Today we’d like to introduce you to Ariel Bonkoski.
Hi Ariel, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
I really fell into all of this by accident. As a child, I really disliked mushrooms. I hated the texture and lack of flavor. Almost 10 years ago I was working in a restaurant and I was telling a coworker about how I did not like mushrooms. He told me that I just hadn’t had the right mushrooms and continued to tell me about how there are so many wild mushrooms out there with different tastes and textures. He even told me about a mushroom that is called the ‘Chicken of the Woods’, a mushroom that is supposed to taste similar to chicken! I certainly did not believe him, but I had gone home and searched for the mushroom online.
It turned out that it was a real mushroom and it even was supposed to grow locally to me. After that, I casually joined some Facebook groups for identifying mushrooms in Minnesota. I didn’t really put any time into learning about mushrooms at that time, but I enjoyed casually looking at them. A few years later, my husband and I were on our honeymoon up on the North Shore of Lake Superior in 2016. We were hiking on a trail just North of Grand Marais and I saw this orange blob in the middle of the hiking trail and I recognized it! I told my husband that I believed that it was what was called a ‘lobster mushroom’ and it was supposed to be edible. My husband asked how I would even know that. I (while laughing) told him I saw it all the time in the mushroom Facebook groups because it was a pretty common mushroom people would post about. He laughed and said we would buy a mushroom book at the bookstore in Grand Marais. But we took the mushroom (along with a few more of the same kind) with us. We got to town and got the book and I also posted a few pictures of the mushroom to the mushroom identification groups on Facebook to get some additional opinions. After checking the book and getting additional opinions from those with more experience, we were pretty confident that my identification of this was correct! We decided to fry it up at our cabin. We sauteed it with butter, salt, pepper, and garlic butter and served it with some mashed potatoes……….. AND I LOVED IT.
I then realized that the coworker from years ago was right! When reading about how unique the lobster mushroom is, really showed me how complex mushrooms and fungi can be. I really wanted to learn more, and now I had a book to get me started. I then started following the Facebook groups much more closer. When people would post to the identification groups and ask what mushroom they had, I would look in my book to see if I could find a match. Once I found a match, I would then open the comments on the post and see what other people were suggesting and see if my identification matched what others were saying. If my identification was different than what others were saying, I would then look up their suggestions and tried to figure out what features of the mushrooms were different and what the proper identification should be. It was like solving a riddle to me, and I loved it.
I really grasped mushroom identification quickly and was able to memorize many species’ names. I enjoyed helping others identify their mushrooms online and other people started noticing my skill and helpfulness, so then I started getting invites to help admin mushroom identification Facebook groups from all over the world. I started realizing that no one in my area was teaching about these cool fungi and I noticed in what areas of the topic people were interested in learning about. I was asked to lead my first foray in 2019 at an event in Wisconsin, along with some pretty well-known folks in the foraging world that I even looked up to. Then people started asking me to give presentations, then classes, more forays, and even hired as an identifier for several large mushroom events.
I realized that this is where my heart is and there is a demand for knowledge. I decided to make my passion into my career. In early 2022 Ariel’s Mushroom Co. was born. I started teaching online classes first so that I could reach people that weren’t in my direct area. I ended up partnering with Boulder Lake Environmental Learning Center to teach in-person classes and hikes after I had done my Minnesota Master Naturalist training there in June of 2022.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
I would say my road has been pretty smooth. I would say my biggest struggle was figuring out how to correctly put a business together, as I had no prior knowledge of how any of that worked.
I am really lucky to be in an industry with mostly really helpful folks, and I have several friends that have similar businesses in other areas that were willing to give me some advice or tell me how they did things. I also ended up getting connected with my local small business development center, which helped answer the few remaining questions I had.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Ariel’s Mushroom Co?
I teach about mushroom identification and foraging! I offer both online and in-person classes. Most of my in-person classes are hosted in the Duluth, MN area, but hoping to travel more for classes in the future. My online classes are great for anyone in the midwest region! I really enjoy helping folks find new ways to fall in love with and interact with nature.
Watching students take what they learn from me, and turn that into a new passion is really exciting. I do hope to expand my business in the future, but education will always be my focus. I had a great first year of business and am very excited for the future.
Pricing:
- Online classes are $35.oo
- In-person classes with guided forays are $75.00
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.arielsmushroomco.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/arielsmushroomco/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Ariels-Mushroom-Co/100077918934445/
Image Credits
Alan Bergo, Maddi Frick, and Ariel Bonkoski
