Month: October 2020

Pikes Peak Mycological Society is please to welcome Olga Tzogas on October 21, 2020 for her presentation on:

The Love + Power of Medicinal Mushrooms

Together we navigate the complex web and ancient world of medicinal mushrooms.  Explore how they grow in nature then, how they nurture us in return.  Explore the deep history humans have with medicinal mushrooms and their power to heal and identify uses and ways to prepare them. We will demonstrate the vast options and diversity of properties within just a handful of selected varieties. The most common and popular we will look at & work with is the Reishi or Lingzhi mushroom, the legendary ‘Mushroom of Immortality.’  

Journey through other divine healers in the wild, the Turkey Tail mushroom, Lion’s Mane mushroom, and the common culinary mushroom, the Shiitake.  Learn about how each of these mushrooms exists in nature, how we can cultivate a working relationship with them in our health regimens and of course keep them sacred and wild where they deserve to remain.  Raising awareness of the growing market for these healers and what it means for us to do our part to grow our own, explore the ethics of this huge growing industry. 

Olga Tzogas, a native of Greece, created and operates Smugtown Mushrooms in Rochester, NY. Her journey with fungi and plants began over ten years ago.  She has been with these allies by foraging in both urban and wild settings, while developing skills to identify  food and medicine in both environments. 

Smugtown Mushrooms was established in 2011 based on a need for mushrooms and mushroom growing supplies, workshops, events and community-based science in  her local community. She is continuously learning and embracing the never-ending  potential of mushrooms and the wonderful world of fungi.

Olga teaches workshops throughout the world about wild mushroom identification, medicinal mushrooms, biology and mushroom cultivation. She was a core organizer for the Radical Mycology Convergence and the MycoSymbiotics Festival from 2015-17, and helped to establish the first ever New Moon Mycology Summit in 2018. Olga returns to her native country annually to offer mushroom- and plant-focused tours.

Wednesday, October 21, 2020

at 6:00 pm

Live on Youtube