December was a month of vigorous activity! We gathered at the farm for a wide range of events, grew our restaurant customer base, and produced record breaking (for us) amounts of mushrooms!
Our dinner on the farm curated by Chef Ria was an incredibly delicious evening! Mushrooms very prominently took the stage in every course! She’ll be coming back in June for another round! You won’t want to miss it!
The Luck Homeschool Collective visited for a morning of fungi and fun! They toured the farm and did an inoculation workshop with Bree using sterilized toilet paper rolls.
The Indian Ladder Farms Agricultural acts podcast was released! You can check it out here:
We hosted a lively Makers Market that included 4 vendors with locally crafted items from custom mushroom harvest knives, mushroom art, hanging crystal decorations, to homemade candles.
Our fresh farm grown oysters were featured in the promotional photos for MyForest Foods on their new website! MyBacon is a mycelium based food product grown and crafted right here in the capital region. Check out their photos and website here:
Our December NYPAC meeting was an eye opening introduction to psychedelics for pain management as presented by the Cluster Busters. Cluster Headaches are a debilitating affliction that affects thousands of people. They have discovered that LSD and Psilocybin are very effective treatments and are advocating for accessibility with us in New York.
Joe McKay, a retired FDNY member and 9/11 responder provides detailed accounts of his suffering and how psilocybin helped alleviate his pain. You can watch the entire meeting here:
We then met in a small group with some of the Troy City Council members to discuss passing a referendum to de-prioritize / decriminalize Psilocybin use in the city. They were so open to it that they offered their City Council Chambers as a venue for our next meeting on January 10th.
Our team finally got a chance to hit The People’s Pub in old Chatham to experience some of what they’ve been creating with our mushrooms! Chef Angus has mixed it up regularly and we caught an incredibly delicious pasta with our oysters marinated in a white wine sauce.
We will be expanding into the second floor of 333 2nd Ave in 2023, and with that move will come a full commercial kitchen and our prepared food production will be scaled up! The second Floor will be called Chanterelle, and our food product line will come out of Chanterelle’s Kitchen! We have been testing a variety of soup options to find a few that will be just right for us to produce. Along with a monthly soup, we’ll also be making small batches of mushroom dumplings and empanadas!
This Gift giving season brought many folks to the farm seeking unique local gifts for the fungi fiends in their lives! In addition to Mushroom Money Gift Certificates, Mushroom themed shirts, tapestries, games, and woolcraft, we also sent happy guests away with gorgeous mixed mushroom packs!
Larry from the Collar City Mushrooms East Chatham Extension has been a critical presence for us the last few months. He started out buying a few ready to fruit blocks and growing them on his own moved to connecting us to new customers, then started delivering our fresh mushrooms, and now he’s lending a hand on our farm! Thanks so much for all you do Larry!
The Second Sunday Poetry and Prose Open Mic continues to gather writers of all ages and abilities for a relaxing afternoon amongst the mushrooms.
We were visited by a few more fungi friends from afar! Here’s John from Catskill Fungi.
And Sam from Mindfull Mycology.
https://www.mindfullmycology.com/
We couldn’t do all that we do without the help and support of our mushroom circle. Corinne and Dave hosted a Collar City Mushrooms friends and family party at their beautiful home in Lansingburgh to celebrate our accomplishments throughout 2022. We are so grateful for their friendship, inspirations, and hands on approach to making Collar City Mushrooms happen!
We played a few mushroom games that we have come across in our journeys! The Shrooms game was a Kickstarter project that was created in the last couple years! We will have a very limited quantity of this exclusive first printing. Only 132 were made! Stay tuned for their arrival!
Our Chanterelle’s Kitchen December Soup and Bread Boule Collaboration with Ovenbird Baking was incredibly delicious. Chef Dave really knocked that mushroom bacon and roasted chestnut topping out of the park!
During our Winter Solstice Meditation Oliver lead us in an embodied Cacao Journey and then Jess walked us through an extended visualization adventure after lifting us with a song based on Thich Nhat Han’s Poem “Call me by my True Names.”
We completed 2 book projects that will be available for purchase at the farm in 2023:
A Pioppino for Santino. A short children’s book featuring some of the young learners that have been spending time at the farm.
And: Amongst the Mushrooms. A collection of mushroom poems and pictures.
The New Years celebration at the Rustic Barn in Spiegeltown featured our mushrooms in a mushroom Bourguignon dish
For our next Book club book we’ll be reading Peter McCoy’s latest book: The Mycocultural Revolution. (Our next meeting is January 19th at 7pm following our soup pop up!
Photographer Carol Bell has been purchasing our mushroom blocks and taking incredible pictures of them! We hope to feature these on our walls some day soon! You can follow her on instagram @carolbellphoto
COMING SOON:
Restaurants that will be serving new dishes with our mushrooms:
Difamiglia has been turning our oysters and shiitake into vegan wings for quite some time now, his next culinary creation is going to be a vegan mushroom parm using lion’s mane! We tested the prototype and it was incredible!
Street Taco VII on 4th St in Troy will be turning our mushrooms into their vegan selections:
The Rustic barn enjoyed working with our mushrooms for their NYE celebration so much that they will be putting a new item or two on their menu as well! Stay tuned for details.
Defazios on 4th in Troy has been turning our kings and black pearls into their vegan Bolognese sauce, and now Rocco is looking at putting some vegan lion cakes permanently on their menu! Stay Tuned for details.
January Events at the farm:
Plus a recently added Wednesday Card Game event with a live DJ:
And a sound journey meditation featuring DIvinely Guided Wellness
All of our dinner dates and chefs are lined up through June (except April… if you are interested, let us know! Dates and time subject to change)
Our January Dinner is already half sold! Buy your tickets now!
We are finally in a position where we can show significant growth and revenue and will be moving to purchase the building within the first 2 quarters of 2023! With that, we will start promoting our Phase 2 fundraiser again, check it out here and get in on the excitement with our exclusive reward tiers for donors!
Psilocybin corner: NYPAC News
We have drafted a press release that will be distributed to various media early next year to make a wider audience of people aware of the work we are doing to create a future with accessible psilocybin.
Our Jan 10th meeting will be held at Troy City Hall, 433 River Street, in the City Council Chambers featuring a law enforcement roundtable.
We are planning a press conference at the capital to announce our partnerships and successes so far.
We will be hosting a virtual lawmaker roundtable on January 26th to promote the bills by Linda Rosenthal and Pat Burke that have been proposed in the assembly.
Other upcoming NYPAC Meetings
NPR did a piece on psilocybin use! You can listen in here:
Further Down the Line
We are collaborating with the Rosendale Theater and other fans of fungi in the Hudson Valley area to curate a mushroom themed festival on June 17th, 2023 that will include a feature film, short films, fungi poetry reading, a cooking demo and a variety of panels and mushroom walks. Stay tuned for more details.
Avery will be speaking at Troy’s Cornell Cooperative Spring Garden Day in March.
Avery will be teaching two courses through the Hudson Valley Community College’s Continuing Education Program in the spring. A repeat of the 4 session course taught in the fall, and a cooking with mushrooms immersive class! Stay tuned for more information. Spring Classes aren’t posted yet
Spring classes aren’t posted yet, but when they are you’ll be able to register for here:
https://www.hvcc.edu/programs/community-education/schedules/index.html
We’ll be vending during Farming Man at Indian Ladder Farms again on July 15th.
Thank you from all of us at Collar City Mushrooms for following along and contributing to our story! We look forward to seeing you in 2023!
Collar City Mushrooms 