Episode 1: Liquid Culture (with Caine Barlow)
Liquid Culture, or LC, is a cheaper and faster way to grow mushrooms than spore syringes. Plus, it's an easy way to introduce mycelium to grain in bulk, it makes for great storage of fungi cultures, and it allows you to share or trade mycelium with friends and family. In this episode, you'll learn how to prepare liquid culture, how to make a magnetic stirrer, how to make airport lids, care and maintenance of your LC, and more. 

Episode 2: Grain Spawn (with Caine Barlow)
Grain spawn for mycologists is kind of like meatballs for grandmas. Everyone has a recipe—and there's a lot of strong feelings about the best one. But what actually are the best ingredients for growing your mushrooms? In this episode, we don't tell you: we empower you to make your own choice and to play around until you find what works best. We cover rye berries, wheat berries, millet, sorghum, corn, wild bird seed, and wood chips (for wood-loving species). We also cover different kinds of spawn containers (glass jars vs. polypropylene bags), and how to take care of your grain spawn to avoid contamination and mold. 

Episode 3: Fruiting Chambers (with Darren Springer)
Your fruiting chamber is your home for your mushrooms. Like grain spawns, there's many different kinds—and they all have pros and cons, depending on whether your priority is ease, cost, growing in bulk, or something else. In this episode, Darren Springer covers the difference between the shotgun fruiting chamber and the monotub, and how to make both. He also reviews Martha's Closet, a more advanced tek, and why you might opt for that once you graduate to the next level of growing.

Episode 4: Designing Bulk Substrates (with Darren Springer)
There's also many different recipes for bulk substrates—or the final medium (like soil) that your mushrooms grow in before they're ready for harvest. We always get a lot of questions about this step in our 101 course. Folks read online that it's good to add manure, coffee, and other ingredients. In this episode, we'll help you navigate the complicated world of substrate ingredients and brands including coir, manure (horse, cow, chicken and more), straw, and worm castings. 

Episode 5: Spore Prints, Agar, and Maintaining Culture Libraries (with Dr. K Mandrake)
In the final episode, we’ll cover how to keep your mushroom cultures going for years to come. Although we’ve experimented with a variety of different species, we still have original culture lines from our first syringes over 10 years ago. Through making spore prints and cloning on agar, you can keep sources of spores available for whenever you need them, as well as isolate the genetics of interesting wild, store-bought, or home-grown species. You'll end the class knowing how to take a spore print, how to make a spore syringe, agar recipes and how to make plates, how to isolate clean healthy cultures (even when your spores might have contamination), how to clone mushrooms to preserve genetics indefinitely, and tips for building a culture library, including long-term storage techniques.