Bonjour!

I've been off doing my favourite thing: getting weird in the woods doing mushroom stuff! 

I have literally just got back from helping the MycoPunks team with the Community Mycology tent and their stall at All Things Fungi Festival 2026, and I wanted to write some words about it because it's sparked some stray neurons into firing and I can’t stop thinking about it.

oh hi

Tell me about All Things Fungi Festival please dude:

Now, I wasn't there in an "official" capacity as Orangutan Trading Co, because the organisers don't want people selling psychedelic spore syringes. I think that's fair enough, a mushroom festival presumably already has some people going "oh magic mushrooms is it haha", and although yes, they're the ones that are most commonly thought of by people that aren't into the hobby, there is a heck of a lot more to it than just liberty caps, amanitas, and the like. I get it, and as much as I'd like to be there selling my spore syringes, I can accept their stance, it ain't personal, it's sensible. I was there as a spare pair of hands for the MycoPunks lot, running about, doing a bit of cooking, trying to film some stuff, and just trying to make myself useful to whoever needed it at the time. It also means that there’s enough people left back at MycoPunks HQ to be able to keep producing and shipping out your orders, so everyone gets their orders as quickly as usual, and I get to spend my time hanging out with chums and talking about mushrooms instead of trying to flog spore syringes.

Setting up the stall next to Om Systems

The festival's doing really well (as it deserves to), and this year it was bigger and better than before. For the sake of honesty, I think the food could’ve been better (and more varied), and the toilets, well, fuck me, let's ignore the toilets, but the rest of it, the line-up, the amount of things to do, the sheer wealth of knowledge getting shared around, the effort everyone put in from the organisation to the décor - fuckin' brilliant.

Celebrity skin

I'm a bit of a weird fella sometimes (in case you hadn't noticed), and I'm not at all programmed to just show people deference because they’re famous. I don’t care if other people do, I couldn’t give the first fuck, but it’s just not for me. Paul Stamets was probably the most well-known speaker there, and yup, I would happily agree that he’s helped to shine a pretty major light on mycology which has got so many people into the field (always sounds like a pun), and he’s also done a lot of important scientific work through his company. Anything that pushes mycology forward is great, because as we all know, mushrooms are great. However, there’s also a bit of stuff online about him doing some union-busting stuff at his company, and I’m not a fan of that at all. I think every employee should be in a union because you can’t trust capitalism. Realistically, I haven’t read enough about the life and times of Paul Stamets to form a particularly strong opinion about him one way or the other, and I’m not going to bother because he doesn’t occupy any meaningful space in my head. Nor me in his, I would imagine! I didn't steal his hat so he's probably fine with me.

Paul Stamets complimenting my mate Pete from Strange Realms on his book

The world of mycology is huge...

I didn’t get to see many of the people speaking, but I did get to chat to a lot of them, and my main takeaway was this: the world of mycology is so insanely broad that I’m a little bit mad at myself for not having taken the time to consider just how broad. This is a very brief list, and I’ve probably mangled everyone’s actual achievements for the sake of brevity, but it’s to illustrate a point so bear with me: off the top of my head, with no names, and in no particular order (obviously it’s me at the top and there is an order and it’s the first is the best and then the rest is all the same), you had:

• The handsomest spore slingin’ monkey mofo known to man
• Someone that decided mycology supplies were annoying to source so solved that problem for everyone else
• Someone who loves to set up amazing mushroom companies, and also teaches kids about how cool and accessible actual scientific style mycology is
• A man who creates the maddest sculptures from reishi
• An ex high-school teacher who now knows an impossible amount about mushrooms, managed to get laws changed due to his findings, and teaches people how to record their findings
• The Executive Director of the Fungi Foundation who is also the deputy chair of the IUCN Fungal Conservation Committee
• Too many very specialised photographers to even begin to name
• Mushroom cultivators from the small scale “it’s enough for me” to the large scale “we produce food for supermarkets”
• Authors and illustrators writing and drawing in every way possible
• Artists running the whole gamut from people making ink out of mushrooms to people making the paper out of mushrooms to people drawing and painting mushrooms to people sculpting mushrooms
• Someone who studies how mushrooms have been used throughout history and contemporary times (including getting to study Otzi the Iceman, that lad had mushrooms on him)
• A regenerative soil dude who was helping people literally listen to the noise that soil can make

This is just a incredibly small sample of the people that were “doing” “bits” at All Things Fungi Festival 2026. All of these people have found their own way of studying and utilising their skills to try and help other people understand mycology better, and I fuckin’ love that. I don’t think I met a single person that was doing the exact same thing as another one, and it’s all in service of the humble mushroom. 

Chris wanted to dress up as a wizard so whatever, we let it happen. Takes all sorts, doesn't it?

Don’t get me wrong, I know my way around mushroom cultivation to a reasonably decent degree, and I’d consider myself to be good at it. When you’re surrounded by literal top-tier-in-their-field mycologists though, whoa boy let me tell ya it’s a very nice reminder that I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface! That’s something I really do like about mycology, no matter where I turn, there will be something else that I can learn about the field that I love!

What was your favourite bit of All Things Fungi?

There wasn't much I didn't enjoy, but for me the best bit was Monday morning, because the only bit of work I had to do was packing down all the MycoPunks stuff, and then I got to go on a stroll through the woods with just us and Damon Tighe. Damon's the guy who's a former teacher and has over 100k observations in iNaturalist, and going for a little mushroom hunt in the woods with him is fucking brilliant. There were so many really interesting things that, if I were on my own, I'd have just walked past and never spotted, but Damon's got such a knowledge of how all these biological systems interact that he knows where things are likely to be, and was constantly going "hey look over here!" He's got a great way of explaining it all in ways that a relative novice like myself can understand (that's where the "former teacher" bit can come in handy), so the whole slightly-hungover walk was super interesting for me.

Another ace point came when a customer at the MycoPunks stall (didn't catch your name, sorry) asked about a billion questions, and then said "oh my gosh I'm so sorry, I've asked you so many questions about mushrooms", and I answered "honestly the opportunity to talk about mushrooms so much is why I'm here, normally most people in real life would've walked off by now". Such a fuckin' joy to be able to Just Talk Mushrooms to so many people and not come across as inappropriately neurodivergent. Try doing that in a Wetherspoons, y'know?

We also had a lot of nice after-hours shindiggery, with lots of fellow mycologists stopping by of an evening to have some drinks and chat, and I managed to get out to some of the nighttime music stuff in the Woodland Stage, which is normally the last thing I'd wanna do, but it was fun. I think that's mostly because, like I've said before, the Venn diagram of neurodivergence and mushroom-lovers is almost a perfect circle, so it really didn't feel as weird and hectic to me as walking into a gig or a nightclub. Possibly that's because it's in the woods too, the woods is always good.

I also got to see Lorin von Longo-Liebenstein doing a talk on why people don’t grow more mushrooms in their gardens, with the main point being that people think “mushrooms can be dangerous so I can’t have them in my garden” without considering that many of their plants can also be dangerous if ingested. I hadn’t thought of that before either, so I’m starting to grow some all over the place in my garden. Sadly I missed out on Robert Dickins talking about his book, Psilocybe Pickers, as we were really busy on the stall but I’m hoping I’ll run into him again at some point (maybe at Fungi Town in Hay-on-Wye, who knows). 

No way I was cropping any part of this picture

So yeah, that’s what’s been smashing about in the inside of my head for the past few days - it’s a refreshed appreciation of the world of mushrooms, if I had to sum it up in a sentence. 

Coming up next - I’m off to Fungi Town in Hay-on-Wye, which is from 2nd-4th October, there’s a link here if you want to check it out. If you turn up and spot me, then feel free to come and say hello!