Growing Mushrooms and Baking Pizza With Maris Wilson, MAFS+MBA ’24
Before she could start growing mushrooms at Eden Hall Campus, Maris Wilson, MAFS+MBA ’24, needed to take down a tree.
It was her first term as a graduate student in the Falk School, and Wilson was in the forest of Eden Hall with a group of undergraduates who were learning how to cut timber. They took down an oak tree; that’s one place shiitake mushrooms like to grow.
Once the downed trunk was divided into pieces, Wilson drilled holes into them and filled the holes with spores. She plugged them with wax to keep critters from getting in, and she put the logs in the laying yard, where they rested while the spores grew into the wood. Then it was time to wait.
She’s been waiting for almost two years, and she’s hoping that this summer, after she’s completed her graduate program, those logs will produce mushrooms.
As the agroecology graduate assistant, Wilson spends a lot of time focusing on the laying yard, where the logs she inoculated sit alongside others from previous years. She took the opportunity to grow mushrooms there as soon as the position was offered to her.
“I have some experience working with mushrooms,” she said. “I grew some species of mushrooms in buckets during undergrad, in one of my agroecology classes. And I’ve gone out foraging for mushrooms. I think it’s a fascinating product that people are growing a lot more now.”
Prior to studying at Chatham University, Wilson spent time working for AmeriCorps in various roles in Oregon. She then worked at a YMCA in southeastern Pennsylvania, where she taught children, before moving on to work at a nursing home.
Wilson knew she wanted to pursue a graduate degree someday. She started looking at programs in Pittsburgh, where she knew a few people, and applied to Chatham University’s Master of Arts in Food Studies and Master of Business Administration dual-degree program.
“I realized the food studies program combined what I’d been doing in agriculture and what I’d been doing in the environmental world into one holistic program, which was very intriguing to me,” she said. “That’s what led me here: that mixture of components that makes up the food studies program.”
After she took on the agroecology graduate assistant position, she began reading paperwork left behind by her predecessors and tried to wrap her head around how she would push forward their work in mushroom production.
“I had never grown mushrooms on logs before,” she said. “Learning that whole process was a steep learning curve, but it’s been very fun.”
Her work at Eden Hall goes beyond the fungus in the laying yard; she’s overseen on-campus events and workshops, such as teaching people how to make apple sauce and pickling. She’s also the fire master for the Center for Regional Agriculture, Food, and Transformation (CRAFT), which involves working the bread oven.
On the day she spoke to Pulse, Wilson was heating the oven for a pizza bake with a group of people who’d recently finished the CRAFT Market Readiness course.
“It’s an interesting job,” she said. “It’s fun to start the fire, to build the fire, to make food in the oven. It’s a very creative space for people to be that’s totally different than being in a traditional kitchen.”
Now, nearly at the end of her time studying at Chatham, Wilson plans to keep working on the farm into the summer to see the spores from her first term produce shiitake mushrooms.
“There’s a lot of freedom working on the farm,” she said. “I’ve been able to do what works best for me and my schedule. When I have ideas, there’s several people to go to for assistance, for guidance, for approval. It’s a very open process. I feel like the farm team is really good at listening to students and what they want to do and what they want to learn on the farm.”
Explore Eden Hall Campus, food studies, sustainability, and graduate programs at Chatham University at chatham.edu.