Free live workshop · From the founders of a working mushroom farm in Marshall, North Carolina
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Free to attend. No card needed.
Chris and Katherine Parker, on the farm in Marshall, North Carolina.
This is the whole idea, in one photograph: somebody with 35 years behind their eyes, looking at the grow with you and naming what he sees.
The workshop runs 90 minutes, and then the call is yours. Three worth bringing:
01
What did Chris do to more than double a wild lobster-mushroom patch, and what does that say about what’s possible on your own land?
02
Why are the slow first weeks colonization and not failure, and how do you tell the difference while it’s happening to you?
03
How do you start without a lab, and which of the buildings and byproducts you already own actually count?
Free to attend. No card needed.
A workshop group on the farm. The room you’d be joining on the 30th is this one, on Zoom.
Chris Parker. Thirty-five years of growing, on a working farm in Marshall, North Carolina.
Katherine Parker, PhD. Chris tends the grow. Katherine tends the grower.
You’ve watched people lie about mushrooms for years. So this page won’t ask for your trust; it will show you where to look.
The Mycelial Healer, Christopher Parker and Katherine Parker, PhD. Chelsea Green.
“I had read Paul Stamets’ books on mushroom cultivation, but it wasn’t until I physically worked alongside Chris and Katherine, ‘the mushroom masters’, that the information truly took root.”
Chuck Hunner
“It’s a lot easier to ask someone who’s had that experience directly, as opposed to searching the internet.”
Pete, farmer, Ashe County, NC
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Free to attend · no card needed · live Q&A with the founders
On September 23, Chris and Katherine Parker, PhD, the research psychologist who co-wrote the book, teach mushroom cultivation live for 90 minutes and answer your questions on the call.
Chris has spent 35 years turning sawdust, straw, and slash-pile logs into food and medicine, on a budget that doesn’t need a lab.
If you’ve tried before, you know the part nobody warns you about. Not the failure itself.
The silence after it.
The jar goes wrong, and you’re left refreshing a forum thread late at night, comparing your grey fuzz to somebody else’s photo, guessing.
Did anyone ever look at your grow with you?
Not a thread. Not a video.
A person, with decades of pattern behind their eyes, looking at your jar and telling you what it’s telling you.
For many growers who quit, information was never the shortage.
You could find ten videos on inoculation tonight.
What you could not find was someone who would look at what went wrong in yours and name it.
He and Katherine teach the cycle live, and then they take your questions: your barn, your basement, your jar. At a recent session they were answering attendees’ situations by name: their barns, their basements, their woodlots.
That is the whole reason this is live, and not another video.
None of that is starting from zero. It’s continuing something you already started.
And if what you’re after is easy and fast: the internet is full of people selling that. It is not fast. It is real.
There’s a corner of a barn or a shed you keep walking past, and you still don’t know whether mushrooms would pay for themselves in it.
You make your own medicine, except the mushroom part. That you still buy from someone else.
There are spore prints in a drawer at your house, and another season is about to pass them by.
When Chris Parker, a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, went looking for how to grow mushrooms, the available knowledge was two library books, and half of what was in them was wrong.
He learned the way you learn when there’s nobody to ask: grow, fail, watch closely, grow again. Thirty-five years of that became a commercial farm in Marshall, North Carolina, and a library of mushroom cultures adapted to the mountains it sits in.
It has not been a gentle 35 years. In 2018, a flood took a decade of his work in a matter of hours. And recently, a contamination still cost thousands of dollars in substrate and a month of vigilance.
Those failures are on this page on purpose. If you’ve stopped believing anyone in this space, the people who only ever show you the harvest are a large part of why.
Katherine Parker, PhD, is the other half of why the teaching works.
A research psychologist with 15 years of designing curricula, she works on the part of growing that happens in the grower: the slow early stretch where nothing visible is happening and every instinct says quit. Chris tends the grow. Katherine tends the grower.
Together they wrote The Mycelial Healer, published by Chelsea Green.
A working commercial farm in Marshall, North Carolina. Not a studio set.
35 years of cultivation, failures included: the 2018 flood, the contamination that cost thousands.
A wild lobster-mushroom patch Chris has more than doubled over six years, by changing how he harvests it.
A book, The Mycelial Healer, with a real publisher: Chelsea Green.
A culture library adapted to the Southern Appalachians, built over decades.
Live Q&A that’s on the record: real attendees, answered by name, about their own situations.
Yes. Attending costs nothing and there’s no card to enter. You give us your name and email, and your Zoom link comes straight to your inbox.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026, at 6:00 PM ET. Ninety minutes, live, both founders teaching, your questions answered on the call. Free to attend. Thirty-five years of growing on one side of the screen; a chair for you on the other.
There will be another workshop in a month; there always is. But the session where you can put your own jar in front of them is the one you’re in the room for. Not beginning. Continuing something you already started.