of the top experts in mycology coming together to share their knowledge

Featured Guests

Dr. Alan Bessette

A professional mycologist and distinguished emeritus professor of biology at Utica College of Syracuse University, Dr. Bessette is a member of the North American Mycological Association, the Mycological Society of America, the Asheville Mushroom Club and the Gulf South Mycological Society. He has published numerous papers in the field of mycology and has authored or coauthored more than twenty-five books, including: Mushrooms of the Southeastern United States, Ascomycete Fungi of North America, A Field Guide to the Mushrooms of the Carolinas, Mushrooms of the Gulf Coast States: A Field Guide to Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, and his most recent book, Polypores and Similar Fungi of Eastern and Central North America.

Alan served as a consultant for the New York State Poison Control Center for more than twenty-five years. During that same time, he also acted as the scientific adviser to the Mid-York Mycological Society. He has been the principal mycologist at national and regional forays and was the recipient of the 1987 Mycological Foray Service Award and of the 1992 North American Mycological Association Award for Contributions to Amateur Mycology. In addition to teaching workshops and seminars, Alan volunteers at state parks and reserves providing mycological surveys and educational programs. His current mycological interests include subtropical fungi.

Arleen Bessette

Arleen Bessette is a mycologist, an award-winning botanical photographer, as well as a retired psychotherapist. A member of the North American Mycological Association, the Asheville Mushroom Club, and The Gulf South Mycological Society, Arleen has published several papers in the field of mycology and has authored or coauthored more than eighteen books, including: Boletes of Eastern North America, The Rainbow Beneath My Feet: A Mushroom Dyer’s FieldGuide, A Field Guide to the Mushrooms of the Carolinas and her most recent book, Polypores and Similar Fungi of Eastern and Central North America. She has been collecting and studying wild mushrooms for more than forty years.

Arleen has served as a faculty member at national and regional mycological forays since 1990. She has organized, hosted and assisted with the planning and running of mycological events for both national and international groups. Her outreach mycological activities include volunteering at state parks and nature centers, as well as presenting and teaching in a variety of venues. Her current passion focuses on how mycology can be a vehicle for increasing one’s personal awareness.

David P. Lewis

David P. Lewis, M.S., is a retired chemist and avid mycologist with a BS and MS from Lamar University, Beaumont, TX, where his master’s thesis was based on a study of East Texas mushrooms. David is currently a Research Associate with the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL, where 5000 collections of his fungi are deposited.

He is an honorary staff member associated with the Tracy Herbarium at Texas A&M University. From 2006 to 2018, he had been the Fungal TWIG (coordinator for mycologists) for the Big Thicket National Preserve All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory. He is president of the Gulf States Mycological Society (since 1998), has authored many papers related to mycology, and discovered several new species of mushrooms. (Four species are named for him.) In 2009 he received The North American Mycological Association’s award for Contributions to Amateur Mycology, and in 2010, the R.E. Jackson Conservation Award from the Big Thicket Association.

With Alan and Arleen Bessette, David co-authored “Mushrooms of the Gulf Coast States- A Field Guide to Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida”. He and his late wife Patricia live on 60 heavily wooded acres in Newton County, Texas where they study plants, fungi and wildlife.

Dr. Britt Bunyard

Britt Bunyard, PhD, is the founder, Publisher, and Editor-in-Chief of the mycology journal Fungi. Britt has worked academically as a mycologist his entire career, teaching a number of university courses and writing scientifically for many research journals and popular science magazines. He has served as an editor for mycological and entomological research journals, and mushroom guide books. A popular evangelizer on all things fungal, Britt has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, PBS’s NOVA and Wisconsin Foodie television programs; and interviewed or quoted in Discover magazine, The Atlantic, Vox, Vogue, Forbes, Saveur, Eating Well, Hobby Farm, Women’s World, and other magazines and newspapers.

Britt serves as Executive Director of the Telluride Mushroom Festival. He has authored several books, including Amanitas of North America (2020; The FUNGI Press), The Beginner’s Guide to Mushrooms (2021; Quarry Books), Mushrooms and Macrofungi of Ohio and Midwestern States (2012; The Ohio State University Press), and most recently The Lives of Fungi (2022; Princeton University Press). In 2021 Britt was awarded the Gary Lincoff Award “For Contributions to Amateur Mycology,” by the North American Mycological Association—NAMA’s most prestigious honor for American mycologists.

Jay Justice

Jay Justice became enthralled with mushrooms and fungi while pursuing a graduate degree many years ago. After completing his graduate degree, Jay joined the North American Mycological Association (NAMA) in 1980. In 1982, he was instrumental in forming the Arkansas Mycological Society and participated in his first NAMA foray in 1985. He has been a prominent member of NAMA, and a well-known mycologist in the decades since. In 2011, Justice was the recipient of the Gary Lincoff Award for Contributions to Amateur Mycology, an award that is given each year by NAMA to recognize service performed by selected amateur or professional mycologists.

He has been listed as a co-author on several research papers in mycological journals and he serves as one of the chief mycologists for the Missouri Mycological Society as well as a scientific advisor for the Arkansas Mycological Society, the Cumberland Mycological Society, and the Gulf South Mycological Society. Jay continues to serve as a lecturer and mushroom foray leader for mycological societies and mushroom clubs, particularly in the Southeast.

He is also a co-author of Amanitas of North America, which was published in June of 2020.

Graham Steinruck

Graham Steinruck is a chef and mycologist, born and raised in Denver, Colorado. He has had the opportunity to work closely with some of Colorado’s top chefs in their restaurants and hosts private dinners featuring wild ingredients in unique preparations. Much of his inspiration for food comes from the natural world as he spent much of his childhood hiking in the Rocky Mountains. He received the prestigious Zagat ‘30 under 30’ award for his dedication to cooking and foraging.

Several of his recipes were recently featured in the ‘Fantastic Fungi Community Cookbook’ by Eugenia Bone, as well as the cookbook ‘Wild Mushrooms’ by Trent and Kristen Blizzard. He is one of Colorado state certified wild mushroom identification experts licensed to identify over 60 species of wild and edible mushrooms for the food industry. He is the chef of the Telluride Mushroom Festival Fungi Dinner, where he features many different types of fungi in multi-course tasting menus. He recently began a company called ‘Friends and Fungi’, an event company that focuses on fungi education and hands on learning experiences. He currently lives in Olympia, WA.

Jordan Jent

Upon witnessing the lack of fresh and local mushrooms in the DFW metroplex in 2018, Jordan started “Texas Fungus” and began testing out Urban Agriculture methods and techniques with mushroom growing in his 1-car garage. After gaining some insight through trial and error, growing shiitake on logs, mushroom beds, and inoculating everything in sight, and the methods being shown today have been refined.

Texas Fungus moved into a 2000 sqft warehouse in January of 2019 where they currently produce an average of 900lbs of mushrooms every week that are distributed to chefs, restaurants, grocery stores, and farmers markets. Now that Texas Fungus has reached max capacity in their current space, Texas Fungus is looking to expand once again and redefine what we know Urban Agriculture to be with nutritious, healthy, hyper-local fungi in a sustainable process across DFW.

Additional information

Ticket Type	Basic Admission, Basic Admission and Cultivation Workshop