How To Grow & Forage Mushrooms

Watch Webinar with Special Guest Chris Gilmour

Enjoy Mushrooms in Abundance

At Grow Mushrooms Canada, our goal is to help people feel excited and confident about exploring mushrooms – whether that means growing them at home or learning to identify them in the wild. Recently, we hosted a free live webinar with mushroom educator and homesteader Chris Gilmour to share practical ways anyone can begin that journey.

If you’ve ever been curious about growing your own mushrooms for food or medicine, or learning how to safely forage wild edible mushrooms, this session is for you. In this relaxed and practical class, Chris and Jessica share lessons from over 20 years of experience growing, foraging, and working with mushrooms, and explore how they can support food security, soil health, and everyday self-reliance – whether you live in a city apartment or on rural land.

What You Will Learn

In this webinar, Chris covers:

How to grow mushrooms at home (indoors and outdoors) using simple, reliable methods
How mushrooms fit into forest and garden ecosystems
Foundations of safe wild mushroom identification
How mushrooms support food, medicine, and local resilience

Watch the full webinar above to learn the foundations of growing and foraging mushrooms. If you’d like to continue building your skills, scroll down for details about Chris’s full mushroom course.

Ready to Take the Next Step with Mushrooms?

If this webinar sparked your curiosity about growing or foraging mushrooms, Chris has created a comprehensive online course to help you continue the journey.

In the course, Chris guides students step-by-step through practical projects like growing mushrooms indoors, preparing shiitake logs, building wine cap garden beds, and developing strong wild mushroom identification skills. The program is designed to give you a clear pathway so you can move from curiosity to confidence.

Students also benefit from live question and answer sessions, guest expert presentations on specialized topics, and a supportive learning community where people share their projects, ask questions, and grow their knowledge together.

Whether you’re interested in producing your own food and medicine, deepening your understanding of fungi, or simply exploring a new hands-on skill, this course provides the structure and guidance to help you get started.

Learn more about his Mushroom Course here:

Meet Your Webinar Hosts

Jessica Snider

Biologist and founder of Grow Mushrooms Canada, Jessica’s love of mushrooms began while foraging chanterelles and other wild edibles in coastal forests. She has taught thousands of people how to safely identify and forage mushrooms through hands-on workshops.

Her curiosity later expanded into mushroom cultivation, growing shiitake on logs and selling them at farmers’ markets. In 2018 she founded Grow Mushrooms Canada to provide high-quality mushroom kits and spawn to Canadians who want to grow their own food and medicine.

Chris Gilmour

Chris is the founder of Chris Outdoors and Wild Muskoka Botanicals. For more than two decades he has been growing, foraging, and working with mushrooms as part of a land-based lifestyle.

Chris and his wife live on a small rural homestead where mushrooms are woven into everyday life, providing fresh food year-round and incorporating mushrooms into broths, teas, and natural remedies. His teaching style is practical, grounded, and deeply connected to the ecology of the land.

Ready to Dive In?

Register for Chris’s online class today and discover how easy it is to create an abundance of nutritious, delicious mushrooms in your own home, garden and acreage.