Walk the Crum Woods loop on any ordinary September morning and you will step past dozens of mushrooms without registering a single one. A cluster of turkey tails on a downed log. Something pale and gilled pushing up through leaf litter near the creek. Nobody stops for them. They are just part of the floor, the way moss is part of the floor.

For one week starting September 28, that changes. Swarthmore College is running a free, weeklong Fungi Fest through October 2, built around walks, screenings, a cooking session, and a public conversation, with most of it happening in the same Crum Woods that borough residents already use for dog walks and quiet mornings. The headline pairing on October 1 puts Merlin Sheldrake, whose book Entangled Life turned underground fungal networks into a genuine bestseller, in conversation with Hannah Huber, Pennsylvania's first state mycologist. If you can't make it in person, a livestream is listed for October 2.

Here is the part that makes the week worth your calendar rather than a shrug: the fungi getting this attention have almost nothing to do with the industry that made this region famous for mushrooms in the first place.

A County Famous for Mushrooms It Doesn't Grow in the Woods

Chester County, one township over from Swarthmore, produces a genuinely large share of the country's mushroom supply. One Pennsylvania Department of Health report put the county's output at 321 million pounds out of a national total of roughly 680 million pounds of Agaricus, the common white button mushroom. That is not a backyard hobby. That is an agricultural sector with its own supply chains, its own labor market, and its own place in how outsiders describe this part of Pennsylvania.

But it is also almost entirely indoor. Agaricus mushrooms grow in climate-controlled houses on a prepared substrate, often built from corncobs, hay, straw, straw-bedded horse manure, or poultry manure, formulated specifically to favor the crop over competing organisms. It is closer to a manufacturing process than to anything happening under a tree canopy. Nothing about that process touches Crum Woods.

The woods run on a different system entirely. Wild fungi there are uncultivated, unlabeled, and uncounted by any agricultural survey. Nobody tracks their yield the way the USDA tracks the commercial crop, which reported 636 million pounds in national mushroom sales worth 922 million dollars for the most recent season, a year-over-year decline in both volume and value. That number describes a business. It says nothing about what is actually growing along the trail you walk your dog on. Fungi Fest is the one week a year when that gap gets addressed directly, by people whose job is studying wild fungi rather than growing a single commercial species at scale.

What Actually Happens September 28 Through October 2

The programming spans the woods and campus venues over five days, aimed at a general audience rather than mycology students. Based on what the college and local coverage have described, expect:

• Guided walks through Crum Woods, looking at what is fruiting on the forest floor and on downed wood this time of year
• Screenings and lectures connecting fungal biology to broader ecological questions
• A cooking session using the more approachable end of the fungal world
• The Sheldrake and Huber conversation on October 1, with a livestream option on October 2
• A companion library exhibit tied to a 2025 fungal-research fellowship documented through the college's own library system, for anyone who wants the indoor version if a walk gets rained out

Registration for some of these programs opened September 14, according to the Delaware County Daily Times. The whole thing is free, which matters for a county whose name is more associated with a commodity crop than with public science programming.

Fungal networks do not respect property lines any more than groundwater does. What is growing under Crum Woods and what is growing in a climate-controlled house two townships over are part of the same underground category of life, even though almost nothing else connects them.

The One Afternoon Worth Blocking Off

If you only make one thing this week, make it October 1. Hannah Huber's title, Pennsylvania's first state mycologist, is not ceremonial. She works as a conservation mycologist through the Pennsylvania Natural Heritage Program, identified by the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, which means her actual job is assessing which fungal species in this state need protection and which habitats support them. That is a very different mandate from the commercial growers a few miles away, and it is a rare thing to have someone with that specific job talking in public, in your town, about what she has learned.

Sheldrake's presence raises the profile of the conversation, but Huber is the one who can speak to what is actually happening in a Pennsylvania forest floor, including the one behind Swarthmore's own campus. Pairing the two means a week that could have stayed academic instead becomes legible to anyone who has ever wondered what that mushroom on the trail actually was.

If You Want to Go

The festival is free and centered on Crum Woods and campus venues, so most of it does not require driving anywhere or paying for parking. Registration opened September 14 for select programs, which suggests the more popular sessions, likely the October 1 conversation, could fill before the week arrives. If you have been meaning to actually learn what grows along the trails you already walk, this is the week institutional expertise shows up to explain it, for free, without you having to leave the borough to find it.

None of this changes what Chester County's mushroom industry means for the regional economy. It is still one of the largest concentrations of commercial mushroom production in the country, and that fact will still show up in trade publications long after this week ends. What changes, for anyone who lives near Crum Woods, is the chance to understand that the industry and the woods are not the same story, and that for five days, the woods get their own expert attention instead of borrowing the industry's reputation by proximity.

That is a specific kind of thing to have in your own backyard. Most towns do not get a state mycologist and a bestselling science writer walking their trails in the same week, free of charge, with a livestream for anyone who cannot make it in person.

If Swarthmore's version of a quiet Tuesday already includes a state mycologist stopping by the woods behind your house, it is worth remembering what else that kind of town offers day to day, long after the festival tents come down. The Tallon & Olenik Team spends as much time walking these trails and talking to neighbors as we do at the closing table, and we are always glad to talk through what makes a specific block or a specific street in Swarthmore worth knowing before you need us for anything transactional at all.