Root down. Reconnect with your ancestors, your body, and your belonging.
F
Footing & Remember
We built our curriculum around 5 powerful keys—each one rooted in regenerative, relational, and reciprocal ways of being.
U
Understanding & Responsibility
Learn to walk the land with reverence. Be a collaborator, not a taker.
N
Nurturing & Reciprocity
Practice sacred exchange with forest, fungi, and community.
G
Growing & Regeneration
Work with natural cycles to heal ecosystems, bodies, and spirits.
I
Interdependence & Relating
You’re not alone. You are the forest. We grow stronger together.
**When you live these keys, you step into Wild Co-Tending**a sacred collaboration with the forest and your own becoming.
“The Forest Farmacy” reflects a simple truth:
The forest offers food and medicine—but only when we engage it with reverence, responsibility, and reciprocity.
Grow something that grows you back
Grapevine Road
Marshall, NC, USA
Cherokee Homeland
© 2025 Design and Developed by Ezycourse
We teach more than technique—we inspire belonging.
Hands and feet in the Soil. Heart in the Sacred.
“I came to learn about mushrooms, but what I found was healing. The forest, the fungi, the community—it all brought me back to myself.”
—Rose R.
At The Forest Farmacy: A School of Applied Eco-Mycology, we believe mushrooms grow more than food—they grow community, resilience, and meaning.
Rooted in a working farm on Cherokee homeland, we teach people to grow mushrooms, tend forests, and reclaim their role as active stewards in the living world.
Whether you’re adding mushrooms to an existing farm, pivoting toward a regenerative livelihood, or beginning your journey as a forest guide, you’re in the right place.
Too many people feel disconnected—from the Earth, from each other, from the unique medicine we each carry. The modern world isolates us. But the forest doesn’t forget.
Here in the Southern Appalachians, these forests were once abundant gardens—carefully tended by Indigenous peoples for countless generations, providing all their food, medicine, and functional materials. Colonization damaged these relationships, attempting to replace them with extractive systems and erasing the truth with the ‘pristine wilderness’ myth. But we didn’t forget.
We’ve seen how powerful it is to reconnect with land-based wisdom, ancestral practices, and the quiet intelligence of fungi.
Our programs are rooted in relationship—not just information. This isn’t about academic theory. It’s about hands-on, heart-open learning that feeds your soul as much as the soil.
We are working, with many others, towards food sovereignty—the ability to feed ourselves and our communities without dependence on fragile, profit-driven, extractive systems. We know these forests can once again sustain whole communities, human and more-than-human, for generations to come—and we’re training the people who will make that vision real.
Christopher Parker, a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, is a Culture Keeper—maintaining fungal culture libraries, seed and spore banks, and the living knowledge of how to use fungi to regenerate forests and feed people. He brings decades of hands-on experience in mushroom cultivation, forest tending practices, and regenerative design. He’s the grounded Appalachian soul of this place.
Katherine, a Ph.D. eco-psychologist and ancestral practitioner, holds the sacred and the systemic. She brings the depth, safety, and structure that transforms learning into healing.
Together, we’ve built a farm in the mountains of Western North Carolina and an online school for people who want to walk a different path—one that’s ancient, alive, and wildly fulfilling.
This isn’t passive foraging or extractive agriculture.
It is reciprocal cultivation – wild co-tending – a sacred relationship between people and place, rooted in mutual care, where cultivating the forest also means feeding future generations.