Make room for mushrooms in your garden – fungi is a delicious addition to your garden

FANCY fungi are yours to harvest at home with grow-your-own mushroom kits.

King oyster mushrooms courtesy Swan Valley Gourmet Fungi

AS a gardener, I naturally support and observe quarantine regulations, but occasionally wish I could bring a little piece of something home with me from my travels.

Last weekend at a farmers’ market in Perth, we came upon a mushroom stall with a difference. We have a grower at our local market, selling Swiss browns (which rapidly sell out) and plain old button mushrooms, but this stall had a dazzling array of what they call “gourmet mushrooms”. We could only admire the photographs, since by the time we arrived, all their stock was sold out.

Brigett and David Proudmore produce a range of exotic mushrooms, from oysters (including king, or French horns, yellow, pink and gold varieties) to shiitakes, pioppinos, reishi and lion’s mane at their property at Gidgegannup, outside Perth. Under their Swan Valley Gourmet Fungi brand, they sell at a number of city and country farmers’ markets around Perth.

The business has grown so much over the past few years that Brigett has given up her job as a hairdresser to join David at the mushroom “farm” – actually a series of “grow rooms” recently extended to keep up with demand.

David is an environmental scientist who, as a young graduate in an unpromising jobs market, developed an interest in mushrooms and imported his first spores from a “culture library”. At first he sold his crop through the wholesale vegetable market in Perth, but fluctuating prices made life difficult until farmers’ markets started popping up around Perth about five years ago.

The demand for their product was plain from the empty shelves at last Saturday’s market. There’s obviously an appetite for a locally-grown alternative to the Korean-produced exotic mushrooms sold in supermarkets.

Instead, we bought a grow-your-own kit. A square bale of wheat straw is inoculated with mushroom spores (in this case oysters), sealed in plastic and put into the incubation room where, deprived of light and in a constant temperature, the spores develop mycelium, a web of white fibres that are the mushrooms’ root system. Oysters take three to four weeks, shiitakes up to three months to get to this stage. They are then brought out into the light, stripped of their plastic and within eight to 10 days, longer for shiitakes, the mycelium develop “fruit” and the first of three crops can be harvested from your bale.

It’s a process that still fascinates and delights him, David told me. “I still get a thrill every day when I walk into the grow rooms,” he said.

The oyster kit made a late birthday gift for my sister, and it’s now in her pantry, where she’ll tend it with a daily squirt from a spray bottle of water and, if all goes to plan, harvest up to 1kg of mushrooms.

I’d have bought one for myself, but felt sure quarantine restrictions would prevent me taking one home. Turns out I’m wrong.

David says he has sent the mushroom kits all over the country. There’s one in the post for me. You can get yours by emailing him at [e-mail] or find them on Facebook under Swan Valley Gourmet Fungi.

Twitter @DeborahBogle

Originally published as Make room for mushrooms in your garden – fungi is a delicious addition to your garden