Mycelium as an educational tool.

Let’s grow something together

Your region burns something too.

This works in any European village — because it runs on whatever that village already throws away.

In Greece the problem is olive prunings. Every winter the groves are cut back, and the branches are burned in the field because there is nothing else to do with them. That is where our substrate comes from — a waste stream nobody wanted.

This is not a Greek problem. It is a European one that simply changes shape depending on where you stand:

• Rice straw — the Po Valley, Valencia and the Ebro delta, the Portuguese river plains
• Vine prunings — every wine region in Europe, cut and burned each winter
• Maize stalks and cobs — Romania, Hungary, Poland, France, Bulgaria
• Cereal straw — wheat and barley across northern and central Europe
• Fruit-tree prunings — apple and pear in Poland and northern Italy, citrus in Spain, Italy and Cyprus, almond across Iberia
• Nut shells — hazelnut, almond, walnut
• Sunflower stalks and husks — Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary
• Sawdust and forestry residue — the Nordics and the Baltics
• Urban streams — spent coffee grounds, brewery grain, cardboard: no farmland required

Open burning of crop residue is restricted or banned across much of Europe, and it remains a serious air-quality problem in farming regions. Every one of these residues is somebody’s disposal cost.

We are not going to tell you which of these works best. We know what olive prunings do. Straw, sawdust, coffee grounds and brewery grain are well established for growing mycelium; woody prunings need chipping and behave differently again. What your local residue does — how it needs preparing, how fast it colonises, what it makes — is genuinely an open question.

That is not a gap in the method. That is the interesting part, and it is what a pilot is for. Your region brings a waste stream we have never worked with, and your learners get a problem that belongs to their own village rather than someone else’s.

Residue does not go from the field into a mould. It has to be cut down, often milled, and usually pasteurised so nothing else colonises it first.

That is the step that takes energy. And in most farming regions, the residue is sitting a long way from the nearest socket. Which means the limiting factor is rarely the residue. It is having power where the residue is.

Run it somewhere that isn’t Athens.

We developed this here, on Greek olive-pruning waste. The interesting question isn’t whether it works in Athens — it’s what your region’s growers throw away instead, and what happens when the method meets it.

We want to establish a European network around these methods, and we’re looking for organisations to establish it with us — not to join something finished. It doesn’t have a name yet. The founding organisations should decide that together.

You don’t need any background in mycelium. The materials are built so a facilitator can run them without one.

We give — the method free; a walkthrough before your first cycle; a pilot in Athens under our accreditation if you want one; co-authorship of whatever comes out of your pilot; and a say in what the network becomes.

We ask — run it once, with one group, and tell us honestly what happened, including what didn’t work.

And if something occurred to you while you were reading this — tell us that instead. Some of the best projects we have been part of started as somebody else’s idea, and we would rather join yours than talk you into ours.

No fee, no contract, no exclusivity.

EVEC Athens — OID E10172681 · PIC 909448430 · Erasmus+ Youth accredited (2023-1-EL02-KA150-YOU-000188397) · ESC Quality Label (2023-1-EL02-ESC50-QLA-000195138).
Methods by Blagoj Ristov, political scientist specialising in youth policy through non-formal education, developing them since 2025 and delivering them through EVEC’s accreditations during hosted mobilities in Athens.
erasmus@evec.org.gr — we reply within 2 working days.

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