The short version: There is a festival in Baltimore this Saturday, October 24, devoted entirely to mushrooms — art, culture, and fungus — at the Carrie Murray Nature Center in Leakin Park. Tickets run about $12. It’s weird, it’s wonderful, and it’s exactly the kind of thing this series exists for. Welcome to Weird Baltimore.
Why we’re starting here
Every city has its postcard events. Weird Baltimore is about the other ones — the gatherings that make you stop mid-sentence and say “wait, that’s a thing?” A whole festival for mushrooms, in a nature center, in October, is the perfect inaugural specimen.
What we know
- What: The Mushroom City Art Festival — a celebration of all things fungus through art
- When: Saturday, October 24
- Where: Carrie Murray Nature Center, 1901 Ridgetop Road, Baltimore, MD (in Leakin Park)
- Tickets: Listed around $12
The Carrie Murray Nature Center sits in one of Baltimore’s great wild spaces — Leakin Park is over 1,000 acres of woods in the middle of the city, which is honestly the right setting for a mushroom festival. Fungi people and forest people are the same people.
The weirder context (why this series will keep going)
Baltimore’s fungus scene is deeper than one festival. The Farm Alliance of Baltimore has run mushroom-production workshops at Charm City Caps on Hilton Street — inoculation chambers, grow labs, and gourmet mushroom tastings. Cumberland, a few hours west, hosts a whole Fungus Fest with talks, workshops, and a “Fungus Bazaar.” The spore network runs deep in Maryland. We’ll be keeping an eye on it.
Field notes for the curious
Go in October and the woods are doing their best work — fall is peak mushroom season, which is presumably the whole point of the timing. Wear shoes you don’t mind getting dirty, bring the camera, and don’t eat anything you forage unless someone who really knows what they’re doing says so. The Captain is brave, not reckless.