Our March Mushroom Experience Dinner Featuring Chef Riany Mena was a delicious evening! The Clear Mountain Room was full of happy diners and lots of mushrooms! Our new Mushroom Table Centerpieces were a huge hit! We’re thinking about constructing a few to sell in the future!
Chef Riany was interviewed by Suzie Davidson Powell for her culinary magazine The Dishing. Read the entire piece here.
Our Mushroom book club was on hiatus for a while as we moved our operation and got everything up and running. We finally had our first meeting since 2024, and it was so great to sit around and talk mushrooms, books, writing, and inclusivity. Author and NYS mycologist Patty Ononiwu Kaishian attended and joined in the discussion about her book Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature.
Patty and her partner Fortune then took a trip over to our farm operation and took a little tour! It was such a pleasure to host them.
The Schenectady Rise HIgh Program connects interested learners to concrete hands on experiences in science technology engineering and math. Mushroom farming includes a bit of all three components (plus art!). The 7th graders visited our farm for the second year in a row and took home some blue oyster toilet paper roll grow kits.
Avery has joined the New York Farm Bureau Organic, Food Safety, and Markets committee. This group includes farmers of all types from across New York. This committee will be discussing New York policies that may impact the ways New York farmers conduct business.
You don’t need to be a farmer to join the Farm Bureau. The New York Farm Bureau is a member supported organization that works with lawmakers to promote farmer needs and concerns.
Spring is logs and dowel time! We do make dowel spawn by request, it is not something we consistently carry, but for customers who want to support local businesses and have planned ahead, it is very easy for us to sterilize and inoculate wooden dowels for log use. We can always supply sawdust spawn for the strains we grow. Brian from Rudy Stempel’s family Sawmill in East Berne cut a few hophorn beam trees and oak trees for our own mushroom growing purposes. After they’ve “rested” for a couple weeks we’ll be inoculating them with Shiitake, Chicken of the Woods, and Brick Cap spawn.
We introduced several new products this month. Our enoki extracts hit the shelves (details in March’s newsletter). We made a new enoki nettle tea. And LH Buttons produced some amazing buttons and magnets for us! Available in the Corner Spore as well as at our market vending locations.
We made a lot of progress towards building out our next grow container. Mr Bluseky will double as storage as well as grow space. Constructing while it is already partially full hasn’t been easy, but it should be fully operational soon!
This year we will be doing more mushroom education programs. Including a class on the wild fungi of Indian Ladder Farms. Over the last year we have been documenting all the mushrooms we’ve found and we’re putting together a place specific class on these fungi and how they interact with the environment and whether they are edible! Here are a few slides we’ve created so far! They do include mushrooms we cultivate as well! You can see them all if you take a few minutes at the Corner Spore.
Many people ask us about finding morels. With the season of these elusive curious mushrooms approaching, we would love to share Adam Harington’s Lear your Land site. Here’s his page dedicated specifically to morels, including a video on understanding the environments where morels often thrive. He posted a fantastic collage of tree photos that often grow relationships with morels. Want to know morels? Learn your trees!
We finished planning for Foraged New York 2026. This will be our 5th year of the wild food festival and we’ve spread it further beyond the Capital Region while expanding into a few more local restaurant tendrils as well. Confirmed tendrils for this year so far are Hamlet and Ghost and Saratoga Winery, Ninepin, Scarlet Knife, Pizzeria Mari, Night Hawks, Arthur’s Market. With workshops, walks, and dinners in Syracuse, Big Indian, Kingston, and Leeds!
Get tickets for walks, talks, workshops, and our Foraged Dinner featuring Chef Matt Olley on our Foraged New York page!
Our games, Myceliate and Find the Fungi have gotten updates! New copies should arrive in early June. Now includes mycelium tokens to cover the consumed primordia in Myceliate and the card backs for Find the Fungi have been edited with new information.
Growing or foraging the ingredients for our salts, teas, powders, and food products has always been one of our goals! Now that we have access to much more outside space we can finally make that happen! This year we will be installing an herb and vegetable garden to grow our own produce!
We worked out some details for a few experiments with Cornell Cooperative Extension. We’ll be using Black Walnut Shells and Apple Pomace as substrate additives to check the viability of using these agricultural byproducts as food for mushrooms!
There’s still time to sign your budding young mycologist up for Indian Ladder Farms’ barn school program. Avery is teaching two programs this summer. A beginner class for 1st through 4th grade. And a more advanced course for 4th through 8th grade.
The first festival at Indian Ladder Farms is always a celebration of all things maple! Maplefest brings people out to shake off the winter doldrums and lights the spark for spring! We made a big batch of our seasonal maple jerky and served up maple BBQ pulled mushroom sliders!
We just can’t get enough of enoki! This NY Times inspired crispy tofu salad was topped by roasted clusters of enoki to add another layer of texture and taste! So delicious!
PSILOCYBIN CORNER
Our March NYMHA meeting was not recorded; it was a short gathering that focused on a few projections for 2026 and ways to redesign our website. Our April meeting will be in person at the Corner Spore as well as virtual through zoom. We’ll be planning for our May Capitol Educational Showcase and discussing next steps forward for creating access in New York.
We will also talk about our need for NYMHA board members! Corinne had to step down as secretary so we are looking for a highly motivated, organized, excellent communicator to replace her! We also need one more Board Member to ensure our discussions are balanced! If you are interested in joining our leadership Board, email Avery HERE. We only meet once or twice a year (through zoom) all other votes / discussion happen through email.
The Northeast Alliance for Psychedelic Access group included advocates from Rhode Island and Pennsylvania for the first time! We continued to talk about ways to share resources and are working to create a contact list for lawmakers across the northeast that are interested in connecting over this issue and looking to get more information.
The NYMHA.com research page is coming along and should be ready to share soon.
The Psychedelic Society of Western New York is hosting an educational showcase event in Rochester in April! There will be a live panel of experts and discussion. Get more information and register HERE.
Our New York Mushroom Farmers Alliance has expanded to a few more farms. As conversations about access to this specialty crop of mushrooms expands, it is critical that the voices of farmers stay involved.
COMING SOON
New Yorkers for Mental Health Alternatives Monthly Meeting, Tuesday, April 14th 7pm – 8pm. This monthly meeting we’ll be returning to a combination of in person and on zoom. We’ll flesh out our next Capitol Educational Showcase and lobby day. We’ll talk about our plea for volunteers.
Join remotely via zoom here:
RETURN of the Mushroom Book Club Thursday, April 16th, 6:30 – 7:30pm. We’ll be meeting at the Indian Ladder Farms Tasting Room (or maybe the Store so we can more easily talk) to discuss ‘Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature’ by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian. We’ll discuss pages 91- the end. We’ll also talk about our next book (possibly one Patty suggested in March)
Mushroom Experience Dinner Featuring Chef Ric Orlando, Friday, April 17th, 6pm – 8pm. Tickets on sale starting March 18th. Dinner will be served in the Clear Mountain Room at Indian Ladder Farms. See EVENTBRITE for details.
Ric Orlando is an award-winning American chef, restaurateur, author, and culinary storyteller known for his bold, globally inspired approach to food. With a career spanning more than three decades, Orlando has built a national reputation for blending Mediterranean, Latin, and Middle Eastern influences with seasonal American cooking, always grounded in culture, generosity, and flavor. With multiple BEST CHEF and BEST RESTAURANT awards in NY’s Hudson Valley and Capital Region, Ric is known as the OG of Upstate Chefs.
Orlando is best known for pioneering restaurants New World Home Cooking Co. (Woodstock-Saugerties, NY) and New World Bistro Bar (Albany, NY) and for his dynamic presence on television, including victories on Beat Bobby Flay and Chopped. He is also a regular guest on WAMC-Northeast Public Radio and appears on many regional podcasts. His work beyond restaurants includes a webstore (https://tastemakermarket.com), consulting, cooking classes, pop-ups, cultural travel experiences, and the authoring of We Want Clean Food, a companion to the 2003 PBS Series Ric Orlando’s TV Kitchen. Equally central to his career is a deep commitment to community. Orlando is currently president of the Good Neighbor Food Pantry in Woodstock, NY, where he supports food access initiatives and community-driven efforts to address food insecurity in the Hudson Valley. This work reflects a core belief that food is not only nourishment, but connection, dignity, and care.
Today, Ric Orlando continues to shape contemporary American dining through media, mentorship, and advocacy and developing new hospitality concepts like Accord Social (coming summer ‘26), —using food as a cultural way to bring people together at the table and beyond.
Contact Matouks@gmail.com +1 845.417.4503
Visit https://ricorlando.com for recipes, commentary, info on Sicily, Puglia and Heart of Italy tours, Ric’s hand made product line of award winning Hot and BBQ sauces, global seasonings, 5 ingredient tomato sauces and exclusive Sicilian olive oil and pasta.
Ric Orlando is on Facebook, Tiktok, Instagram, YouTube, and Substack at chefricorlando
Mushroom Cultivation Course through Cornell Cooperative Extension, Sunday, April 19 1pm – 3pm. This course will include a brief tour of our mushroom farm and an outdoor grow space. Workshop will be in the Beer Garden outside of the ILFCB tasting room. FREE, but registration is required:
Poetry on the Farm, Sunday, April 26th, 3pm – 4pm. This monthly poetry series will reoccur on the 4th Sunday of every month the Tasting Room is open. Come early for food and drinks! (ILFCB is hosting a Sunday vinyl brunch for the first few months of operation that ends at 3pm) Bring a poem or two to share or just come to listen. Free.
FORAGED NEW YORK 2026 Saturday, May 2 through Sunday May 10. This will be year 5 of bringing wild crafted ingredients to the Capital Region and Beyond. We’ll have a host of restaurant partners, a variety of foray walks, and a workshop or two! To register for walks, talks, and other activities see our website FORAGED NEW YORK . Wild Hudson Valley, The GIving Trees, Soulfire Farm, Catskill Fungi, and Spore to Fork are all doing foraged activities around New York as well (see our website for details)
Foraged New York has also expanded outside the Capital Region! There are so many wild crafters all across New York independently wandering the wilds and gathering tasty ingredients to add to their meal planning, health and wellness routines, and craft and tool construction. For year 5 of our festival we want to showcase the network of knowledgeable gatherers exploring their local habitats. This year we are joined by experts in the Catskill Region and Central New York who will be hosting walks or talks and coordinating with restaurants to serve up some of New York’s non-cultivated edibles!
A Mushroom Experience Dinner: FORAGED EDITION featuring Chef Matt Olley, Saturday, May 9th, Indian Ladder Farms Apple Barn. Tickets on sale soon. (Starting 4/9). Menu coming soon.
A Mushroom Experience Dinner at the Adirondack Experience Museum featuring Chef Matt Olley, Friday, August 21st, ADKx Museum. Details coming soon.
A Mushroom Festival at the Clifton Park-Halfmoon Library, September 11 – 12, dates and times still to be finalized. This celebration of all things fungi will feature book talks, film screenings, workshops, and foray walks! Mark your calendars now! Stay tuned for details
Collar City Mushrooms 