FFSC Events Archive

This very special local foray includes a one-way steam train ride in the Redwoods and Oak forest of Bear Mountain at the Roaring Camp Railroad in Felton. The train will leave us at the top to hunt on the private property of the Roaring Camp forest. Mycologists and science advisors will be on hand to lead the foray. Bring the family for a fun day of steam trains, hiking, mushrooming and food!

After a 1.5 - 2 hour foray we will walk back down and gather for a reception of hot mushroom soup and hors d'oeuvres to follow. BYO Beer/Wine/beverage of choice for the festivities! Food served will include Winter Mushroom Soup with Aldo's Artisan Sourdough Breads, Fruit and Cheese platters, passed appetizers, coffee & tea.

When:  Saturday February 17, 2018

Arrive: 12 noon  

Train Departure:  12:30 pm  

Arrive at Bear Mt.:  1:00 pm

Arrive promptly, as the drain departs as 12:30 pm sharp!

After foray: After walking back down (the easy part!), we will meet in the Bret Harte Hall.  Roaring Camp's Chef Antonio will have delicious soup and appetizers waiting for us.  Bring your own wine, beer  or beverage of choice.

Cost: $45.00 per Adult  

          $23.00 Children 12 and under

          Children under 2 free

You must be a member of the Fungus Federation of Santa Cruz to purchase tickets for this event.

We hope to see you there!

Visit our Albion Long Distance Forays page for details.

Our program will consist of four beginner-oriented, mini-presentations about how to recognize some common local mushrooms.

These presentations will be given by four of our own members who have volunteered to talk.

• Jeanne Gonda will tell us how to recognize and differentiate the different members of the Boletaceae family

• William Goss will tackle the tricky Agaricus genus

• Dan Tischler will cover the difficult Russula and Lactarius group

• Phil Carpenter will tell us how to keep from going to the hospital because you ate the wrong Amanita

These talks are not meant to be definitive but rather introductions to these groups of local mushrooms.

5:00 - 6:00 PM

Check in and gather in the Auditorium Douglas Smith will lead private tours. Douglas Smith has been involved in mycology for many years, looking for and photographing mushrooms on several continents. A constant figure in the Bay Area mycology scene; he is an expert in many fungus fairs and organized forays.

6:00 - 9:30 PM

• Chef Chad Hyatt presents the 7th Mushroom Dinner

• Wine pairings by Jeff Emery of Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard and Quinta Cruz.

• Music by George Heagerty & Never the Same

• Private tour of mushroom displays with Douglas Smith and without all the daytime crowd 5:00 – 6:00.

• Appetizers will be served.

WHERE: Room #3, Louden Nelson Community Center, 301 Center St, Santa Cruz, CA 95060

Cost: $120.00, Tax and Gratuity Included

Loch Lomond Recreation Area is hosting an interpretive foray led by a local mycology expert on January 6, 2018 from 11 AM-1 PM.

We will be hiking less than two miles and identifying fungi under the instruction of our own wizard Phil Carpenter. The park entry is FREE for the event and participants will have to sign waivers. The meeting location is Loch Lomond Recreation Area in the lower, lakeside parking lot. We are opening this event to the first 20 participants.

Heads up, art fans! The buzz about the Fungus Fair, food and art has extended to Artisan's Gallery on Pacific Avenue in downtown Santa Cruz. The event celebrates the start of of Culinary Mushroom Week January 5th – 14th 2018. A mushroom artist's work will be featured, accompanied by appetizers and wine. If you haven't attended First Friday, it's a fun night of gallery hopping, sipping and munching with friends. See you there!

For info about this event, visit the Holiday Potluck page.

Join us at the Santa Cruz Mycoflora Project's Wild Mushroom Foray this December for a full weekend of lectures, workshops, mushroom tasting, and of course, mushroom collecting! Here in the southern stronghold of Redwoods, mid-December has been the most consistently productive time for mushroom variety and abundance in recent years. A good mix of fall species should overlap with early-winter groups like waxy caps, contributing to outstanding diversity.

Our preliminary lineup is headed by the inimitable Tom Volk, and will be accompanied by a lineup of fungal luminaries including Steve Trudell (author of Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest). More speakers and educators will be added as confirmations come in, so stay tuned! Noah Siegel and Christian Schwarz will lead field trips and teach workshops covering tips and tricks for identifying California mushrooms, and for using Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast. Milton Tam will lead a build-your-own Oyster Mushroom cultivation kit workshop, and Chad Hyatt will give a mushroom cooking demonstration and tasting including some lesser-known delicious edible species.

Help us learn about the marvelous mushrooms of this spectacular bioregion – our findings will support the Santa Cruz Mycoflora Project, and we'll be using citizen science tools like iNaturalist to pair with our vouchered specimens for the UC Santa Cruz collections. Participants will no doubt find mushrooms that we've never documented for this area – every year, new species are added to the Santa Cruz County mycoflora.

On-site registration is $325 (includes lodging Thursday-Saturday night, meals from Thursday dinner through Sunday lunch, and all foray fees).

Off-site price is $200 (includes meals from Thursday dinner through Sunday lunch, and all foray fees).

This foray will almost certainly sell out, so make sure to register early!

Visit our Albion Long Distance Forays page for more info.

Fungal frenemies: How can roots tell good fungi from bad?

Nearly all land plants rely on fungi to help them extract nutrients from the soil. These mycorrhizal fungi need the plants, too, bringing nutrients to plant roots in exchange for carbon (sugars) from photosynthesis. But how can plants tell which fungi will really help them get nutrients, and which will be dead weight (or even parasites)? Laura’s work examines how plants and fungi choose their "friends," focusing on the ectomycorrhizal symbiosis. This mycorrhizal association is crucial for the nutrition of many temperate trees, and is the reason that porcini, chanterelles, and matsutake grace our forests in the winter. In this presentation, Laura will share some of her dissertation work, highlighting experiments that examine how plants and fungi negotiate their relationships. Her study fungi, Suillus brevipes and Thelephora terrestris, are common at her field sites in Point Reyes, and may be very different fungi from the perspectives of their plant hosts. How do plants and fungi decide who their symbiotic partners will be? Answering this question will lend insight into the evolution of mutualism itself, improve our understanding of forest ecology, and illuminate the details of carbon and nitrogen cycling through forested ecosystems.

Laura Bogar is a fifth year PhD student working with Kabir Peay at Stanford University. Originally from Seattle, she completed her bachelor's degree at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon in 2012. Her dissertation research is focused on the ectomycorrhizal symbiosis between land plants and soil fungi. Laura is interested in how ectomycorrhizal plants and fungi choose their symbiotic partners and negotiate their interactions, using genetics and physiology to understand small-scale mechanisms that can influence large-scale ecological processes.

The FFSC Culinary Committee is happy to announce a fungal feast to start off the new season. We’re planning a family-style dinner for FFSC members at Casa Nostra in Ben Lomond on Tuesday, November 14 at 7:00 pm. Get your reservations now before it fills up! Members can purchase guest tickets for the same price.

Pasquale, the chef, enjoys collecting wild mushrooms and knows just what to do with them. Dinner will include one glass of house wine or soft drink per person, tax and tip for a cost of $40.00 — check out the menu below. Additional beverages can be purchased, or you can bring your own for a corkage fee of $TBD. Our feast will be served family style, meaning that dishes will be brought out on platters and diners will serve themselves, rather than a "plated" meal in which diners must choose in advance.

Mushroom hunters!!

Bring in a specimen of any freshly picked wild, edible, mushroom to be on display on the evening of the event for a chance to win a free seat ($40 value)

Complexity, Simplicity and Convergence

A tour through the evolutionary history of the Basidiomycota

The Basidiomycota (i.e., the mushrooms, rusts, and smuts) provides many great examples of complex structures and behaviors that have been created through the evolutionary process. Equally impressive are the number of times these complex innovations have been simplified or reinvented by independent lineages. These latter processes lead to convergence – structures or behaviors that look similar but are not related through a common ancestor. This talk will cover a set of classic examples of these processes within each of the three main groups of the Basidiomycota.

Professor Tom Bruns received a PhD from the University of Michigan in Botany in 1987 where he worked on molecular systematics of Suillus. He went on to a postdoctoral position at the University of California Berkeley in 1987, and he joined the faculty there in 1989. His research is focused on fungal ecology and systematics and he has published over 150 scientific papers in this area.

He is probably best known for his development of tools for molecular ecology and for the application of these tools toward understanding ectomycorrhizal fungal communities. He is a recent past president of the Mycological Society of America, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the California Academy of Science, and the Mycological Society of America. He teaches introductory and advanced courses on fungi at Berkeley, and has won teaching awards from the College of Natural Resources and the Mycological Society of America for his efforts.