Garden Club Presentation | Gardening with mushrooms

||| FROM ORCAS ISLAND GARDEN CLUB |||

Please join the Orcas Island Garden Club on Wednesday, September 9, 2026, when we welcome Alex Winstead to share helpful advice for Gardening with Mushrooms in the Pacific Northwest. Though often misunderstood, mushrooms can be fantastic companions to your garden or landscaping plan. Many fungi are allies to plants, enrich the soil, and provide a unique, delicious crop that you can enjoy seasonally or year-round.

The Pacific Northwest with its high humidity and mild winters is an ideal climate for growing mushrooms both indoors and outdoors. Whether you have perennial landscaping, a fruit orchard, a seasonal veggie garden, or a greenhouse, mushrooms can fill and thrive in many niches to provide you with a unique and valuable culinary crop. We’ll explore the many ways you can successfully introduce mushrooms into your gardening plan and start harvesting the fruits of your labor at home within a single season or long-term with mushrooms that will produce for many years to come. We will also take a look at what it takes to grow mushrooms commercially and indoors for a year-round harvest.

Alex Winstead is the founder and owner of Cascadia Mushrooms in Bellingham, WA which he started in 2005 as a tiny “farm” in his rented basement and a stall at the Bellingham Farmers Market. Today the farm–no longer in the basement–grows nearly 2,000 lbs of fresh organic mushrooms each week and distributes their crops from Birch Bay to Olympia year-round. In addition to fresh mushrooms, Alex and his small crew of dedicated farmers provide grow-at-home mushroom kits to enthusiasts and gardeners across the country via their website, and supply commercial mushroom spawn and consultation services to other mushroom growers. Alex loves spreading the fascination and fun of growing and eating mushrooms because it fosters people’s connection to some of the Earth’s most basic processes, most curious life forms, and most delicious foods.

Join us for coffee and social time at 9:30 AM just before the program. For a link to the live Zoom presentation go to the Orcas Island Garden Club website and click the link below the list of presentations. The presentation will be recorded and available to view for four weeks after it is posted.

To watch the recorded presentation, go to the link ‘recorded presentations’ under ‘events’ on the club website. Garden Club presentations are free and open to the public.