Chicago Mushroom Club

Hope to see you all this year ❤️

Hey Chicago Mushroom friends! We hope you are defrosting as happily as we are.
We apologize if we’ve been hard to reach over the winter; we’ve been focused on learning to care for a small human and fighting for vitamin d.

We figured it was best to drop our entire schedule all at once this year.
We have plenty of other events in the works for this year, but this is our baseline schedule.

Stay tuned for unlisted events and details for our Minneapolis foray.
If you have any questions about specific events, just shoot us a DM.

We hope to see you (again)!!!

Saturday 4/4-
10:30 West Ridge Nature Preserve
Sunday 4/26-
11:00 Wooded Island in Jackson Park (meet at northern bridge)
Monday 5/4-
3pm Humboldt Park (meet at the Fieldhouse)
Saturday 5/16-
2pm Glenview Woods
Saturday 5/23-
Minneapolis Morels (w/ Mushroom Block)
Sunday 6/28-
10:30 West Ridge Nature Preserve (no venturing off path)
Saturday 7/11-
10am Marquette Park
(meet at northeast corner of the lagoon)
Sunday 7/19-
1pm Lincoln Square Ice Cream Social and walk starting at Vaca’s Creamery
Friday 8/7-
3pm North Park Walking Stick
Woods (meet at Peterson Park Fieldhouse)
Saturday 8/22-
10am Humboldt Park
(meet at the Fieldhouse)
Sunday 9/6-
11am Puffball Walk @ Wooded Island at Jackson Park
(meet at northern bridge)
Saturday September 26th-
2pm Bohemian National Cemetery (meet at main building)
Saturday 10/3-
10:30 West Ridge Nature Park
Monday 10/12-
2pm Lincoln Park North Pond (NE corner of Stockton and Fullerton)

(Additional info in comments 🍄)

Join the Chicago Council on Science and Technology on Tuesday, October 29th, from 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM for the second annual Twilight Nature Fest at Rosehill Cemetery, an evening of nature exploration under the autumn twilight.

Come learn about the diverse plants and wildlife that call this space home and discover how ecosystems adapt and flourish amidst city life. This special event will feature guided nighttime walks led by experts from theIllinois Audubon Society, The Insect Asylum, the West Ridge Nature Park Advisory Council, and the Chicago Mushroom Club, offering a unique opportunity to explore the and of this historic cemetery after dark.

While we’re still finding cold weather Coprinoids, we’re moving things indoors this month 🥶.

We’re so psyched to announce the first round of many future collaboration with !
12/7-11am @ Budlong Branch - Family Cultivation Workshop
12/12-6pm @ Little Village Branch - Spanish/English Cultivation Workshop
12/14-3pm @ Independence Branch - Mushroom Ornament Decorating

We’re also about to announce a spring exhibition with our lovely friends - ! We’ll be putting out an open call in a couple of weeks, get those fungal art ideas percolating!

For those of you that supported the Mead Got Hit By A Car! Sale, we love and appreciate you so much! All purchases are made to order, we’ll be shipping them out as soon as they’re cured and ready. 💕🍄✨

Due to a printer falling through, we have to delay our zine shipping date until Wednesday 08/21/24. We’re so grateful for your interest and your orders, we can’t wait to get them to you!

We will be co-hosting a fundraising/zine release party with and Friday 08/23 from 5-9!

Undisclosed Location (Logan Square)
We will email you the location of the party after purchase of a ticket.

Vendors
DJ
Fashion Show
Infused Wellness Happy Hour
CMC Fungarium
Zine Release
Free Samples

We’re aiming for a fun end of summer event for the community; creating awareness around mushrooms as medicine, community science, and safer alternatives to alcohol.

This recent rain has really ramped up the season!
Join us in July and August for forays, workshops and community building.

We’re so excited and grateful for more collaborations with some wonderful Chicagoans. We’re proud to be a part of this community and hope you’ll join us.
Check out our website for more specific details regarding each meetup. As always, free of charge and family friendly.

We’ve got a lot of fun stuff in the works for y’all so keep your eyes peeled as certain events will have limited space and fill up quick.

Love y’all.

We’ll be taking two groups of 30 on a tour of a commercial mushroom growing facility. have generously donated their time to teach us all a bit about gourmet mushroom cultivation! We’re so excited and grateful for this opportunity.

As space is limited please “purchase” a free ticket on our website in order to reserve your spot.

chicagomushrooms.org/store

Looking forward to seeing you!

See y’all on Saturday! We’re excited to show you our new merch and chat about the future of our club.

Dylan’s appendix has to be removed tonight or tomorrow, so our 05/25 Humboldt Park outing is cancelled. “Sorry guys!”-dyl’s appendix 😅😅😅😅😅😅😅😅

Prosthemium neobetulinum (formerly Asterosporium betulinum)

This strange black fungus can be found growing all over Chicago. It grows on river birch trees (Betula nigra). We’ve found it on MOST of the broken river birch branches we’ve scooped off the ground. It’s usually growing right where the branch snapped, and doesn’t seem to grow much further up the branch.

Oddly, this fungus hasn’t been collected in the United States since the 1930s. We have a collection from Graceland Cemetery being DNA sequenced to confirm the ID for our collections.

It seems plain to the naked eye, but has an insane micro-morphology. The conidia (asexual spores) are stellate, or, star shaped. The 4-pronged conidia are fairly unique and very photogenic. We’ve observed the conidia to soak up lactophenol cotton blue, staining the tips of the prongs.

Our friend was kind enough to lend us his nice microscope and micrography setup for the summer. That’s where we got these cool pics!

The sexual form of this fungus has never been observed. So, it either always reproduces asexually, has an unknown morph, or, the sexual morph is already known but the relationship between the two (one) has never been noted.

Regardless, it’s one of the cooler fungi we’ve found in Chicago and shows that sometimes a closer look can unveil a long-hidden message from the mushroom world.

Comment on this post if you’d be interested in a beginners fungal microscopy workshop!
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Hey y’all, we’re planning on another zine release. We’d love to see what you have to say/create! Fungi are inspiring to us in so many ways, we want to see how they inspire you. Submissions can be anything-as long as we can print it! Email your submissions to us at [email protected] by Monday, June 3rd ❤️🍄

(Please feel free to share any fungal inspired music, dance, or performance on our discord. We can’t publish it in a zine, but our members still want to see it!)

Not something we’re super excited to post, but we need some help.

Our website is down and we can’t afford to get it back up. We need $100 for the next two months of hosting.

We intend to always keep our outings free to the public, but we are both low-income workers, so the costs can add up. Dylan and Mead both recently took pay-cuts to prioritize mental health and CMC.

If you are able, please donate whatever you can to our Venmo in our bio.site, it would be greatly appreciated and will contribute to CMCs longevity.

Thanks in advance, we love you all!!
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