The Mycollective is one of five autonomous volunteer-led collectives at Santropol Roulant. We produce mushrooms for the Roulant’s kitchen and educate on all things fungi and spread our love of mushrooms – through production, experimentation, and teaching – to the greater Montreal community.
This year, the Mycollective cultivated oyster mushrooms at the Rouland farm in Senneville. Harvests early in the season were very promising; taupe bouquets erupted from the woody beds in June. Access to a dehydrator at the farm let us use the mushroom harvests more effectively and required fewer deliveries from the farm to the Roulant. However, the impressive amount of rain in late June and July flooded the mushroom beds and unfortunately killed most of the mycelium. This deluge dramatically decreased our production as the beds have been historically most active from late August to October.
Fortunately, the Tourne-Sol Cooperative Farm came to the rescue! They donated 18 buckets of organic gray oyster mycelium when they were winding down their mushroom production operations. These 18 buckets produced 10 kg of mushrooms for the kitchen in just one month! A huge thank you to Don and the Tourne-Sol farm for sharing their mycelium.
The Mycollective also established a new mushroom bed of blue oyster at the Cité-des-Hospitalières garden. This bed produced 6 kg of mushrooms for the kitchen, more than double the amount grown at Cité-des-Hospitalières in 2023. We refined our techniques for creating the beds to decrease the chance of rot and to increase the longevity of the beds. We documented these techniques and shared what we learned at our presentations to the collective. Attendees are now successfully making their own mushroom beds.
The Mycollective hosted workshops for the Roulant and for outside organizations. A highlight was presenting at the Fungi Fest in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, speaking about the fundamentals of mycology and what we do as a collective. At our workshops, we taught new members the basics and then graduated to more advanced mushroom-cultivation techniques. We led workshops on preparing grains for cultivation, expanding liquid culture to grains, and expanding from grains to a fruiting substrate. With a goal of reducing waste, we experimented with growing blue oysters on a mix of hardwood fuel pellets and spent coffee grounds that we collected from cafes around the Plateau. Delicious dark blue caps erupted from the side of the buckets, outcompeting the burgeoning molds that loiter on the nitrogenous coffee waste!
Curious to dive deeper? The MyCollective is looking for passionate mycologists and motivated people of all backgrounds to join our team. If you want to learn more about mushrooms and would like to help at the farm and at workshops, please fill out the below form.
Thanks for reading!
The Mycollective