Mycologist Career: The Business of Mushrooms

If you can tell the difference between a deer and an antelope, or a cat and a dog, both have four legs.
They have minor differences, but there's no way you would mistake a cat for a dog.
And that's where mushrooms come in.
As long as you know how to look at it and what you're looking at, it's as easy as telling pointy ears from floppy ears.
Hi, welcome back to How Much Can I Make?
The podcast about jobs and careers.
I'm your host, Miravozeri.
Today we're talking about mushrooms.
Not the kind that you put on your pizza.
We are talking about a fascinating career that's part science, part business, and part adventure.
My guest is John Micheletti, founder of Catskill Fungi.
He turned his passion for fungi into a thriving business that includes guided mushroom walks, medicinal mushroom extracts, workshops, retreats, and even mushroom tools around the world.
Today you'll hear how he built that business, what mycologist does, and how much you can make in this field.
And why mushrooms that are the most fascinating organisms and are everywhere in the world are so misunderstood.
Chances you walked right past them without even noticing.
Anyway, here is my conversation with John McCaletti, the founder of Cutskill Fungi.
It's my pleasure.
I'm so curious hearing about mushrooms.
Let's just start with tell me how and when were you introduced to mushrooms?
I wasn't raised with fungi though, I was raised being out in the woods.
Always loved walks and doing a lot of hiking and was an outdoor guide for a while, doing rafting, rock climbing, hiking, caving, scuba diving adventures from college on.
And then I remember I was a boat captain at the time and I was volunteering at the local nature center.
And I found this little bright red mushroom.
What I know now to be a hygrosopy, like a waxy cap.
But it was so striking that I asked the person at the nature center what it was, and she said she had no idea, but that there were these local mushroom clubs that I could go bring it to on Saturday when they had mushroom walks, and they can help me identify it.
When I went there, I met one of my main mentors in mycology, and that was Gary Linkoff, who taught at the New York Botanical Gardens for 42 years and wrote the Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms.
Anything you brought him, he would just tell you stories about it and just make you so fascinated by the world of fungi that I really just very quickly became enamored.
So, what was your next step?
Did you go to study it?
Did you start to forage mushrooms?
Yeah, I started rearranging my schedule so I could be out in the woods with this mushroom club as much as possible, and I went to all their talks and walks, and then I started peeling through as many books as I could about the subject.
At that time there really wasn't a ton available, but there was a book by Paul Stamitz called Mycelium Running, which is still a tried and true book to get people involved with ways in working with mushrooms.
So there's people that study taxonomy and identification, which is what Gary Linkoff did.
And then there's people that work with mushrooms to grow mycorremediate or clean up toxins from soils or make different extracts, harness the different nutraceutical possibilities from fungi.
Paul really was somebody that opened those doors for me.
Now, he was offering courses in the Pacific Northwest where he is, but it was way out of my price range.
And so I found something of an extended internship in Ecuador, where I went down there for a summer and studied with some international bioremediators and mycologists and chemists and biologists, and we were looking at how to cultivate fungi to remediate toxins from soils there in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
That season changed my life.
And so when I got back after that, I was just so excited about mushrooms.
I would talk to anybody who would listen, and I started offering classes on cultivation.
And you sell kids for cultivation.
And my question is what's the easiest mushroom to cultivate at home?
Easiest one to cultivate indoors, I would say, would be oyster mushrooms.
And I teach classes at the New York Botanical Gardens about this, where you can take your coffee grounds or your cardboard and you can inoculate it with the roots of the fungi, which we call mycelium.
And the mycelium will grow through the coffee grounds and then fruit oyster mushrooms, which is pretty fun.
And then if you want to grow outdoors, I give a lot of talks with garden clubs, and most of what we focus on is these companion plants that you can plant, these fungi that will grow well in your garden.
So we can grow shiitakis on logs outdoors, but the easiest I would say would be something called winecap stropharia that grows on mulch and wood chips and straw.
And you can have that in your garden among all of the And you eat it?
Can you eat it?
Oh absolutely.
It's delicious.
It has this burgundy red cap, big stem, and then it fruits pretty prolifically from spring through summer and even into fall.
I can get a kit to grow any mushroom I want.
Okay, so you can get a kit to grow certain mushrooms.
Can I grow lion's mane?
You can grow lion's mane, yeah.
And if you wanted to grow enough lion's mane to eat it every day, you'd probably need to devote one of your closets and could wrap it in plastic and build some wire racks and get 15 to 20 blocks going at once.
But if you wanted to grow a little bit of lion's mane, you can get one or two blocks.
And there's plenty of places that you can go online to find it.
Yeah.
What's called a mushroom block because it looks like a block wrapped in a plastic bag, and then you poke holes in it, and the mushrooms fruit out of it.
And you just need to leave it on a plate and it just fruits mushrooms right out of the bag.
And if you haven't done this, I really highly recommend it because it's such a fun thing to do watch these mushrooms.
Especially if you do it with your kids, I know.
Yeah, there's other mushrooms out there that you cannot cultivate, like chantrelles and this is why truffles sell for a hundred to four hundred dollars a pound, because we can't reliably cultivate them.
And so we rely on the mycelium, these roots, to link up with their plant partner, which in this case, in many cases, are trees, and then it's we're at the whim of the weather and the seasonality.
You also, your business cut says that you're a mycologist.
Yeah.
What is a mycologist?
Yeah, a lot of mycologists and I talk about this.
I feel that I would be more of like a mycological educator or a community mycologist because a honest mycologist is someone that generally works in academia.
I am helping to take mycological knowledge that I gain from all these mushroom conferences and these different books that I'm reading and Fungi Magazine and all these other places.
And I try to put it in bite-sized accessible forms for our community.
And that has just been a passion of mine.
How many years of education?
It's 12 and running, I guess 15 and running.
Because you're constantly learning.
Constantly learning.
And with the advent of DNA extraction and the accessibility of it, we're realizing that the things that we thought were related are no longer related.
New science keeps coming out every day, every week.
There's new things happening in mycology, and some of the time it's very humbling.
Oh.
So you're also a toxologist because mushrooms also have a bad name as a really dangerous thing to consume.
Yeah, you really have to know your mushrooms when it comes to what you're gonna eat.
But as somebody that studies toxicology, which mushrooms are poisonous?
But I will say there are no mushrooms that are poisonous to touch.
So you can safely touch any mushrooms.
So it's a fairly safe hobby to study them.
But you just don't want to go around eating any mushroom, that's for sure.
Some of these things can be toxic to your liver or they can react with alcohol.
Some of them even have hydrazines in them.
What is that?
It's the same thing that NASA uses to shoot rockets into space.
So people will cook these things and the fumes emitted make them kind of pass out in their kitchen.
Wow.
It's really pretty wild what different compounds these mushrooms have.
And of course, we don't know why.
What's the most amazing mushrooms you discovered or you ran into and it blew your mind?
Oh my gosh.
It's really every day is a different discovery, quite honestly.
I was just leading some mushroom walks this past weekend.
We found something that I thought was very interesting.
It was a mushroom growing on another mushroom.
And it was two different mushrooms.
Yeah, so it's it's what's called a hypomycet.
So it's something that grows on another mushroom, it parasitizes another mushroom, and then it changes its form.
So that mushroom wanted to be something, and then this other mushroom grows on it, and it completely changes the form of that mushroom.
It changes the color, changes the texture, changes the size and the shape.
It's really wild.
So things like that are very interesting.
And even just last week, one mycologist found a cordyceps.
So this is a mushroom that grows on insects or cordyceps, and this is what that TV show, The Last of Us, was based on.
So these cordyceps, they found another mushroom parasitizing a cordycep mushroom.
How many types of mushrooms are they?
Thousands, right?
There's anywhere between two and ten million species of fungi, and we have only scientifically described less than five percent.
So it's a completely unexplored kingdom, and one that's really has been not looked at for many years.
They were just considered lesser plants until 1969.
So it's really something that has been developing, but very slowly.
And it's really over the last few years that we have this community interest, and people are really taking to it.
I will say that a lot of the mushrooms we're discovering doesn't come from academia, doesn't come from paid mycologists, it comes from community scientists that are just out there in the forest, they're taking an interest in fungi, they're taking photographs, and they're sending it samples to the right person that is in academia that says, Wow, yeah, I'm I don't have time to be in the field, but you just found something novel and we're gonna rename it.
It was almost the same thing for birding where iBird came out through Cornell Cooperative Extension, it changed birding because now you're just getting people that are naturalists that are just out there taking good photos, and that that is really what moves the science.
Interesting.
But when it comes down to it, there's some pretty profound things that mushrooms have in them that when we pair with them, we can improve our lives.
For example, before I go into what's there, just eating mushrooms, you're getting insoluble fiber.
This is gonna be really excellent for your gut microbiota, it's gonna be good for your the bacteria that grow in your gut.
It's it helps to feed them so that you can absorb food better.
It has nearly every amino acid to be a complete protein.
So you are getting a lot of protein with mushrooms, so they're they are closer related to meat than they are to vegetables.
That being said, mushrooms are 90% water, so you're not getting a lot of protein from them, but you're getting maybe two to ten percent protein.
They also have thiamine zinc, they have different different compounds that are also excellent for us, like polysaccharides.
They're sugars that are really good for our immune system.
Many of the things that mushrooms are doing for our bodies are not like artificially giving us a chemical that does something, it's something that helps our bodies to do what they need to do.
So remember when we found out that like carrots had like beta-carotene, and if carrots it'll be good for your eyes, and it's not like anybody's just like going out there and really just consuming all the carrots, and it's is that medicine or is that food?
Like there's a blurred line there of medicine and food.
But I look at these things as having things that can help our bodies do what they need to do, and so by incorporating them in our lives in different ways through eating more mushrooms or taking an extract that has all the compounds isolated, it helps our bodies do what they need to do.
Which mushroom amazed you the most because of its medical benefits?
I would say Lion's mane has been really profound.
Oh, really?
That is one that people really feel a difference within a short period of time.
And I know that there's a lot of different products out there and things like this, but if it is a good quality product, if it's a high quality product, then people really notice a difference within like taking it within a couple weeks.
Now, many of the benefits are cumulative, so people have to take it regularly, as is cordyceps.
Cordyceps and energy, that was also very surprising taking that one.
I take both, yeah.
And one can contradict the other.
Now that I have you, I can ask you.
Okay, is one contradicting the other?
No, if anything, and there hasn't been much scientific evidence of this that I've seen, but there are some claims made by some people and companies that they are actually working in concert, they can actually support each other in their activity.
And I could see that happening because you have different mushrooms with different polysaccharides helping your immune system regulate itself.
I want to talk a little bit about your business.
You have the workshops, the walks, we'll talk about that.
But the tincture I wanna talk about because I've been using it like 15 or 17 years, something like that, and never got sick.
The only time I got sick, I didn't even get corona.
The only time I got sick was when I didn't take it for 30 days and I flew back from Hawaii and got sick on the plane like I used to before.
So I wanna know, first of all, you produce the tinctures in your own farm, right?
We do, yeah.
We're growing some mushrooms there, but we're also foraging them in the forest.
And then we link up with local mushroom farms to source our lion's mane and our cordycept, which there's just not enough to find out there in the forest.
You want to know that it's coming from pristine land, that's for sure.
And then a lot of these mushrooms are seasonal, so these last few weeks I've been in hemlock forests looking for reishi mushroom, which is one that has been called the mushroom of immortality in China, and it's one that has been shown as a modulator of the immune system and nervous system.
Yeah, it's an absolutely beautiful mushroom, it's a very easy mushroom to identify.
It is bright burgundy red on the top and sometimes a putty margin or outside edge, and it grows like a shelf mushroom on the side of dead hemlocks, and it's quite striking, quite large too, up to a foot in diameter.
So you forage them and then you bring them to the farm.
And how long is the process of making the extract?
It's quite a long process.
The first thing we do is put the mushrooms in the sunlight upside down, and you can do this with any mushrooms you buy at the farmer's market or the store because when you put them in the sunlight, they hyperaccumulate vitamin D to the factor of a hundred.
So you're getting even more vitamin D just by putting your mushrooms in the sun.
After we put them in the sunlight, we dehydrate them until they're really cracker crisp, dry, and then we powder them, and then we do a non-GMO organic cane alcohol soak for a month.
Wow.
And yeah, then we strain that out and do a cold water bath, which gets enzymes.
Uh, the alcohol gets triterpenes and sterols that you wouldn't otherwise get from a water bath.
The cold water bath gets enzymes, and then the third process is a uh triple decoction or basically a slow, low boil that reduces to a third.
And so in that we are pulling apart the chitin, the cell walls of the fungi, and we're getting different polysaccharides.
Everything is measured out to the tenth of a gram and by the milliliter.
Everything is very precise, very exact with the processing of it.
Your cells must have grown a lot.
I turned on a lot of people to it because I'm such a believer in them.
And when I buy them, the guy tells me, Oh, I have people that come here.
They say they will never move without them.
And it's true.
So, when did you start your farm and what was your mission when you started it?
Yeah, we're really grateful for people like you, Mirab, I have to say.
Not just as supporters, but for what you're creating for our community too.
So the way it really started was, you know, it was come from this passion of mushrooms.
I knew I wanted to devote my life to it.
I wanted to have this as a career.
And I was being really pushed by that main mentor, Gary Linkoff, which by that time was pulling me on stage to talk about what I was speaking on.
And then one time he did a tour of presentations, and his topic was quit your job and devote your life to mushrooms.
And he included my picture in the presentation.
So I had to take the hint.
But I spent a year really looking at the different ways in which I can work with fungi.
I went and visited the smallest mushroom farm in the country to the largest mushroom farm in the country and what doesn't in between.
I looked at all the ways in which I can interface with mycology.
While I was doing that, it really came out of the interests of the community.
Where I was on an herbal walk with Marguerite Ullmanbauer.
I started identifying mushrooms.
She said, Wow, maybe you should lead a mushroom walk.
And so the person that was leading that walk invited me to lead a mushroom walk.
So that's how you started with the books?
No.
That's how I started with the walks.
And then with the extracts, I remember being at the High Falls Food Co-op.
They had a lot of local plant tinctures, and then they had mushroom tinctures coming from the other side of the country.
I said, Would you guys want local source of mushroom tinctures?
And they got really excited about it.
It really came down to crunching the numbers.
You gotta crunch the numbers first, just like anybody that wants to start your own business.
You can't just go out and just start doing it.
You have to understand that it's gonna be a lot of work, but you also want to make sure you're gonna enjoy the work.
And so I saw a lot of the mushroom farms that were growing inside, and I didn't really want to be inside.
I knew I wanted to be outdoors.
I also noticed that based on what they were selling them for, it was you could not go away.
It was$2.50 an hour at first, based on like what you're really putting the time in.
It takes a lot of energy and effort, and a lot of you have to have misters, you have to have air conditioning, you have to have heaters in the wintertime, and everything has to be balancing the temperature and humidity.
So, what was the the startup cost for something like that?
Yeah, for something like that, yeah, you're looking at a higher startup cost because you're looking at many different things, but you can still do it inexpensively.
Okay, you can still start with maybe a few thousand dollars, and then you start by selling mushrooms into your local stores, and then eventually you can ramp up and sell further.
But for me, something that is spoiling in three days just did not seem I it's I just don't have the brain for that, like moving that so quickly.
So I needed something that was going to last, and so I looked into value-added products with fungi, and that's still what I focus on is value added.
So we do, of course, the mushroom education aspects that were constantly evolving.
How often do you do the walks?
Uh, walks happen nearly every week from May all the way through the end of fall.
Generally in the winter time, we actually are running a trip to Puerto Rico where we take people to the tropics and teach them about uh mushrooms down there.
So it's a we have a nine-day trip coming up in January where people can come out and meet the local mycologists, and it's backed by popular demand after we did it last year.
So you said before a shelf life of three days.
That's when I uh get fresh mushroom and when I forage it from the woods.
I have three days to use it, and that's it.
Sometimes you have longer, but some of the ones that you cultivate, like oysters, yeah, within three days they really start to break down, even in the best condition.
Okay, so you started with the day walks, then you added the workshops, then you added the tincture.
Do you do anything else at the farm?
We have a space called the spore space that we lovingly call the spore space, and that is our commercial kitchen, and we have a giant mushroom mural on the side, and we have cultivation of logs in the back.
So we're cultivating outdoors and we host workshops to teach people how to grow mushrooms outside.
So, along with presentations, which we get hired by all sorts of different organizations to give presentations, we do these two-hour mushroom walks to teach people about mushrooms.
We do cooking demos, we're gonna be doing a salve-making workshop coming up, and then we do three-day-long workshops with different resorts in the area, and we take people on this journey of you don't know anything about mushrooms, and by the end of the weekend, you're gonna know five to ten easy edibles, how to identify them safely, how to cook them, prepare them, preserve them, how to make extracts from them.
And then we also when I say we, it's grown from just me doing this to a group of other mycological educators.
And we do private mushroom walks where if people want to identify mushrooms on their land, they can hire a private guide that will come and And teach them about the fungi in their forest.
So when people come to your walking tours, do they come for photography, nature, a curiosity?
What do you think is the reason that most people come?
And you have a lot of those over the year.
Yeah, we have.
It's a great question.
So I think people come out of the interest in what these mushrooms are and what are they doing out there in the forest?
But I think a lot of people are following their stomachs.
They want to know what I can eat?
What can I eat?
What's medicinal?
How can I use these things?
And that's why we really focus on helping people understand some of the easy edible mushrooms.
Do you have any story from the mushroom walks that sticks with you?
Oh my gosh, yeah, so many.
There's so many times that you have these people that come along and they're just there because their partner dragged them along.
And then they start finding one.
And they run out to you.
They're like a little kid, and they're like, oh my gosh, look at the colors.
And it's and then it's the end when you lay out all the mushrooms on the table and 20 different mushrooms and all the different shapes and sizes.
And that's when you can see them side by side and tell the edible apart from the non-edible ones, and that's when people really light up.
But I remember we did a quick go-around of why people were there, and one person broke down crying because she was a chef and she had bought mushrooms from a forager, and there were only enough to cook for the kitchen staff.
Fortunately, after they went home, they were all vomiting, and they were and she called the forager and said, What's going on?
And he said it's just a little vomit, no big deal.
Oh my god.
Yeah.
And so I commended her because here she was, rather than being afraid of mushrooms, she came on an event to learn about this stuff.
And then she went on to be a president of a mushroom club and really a lover of mushrooms.
And I know there's somebody out there listening thinking to myself, I would never trust myself to eat a mushroom.
But if you can tell the difference between a deer and an antelope, or a cat and a dog, both have four legs, they have minor differences, but there's no way you would mistake in a cat for a dog.
And that's where mushrooms come in.
As long as you know how to look at it and what you're looking at, it's as easy as telling pointy ears from floppy ears.
Is that the first rule you give anybody that wanna forage mushrooms in the wild?
Oh I say first you can touch any of them.
None of them are poisonous to touch.
That takes the edge off.
And then it comes down to how to look for mushrooms.
How to train your eye to actually see these things, because they are everywhere.
If you go out in the woods, if you look at the dead-downed wood on logs, and you look at the leaf litter, it's a training your eye to see them.
And once you start seeing them, you'll never stop seeing them.
What is the biggest challenge in being in a fungi business?
Sometimes it is the things that aren't fungi, right?
It's like the managing the website and keeping it all going.
One thing about the structure of my business that my business mentor has warned me about is I have both a service and a product, and keeping those both running is quite a bit.
But sometimes, like a lot of other business owners, I'm sure can relate to this, sometimes it becomes focusing on just doing the thing.
There's so many other things to get involved with in mycology.
We could be going into micro-remediation, we could be going into mycrotechnologies, and I give presentations on this too.
Like, how do we grow mycelium, grow these roots of fungi to create new bricks, new building materials, new?
Oh, absolutely, new leathers, new things like this.
There's all sorts of different ways in which people are working with growing mycelium, not just for the food, but for compressing them into bricks and building houses or yeah, really making cosmetic leathers or shoes or moltiles and things like this.
And so there's really a lot of different aspects to get involved with when it comes to mycology.
And so honing in on just a few is really sometimes the challenge because the interest is deep and it's all very fascinating.
And when I if there are people that are interested in going into mushrooms, I would say that the mycotechnology aspect of this, the myco materials, are really booming right now.
There's a lot of potential in jobs that that way.
There's a lot of potential in jobs with with yeah, this biotechnology.
Let's talk money for a second.
What field mycologists can make?
Let's say you finish some studies, you're ready to go to the field.
You can't make anything as a field mic.
You can get hired from a nonprofit like Fundus, the fungal diversity survey, which is North America's nonprofit for fungal biodiversity and conservation.
And if they have a grant, they might be able to pay you by the hour to collect mushrooms.
You will not be able to do this full-time.
So it's like a side hustle.
Yes.
Okay.
That and that's if you're lucky.
Nobody's hiring mycologists per se.
If you're just out there looking and studying fungi, most of this work is volunteer.
Most of this work is just people doing it out of the love of it.
And on the other hand, I ran into a guy from Brooklyn that has a huge warehouse.
He grows, I don't know what kind of mushrooms, and his business is in the millions.
And that is where cultivation can really take off.
That is where, yeah, by cultivating mushrooms and really growing scale.
In the millions, that is that's very most people.
I knew who you're talking about, but most people are going to do okay.
You can have it as a supplement to a farm, or you can really grow a lot of mushrooms in a small space and generally do okay with it.
At home, when I cultivate, can I grow enough mushrooms for my own use?
For family use?
Yeah.
Not only that, yeah, you can grow enough mushrooms for your own use, but I knew people in the city that were growing enough mushrooms in five-gallon buckets with coffee grounds that they were selling them to local restaurants and helping to pay the rent.
So there's ways in which you can grow a lot of mushrooms in a small space.
It's a great way in which you really can scale it.
But you just have to understand that if you're going to do that, there's a certain level.
And this is where I got out of cultivation.
But if you hire up to three people, if you have three people working for you, you can make it so that it's sustainable.
But with the mushroom extracts that I make, because we can make in bulk and preserve them, they preserve for over a year, then we can really build stock and scale faster.
Which is the best revenue stream for you?
The walks, the workshops, the classes, the tinctures?
It's the tinctures, by the way.
The tinctures.
They're excellent.
I'm not surprised.
They're really and really the word is spreading around.
They're really amazing.
How did you decide which of the tinctures to make?
Because apparently, from what you say, you could have done a million different ones.
Yeah, there are many different beneficial compounds in fungi.
These mushrooms that I've chosen are the ones that have been looked at the most by different scientists.
I was making them for myself and friends and family and having a good time of it, but then once I decided to do this commercially, I really peeled through all the scientific studies, what was published, what was going on, what were the methods that they used to get what results, and then I combined those methods in order to create the extract that we create.
What I really found was these were the six most studied extracts out there.
Now that being said, there are others that I find but are maybe more difficult to source to the point where I may not be able to make enough for the public, but I might make enough for a small group or something like that.
Do you see a difference in the forest because of climate change?
Do you see some things maybe coming back less, maybe not growing as much?
Yeah, the changes we're seeing due to climate change have to do with seasonality, where things are showing up earlier and earlier, or they're coming later and later.
And as rain comes through, that really determines how many mushrooms you're gonna see.
So much of it is the seasonality, and we're being surprised every year.
Wow.
Did you ever learn or studied the psychedelic mushrooms?
Yes, I've studied psychedelics quite a bit and have weighed in New York State policy for it.
I've been involved through the North American Mycological Association's Medicinal Mushroom Committee.
We publish a lot about psilocybin, and every year I go to the Telluride Mushroom Festival, which has really been a celebration of mushrooms, but has also attracted some of the top researchers in psilocybin mushrooms, and I've gotten to listen to them for the past 12 years.
And so I've really learned a lot about these mushrooms, and I understand how they interact with the brain and what they're doing.
Apparently, the helping PTSD they found lately.
I saw a movie where it helped a guy get rid of his stutter because he took too much.
Yeah.
Chronic depression, chronic addiction.
There's ways in which people can work with psilocybin-assisted therapists that can really help them overcome a lot of different things.
And it really helps to lower what's called the default mode network, which is our kind of ruts that we get in, and the ways we think about things are pathways through processing.
And it can really help to reset by.
I heard one person say that it's almost like a if your neurological pathways are like sledding down a hill, you get those paths really worn in the snow, and psilocybin can kind of be like a fresh coat of snow where you have now the opportunity to make new paths.
I always recommend people, as we forage in the woods and as they interact with these things medicinally or they interact with them in cases like this, to really hold the mushroom in reverence and as a relationship.
Alright, I have a few very quick questions.
Great.
Your favorite edible mushroom?
Oh the one closest to me.
I would say morels.
I should just go out and say morels.
Morels are phenomenal.
Which mushroom everybody should learn to identify would be the first one to learn.
I would say Chicken of the Woods was the first one that I learned to identify.
And Chicken of the Woods can grow from spring through fall.
So it has a long season, so you have a long time to find it.
And it is bright orange on top and either white or bright yellow underneath.
The lookalike has deep bladed gills, similar to the ones on oyster mushrooms or the portobello mushrooms that have those gills on the underside.
The chicken of the woods doesn't have that.
It has almost a smooth surface that looks like a used pin cushion.
It's called pores.
So if you look with a magnifying glass, you'll see little tiny dots.
And so if it doesn't have gills and it's bright orange, it doesn't look like your typical looking mushroom, but it grows like a shelf on the side of Dead Wood and it's big.
Sometimes you find five or fifteen pounds at once.
That's chicken of the woods.
Where do you see Catskill Fungi going five, ten years from now?
Is there a new project on the horizon?
What is your dream?
Yeah, I love this question.
I'm really glad you asked that.
I'm very happy to say, Mrav, that when I started this company, I had an idea about where I wanted to go.
And I'm so happy to say that I'm here now.
And it feels great.
And I'm so psyched that it has succeeded in this way.
It helps to support the environment.
That's a big part of what we do.
We want to make sure that whatever we're doing has a positive impact on the environment.
It supports the community, both in health but also education.
And we've gotten a lot of really great feedback from people from that.
And that continues to feel great.
One of the next things that we really hope to become is a broader place for people to come and learn about fungi.
We want to be continuously connecting with larger organizations in the cat skills and helping to create species surveys of the cat skills.
We're creating a cat skill fungi field guide for learning the mushrooms of the cat skills and really continuing to expand the knowledge of fungi and the cat skills is a big part of it.
As well as continuing our tours in Puerto Rico, we're going to be doing another tour in New Zealand coming up.
Wow.
Yeah, we're going to be doing further tours out while also becoming deeply entrenched in the community here.
I have to commend you for having your mission is educating the public about mushrooms.
I think it's so important.
It really is.
Thank you.
Before we go, what would be the best way for people to find you?
Best way is through the website.
Through the website.
Yep, catskill fungi.com.
And they can sign up for the newsletter for our Substack and learn more.
And they can find our extracts there and find our list of mushroom walks.
And we always love hearing from people.
So yeah, we'd love to know what you thought of this episode and then what you're hoping.
We really hope to be a community support.
So if there's something that you want to learn about, we want to teach it.
Fantastic.
Yeah.
Thank you so much, Mirab for the show.
I have to say, I really appreciate what you're putting together here because it's such a diverse population of people.
Yes.
They're speaking on so many different subjects, but all of which with the same common thread that is an important topic for all of us.
Yes.
And the interesting thing is all the people I interviewed, they love what they do.
Yeah, I saw that.
Yeah, it's amazing.
It's really good.
Yeah, that's a good thing.
Hopefully, if you're out there and you don't love what you do, you're inspired to find it because there's just through looking at your podcast, there are so many things that exist that you wouldn't even ever think to know that people make a living doing this.
I know.
Yeah, and trying to find more.
I know.
Yeah, that's amazing.
You love what you do too.
Look at you.
You had a passion for it.
I love it.
Absolutely.
How old were you when you were introduced to the I must have been like 30, 29.
No, I turned 30 in Ecuador.
So I was 28, 29.
I feel like that's late.
That's why whenever there's kids on the walks, I'm locked into them.
I am teaching them.
Everybody else is hearing me because that's who I'm talking to.
Because it's so important that kids get introduced to these things.
Yes.
In good ways.
Yes.
Yeah.
Fantastic.
All right, great seeing you.
Thank you.
Yeah, thank you, Muhammad.
Yeah, it's so great to see you again.
Yes.
If you'd like to learn more from John, join one of his mushroom works or check out his educational programs and mushroom extracts.
You'll find all his information on the show notes.
Thanks for listening.
And remember, sometimes the most interesting careers are the ones you've never heard about.
I'll see you next time on How Much Can I Make