‘We shall by morning inherit the earth’, wrote Sylvia Plath in her poem Mushrooms. Cotswolds-based blogger Jools Kelly meets Rafe Williams and Oscar Clutterbuck-Jones of Slad Valley Mushrooms, who are working to make a tasty selection of nutritious fungi more readily available
Mushrooms have featured heavily in my life over the past few weeks. Whilst I have always been very good at growing various moulds in dark damp recesses of our half underground house, I have never tried to grow them on purpose.
Lion’s mane has even infiltrated my morning coffee. The flavour is good: it's brownish, like peaty dog paws. Plus, lion's mane is supposed to be a ‘cognitive mushroom’ so I knock it back daily, hoping…
I first discovered Slad Valley Mushrooms (SVM) at Stroud Farmers' Market. Their stall is always stacked high with multicoloured waves of silvery grey and yellow oyster mushrooms, rusty bunches of chestnut mushrooms dotted with their characteristic white speckles and a reishi with its villous red projections.
SVM’s farm is hidden behind multiple doors and silver stud walls in an attic in a trading estate in Gloucester. I’d imagined a mushroom farm to be rather Narnia-like with colourful fungal blooms atop semi-decomposed logs and straw bales busting with pins. But I’d say it turned out to be far more research laboratory than CS Lewis.
After tentatively calling through the wall 'it’s Jools I’ve come about the er mushrooms…'
At Rafe’s feet lies six-month-old Winnie, a dear walnut-coloured lab-staff cross, rescued as an orphan puppy. She has a penchant for deer antlers but luckily has little appetite for fungi.
Rafe bags substrate into 5kg bales. “I’m not sure people realise what heavy work it is” he says, slamming down another bag of sawdust and folding it up into a tight cube.
Are they organic?
'At the start I was determined for the whole process to be organic. It seemed like the right thing.' But the more he looked into it, organic farming in this context did not make sense. 'We would have to import the sawdust from abroad and the soy would need to be ‘food grade.’'
It’s counterintuitive to grow food…on food. Being organic here is actually the less green option. 'I mean, there’s nothing weird being sprayed on the mushrooms. Just water and good airflow is all they need' he says, patting one of the bags affectionately.
The bags are packed into the steriliser and heated to 95 degrees for 48 hours, eliminating any contamination.
Oscar shows me the laboratory. Agar plates grow white fuzzy mycelium that is transferred to a malt extract solution and later added to colonise bags of millet.
I ask where all this started.
They met as teenagers growing up in Wales. Rafe worked as a carer for Oscar’s brother and both shared love of surfing. 'We both have caravans on the Gower.' This is where the mushroom growing was born. During the first Covid lockdown, Rafe moved from South London where he was working making TV commercials after his work disappeared, prompting him to up sticks and move home. 'I had the whole of Llangelith beach to myself pretty much, which was amazing…' but after a balmy summer he got a bit bored.
'I wanted to try something new and grow something I could eat, so I bought a few grow kits online had a play. I just fell in love with the process of growing mushrooms.'
Then came the mushroom palace: Rafe’s parents' garage in Wales. He was soon shifting 80kg of oyster mushrooms a week and was running out of space.
We walk into the inoculation room, an immaculate space with cooling racks for the recently sterilised bags and a work bench with a HEPA filter pushing clean air over the sterile area. Here they inoculate the sterile bags with spawn they have grown on the millet.
Any unwanted mould spores could ruin a batch, but you won’t know it’s happened until at least two weeks later. Rafe shows me a bag overrun with green mould - Trichoderma. 'This is what we need to avoid.'
The mushroom nursery.
The next stage is a warm cosy dark room with several radiators working hard and a comforting mulchy leaf litter smell.
'You wouldn’t have liked this in the summer' The lab hit 41 degrees C in their first July here, and not only did nothing grow well but they also had to do most of the work in their boxer shorts. Like Walter White cooking methamphetamine in his pants in Breaking Bad? Rafe chipped in 'exactly! And we were also a LOT thinner then!'
On the subject of psychotropics I wonder if they are ever asked about ‘exotic’ mushrooms. 'Well obviously we don’t grow them, but I’ll be on the market stall and 20 people a day will say ‘mate, you got any magic mushrooms?’… its so annoying!' Whilst they don’t grow psychedelic psyclocybes, they do grow medicinal mushrooms. Rafe is fascinated by the health benefits of mushrooms and hopes to expand SVM’s supplements range.
A mushroomy panacea?
'Lions mane Hericium erinaceus is very popular, it has benefits for cognitive function, memory, gut health, focus and clarity. Neither of us feel we can live without it now.'
Their other medicinal mushroom is the modestly named 'Reishi The Mushroom of Immortality', also known as Lingzhi (Ganoderma species).
It is a rust coloured polypore resembling a clump of coral. Though I’m a little put off by the idea of immortality, I ask Oscar if it has any other benefits? 'Yeh, I find it relaxing. I’ve not been sleeping well recently so have been taking Reishi in my fruit tea. Its effect is a bit like melatonin. It gets you relaxed, and in the mood for sleep.'
Planting
Oscar throws me a grow-kit bag -'this is a good one' it’s an orangey colour with white blotches all over the surface. 'Take it home with you, see if you can grow it.' I clutch it the way you do, slightly nervously, when someone hands you their baby.
We wash hands and glove up for the next stage. Planting. We get a clean stainless steel trolley, open the bags, squeeze out the air and lay them tightly together on the trolley.
Oscar grins 'The next bit is my favourite, it’s so satisfying' and starts beating the bags of sleeping mycelium. 'It’s supposed to simulate a tree falling, waking the mushrooms up to begin breaking down the wood. These are oyster mushrooms, you can be rough with them. They are the best ones to grow when you’re starting, they’ll grow on a book if you let them!'
We then clean the bags and cut a cross in the top. Oscar encourages over my shoulder 'don’t worry, you would really have to try to mess this bit up.' The bags are then loaded onto shelves in a much cooler fruiting room where the light and temperature shock the mushrooms into fruiting. I recreated this on my kitchen table at home and from one bag I have had three huge flushes of mushrooms.
Growing mushrooms commercially requires a lot of care. 'They really are our babies'. Oscar shows me the next room. 'These have been growing two weeks and will be ready to harvest for the market at the weekend.' The bags are bursting mushrooms, the smell is earthy umami. Some oyster mushrooms drip with metabolites and others are matte and flat with a subtle grey iridescence and ready to harvest multiple fruits pull away easily as one.
The future plan is to find a new premises. 'The roof leaks, and we have to share warehouse space with wrestlers at the moment. We just want a nice field with fresh air and a beautiful lab to grow more and more interesting mushrooms.' Rafe scuffles Winnie gently on the head 'you’d like that, wouldn’t you Win?'
Rafe reflects 'We haven’t even touched the surface with mushrooms, it’s such a new area of research and there is so much we don’t know. They are beautiful to look at and grow. Life without mushrooms is impossible, and I love the fact that the world is opening up to the possibility that we don’t know everything. It’s a fascinating place to be.'
Find Rafe and Oscar and their beautiful mushrooms at Stroud Farmers' Market every Saturday.
https://sladvalleymushrooms.co.uk/
Jools Kelly is a blogger based in the Cotswolds pleasetellmemore.co.uk
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