Free Mushroom Grow Kits!

I support everyone that buys a mushroom grow kit from me.

This means answering emails, getting on a phone call, asking for picture of their grow kit and troubleshooting with them.

I want them to succeed and my customers have seemed super appreciative of the effort.

It’s also helped me learn and fine tune my messaging and delivery. This process over the past 6 years has been a fascinating peek into how people, who are just getting into mycology, think about mycology.

It also takes a lot of time, and it’s more or less the same conversation again and again.

Since, I have a limit to how much support I can provide this way this 1-to-1 delivery has been hitting a ceiling.

So, I made an online community for the people I serve.

It’s very young, only 4 days old at the time of writing.

I’m actually watching my first video tutorial upload while I write this.

The first module I’m working on “The Mushroom Grow Kit Course” is a live learning and teaching experiment.

Last weekend, I was a local agriculture fair, working my mushroom booth.

I put out a sign for Free Mushroom Grow Kits:

In no time, I was give back-to-back mini-workshops to groups of people.

I provided the bag of hydrated sawdust and the mycelium. They did the inoculations themselves while I guided them along. Afterwards, we went through the instructions for caring.

Finally, I told them this: “You’re going to go home and questions will come up. They always do. Rather than have 30 email conversations explaining the same thing, here’s a link to a free course and community. I’m doing this experiment with you and will be posted far more detailed guides and tutorial videos than what we did here. Enjoy.“

Most of them seemed shocked at how much they were getting for free, and I admit, I felt proud watching their faces shift.

As much as I love growing mushrooms and feeding people, the window of contact, at least how I’ve done it, is very small. It’s transactional.

Teaching is the opposite, it’s relational. I’ve been trying to figure out how to do this in a way that feels good for me and that excites me.

I keep trying to do the social media thing, but for me that’s been such a hard thing to stick with. I really don’t enjoy it.

But meeting people in person, shaking their hands, and then getting messy with some mycelium - that’s my jam. And now I get to continue hanging out with them in our own space, talking about exactly what we want to talk about.

So yeah, I’m so excited about this.

I’m not sure what shape this will take, in fact I’m banking on that shape emerging from the people that join, and what they want to learn.

I think I can best help a small range of people, from those who are trying a grow kit for the first time, families that want to grow from themselves, to those who want to start selling mushrooms.

In fact, I’ve had so many people come up to me at events and say they tried to grow a kit from Costco or other place. It didn’t work, they gave up, got discouraged. There wasn’t that support needed to do a new, weird thing like mycology.

I really do hope people who are in that boat find there way here.

Alright, I’m out of here. The first video has finished uploading! Woop woop!

Come check it out.

Here the link to the Mushroom Growing group. It’s completely free. I’d love to have you there.