Growing Mushrooms at Home

Are you curious about how to grow mushrooms? Do you love the freshness and quality of homegrown food? 

Let us help you demystify the process and grow delicious oyster mushrooms from your own home.

Mushrooms are often overlooked as a potential homegrown food. Costly 'Grow your own kits’ perpetuate a myth that cultivating mushrooms requires expensive infrastructure, specialized technical skills, and multiple resources beyond what already exists in your home. We will show you that growing mushrooms can be easy, and can be done without huge expense.

This hands-on, beginners workshop will cover basic oyster mushroom growing. It is a skill sharing 'tips and tricks' lesson from an experienced commercial mushroom grower who started growing very basically at home in a small space with no technical equipment in the inner city. 

We will share a local source of substrate, grain spawn & identify material sources for small scale growers and offer ongoing support to students.

With a strong focus on EASY & LOCAL DIY (do-it-yourself) AND ZERO WASTE growing methods these workshops will be run by our head mushroom farmer and take place at Sporadical City Mushrooms Urban Farm in Alphington, Melbourne. 

No prior knowledge or equipment required. 

All participants will take home

• their own mushroom growing kit that they prepare themselves during the workshop (valued at $40)
• the materials and instructions they need to prepare a kit at home  i.e (repurposed plastic bucket & lid, oyster mushroom grain spawn, enough straw for a grow kit, a bag for pasturising staw, small bottle of isopropyl alchohol for sterilisation and water straw bottle  - valued at $60)
• detailed digital instructions and information resources covering everything in the class plus directions to great resources and mushroom growing networks
• a better understanding and confidence for growing mushrooms at home and a connection to other Melbourne growers.

Classes are kept small for greater learning so if the class is full pop your name on our waitlist and so we can schedule more.

Children under the age of 12 will need to be accompanied by an adult.

Check out the Sporadical City Mushrooms website, or follow us on social media for more advanced workshops and collaborative skill sharing events for people of all ages.

About your Teacher:

Julia has many years of experience both as a farmer and working to support the farming community in Australia and worldwide. She is an experienced educator having taught at informal workshops, international conferences and has delivered programs in urban agriculture and food system studies at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Julia enjoys supporting others in growing their own food by sharing her skills and experience and understanding of healthy foods ecologies. In 2018 she established Sporadical City Mushrooms in the small rental on Swanston St in downtown Melbourne, moving to upscale her business in Alphington in 2020 where she continues to produce seasonal gourmet mushrooms for restaurants, households, and farmers markets.

Sporadical City Mushrooms is a small urban farm in Melbourne where we grow delicious seasonal mushrooms for our local community, markets & restaurants. Guided by our zero waste ethic we have grown from a small backyard business to building our farm at Alphington. We also teach mushroom growing workshops for indoor, garden or mushroom log cultivation and give farm tours to share our DIY methods and help get more people growing. If you would like to organise a workshop get in touch or keep an eye out for our up coming workshops.