with Yolanda Gonzalez & Jie Jin
Wednesday, October 7, 5:00 pm – 6:30 p.m EST / 2:00 – 3:30 p.m PST
Mushrooms are a wonderful crop to grow both in the city and on rural farms, and can be incorporated into many existing growing systems to offer healthy, nutritious, and medicinal food to people and community. This workshop will offer gardeners and farmers of all sizes insight into a wide range of growing methods for mushroom production with a focus on seasonal and outdoor cultivation. Anyone interested in learning more about mushroom cultivation techniques and starting a new small scale enterprise are welcome to attend. Prepare to get hands-on while learning the principles necessary to start incorporating mushrooms into your existing gardening and farming practices.
Presenter Bios
Jie Jin (she/her/hers) is a mushroom grower and founder of Curiouseed, an education studio that inspires nature awareness through playful, experimental, and hands-on experiences with fungi. Her work explores accessible mushroom cultivation techniques for community resilience and soil regeneration, and has offered her a unique pathway to reconnect with her Chinese heritage. Jie also founded Teaming with Fungi Meetup and created Intelligent Fungi, an exhibition and workshop series as part of Governors Island’s 2019 public season. She has taught workshops at Farm School NYC, Cornell Cooperative Extension, Brooklyn Botanical Garden, NYC Parks, GrowNYC, CUNY, Civic Art Labs, AgTechX, among others. Previously, Jie was a founding member of a national social enterprise with a decade of experience building and supporting social impact initiatives in areas of program design and operations.
Yolanda Gonzalez (she/her/hers) is an Urban Agriculture Specialist with Cornell Cooperative Extension. She holds a dual degree in Master of Science in Environmental and Community Land Planning from SUNY ESF and Master of Public Administration from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, as well as a Bachelor of Arts degree in Environmental Studies and Spanish Literature from SUNY Geneseo. Yolanda’s most recent experience as an Excelsior Fellow at the NYS Office of General Services in the Organizational and Workforce Development Unit has given her process improvement skills that will help urban growers maximize efficiency and profitability in limited spaces. Her background is mostly in small-scale production, working on a number of small farms in Maine, Pennsylvania, and Long Island.