Fungi, for everyone

The Mushroom Conservatory exists to empower people and communities through the transformative power of fungi.

We're a woman-owned mycology company rooted in Michigan, founded by Erin Hamilton on the conviction that mushroom cultivation shouldn't require a laboratory, a degree, or a leap of faith. Our kits are designed so a kid at the kitchen counter and a chef in a working kitchen can both grow something remarkable – and understand the full process while they do it.

Every culture we ship is contaminant-tested. Every instruction set is written for real people in real homes – buckets, bags, garden beds, windowsills. Our kits live in hundreds of boutiques and farm stores because they work, and because they treat growing mushrooms as what it is: a science experiment and a gourmet food project in one box.

But the kits are only half the story.

The Mushroom Conservatory is also a working research organization. Watershed Revival, our initiative with The Henry Ford at Greenfield Village, is developing scalable methods for using native fungi to restore the Rouge River – with a long-term aim of helping protect the entire Great Lakes watershed.

We're building a living archive of Michigan's native fungi through deep fieldwork, community science, and preservation – documenting fungal biodiversity as ecological memory for climate resilience, medicine, and regenerative futures. And we experiment constantly with mycoremediation and advanced extraction techniques to improve both environmental cleanup and functional mushroom products.

When you buy a kit, book a workshop, or bring us in to consult, you fund that work directly. That's the model: curiosity pays for restoration.

Mushrooms aren't a novelty. They're a tool for resilience.

That's what we teach in classrooms and on foraging trails, what we tell chefs and homesteaders, and what we'll keep saying on every podcast, stage, and farm-store shelf that will have us.