People ask me how I got into growing mushrooms.

I’m not sure how anyone else gets into this, but for me, it was reluctantly, on the assurances of my dear partner.

By the time he suggested we become full-time mushroom farmers, I had been through nearly 10 years of his promises fulfilled, in the realm of growing things, anyway.

We had begun growing food together in the summer of 2006. Actually, we began in January of 2006, if you count from our first compost pile, built a few weeks after we met.

From those first potatoes, eggplants, tomatoes, herbs, flowers, and squashes, we grew into multi-property, multi-acre, multi-growing-method, capital-F Farmers, attending farmers markets weekly, and eventually quitting our day jobs to grow food and sell it to our community. Other than a few lean years in the beginning, we’ve been able to make it work.

And so, knowing he would make it happen, I agreed.

For some reason, no other promises from him ever seem to matter as much, no other problems seem insurmountable, as long as he continues to deliver in the arena of growing things.

Will he always deliver when I expect him to read my mind about how I want him to help with the kids, or groceries, or cleaning? Not often.

Will he be able to deliver when it comes to socializing smartly with a group of assorted friends? Almost assuredly not.

Will he be able to deliver on the expectation that he impress my parents? Gave it up a long time ago.

I asked two things of him at the beginning: I asked that he never leave or forsake me; and I asked that he follow through on his promises to grow things.

On those things, he delivers. Over and over and over again. If you find a partner who can grow stuff, hang on tight.

But back to why mushrooms.

That question comes up regularly at my farm market stand. And I love it. I love it because there’s no way I can answer it fully. The answer is long and meandering, and when there’s time, I try to tell more of a story. But there are many answers.

Usually I summarize:

“My partner and I have been growing food together for nearly ____ years; we started out with a garden, growing lots of veggies, which grew to a little farm, which grew to a bigger farm, with greenhouses. Then one day, my partner said, ‘you never see mushrooms at market. Why not? I love mushrooms. I want to learn to grow them? How hard can it be?’”

Anyone who has ever grown mushrooms will laugh at that last line. Because the answer is: really kinda hard. But that’s not the whole answer either.

In a spiritual way, I go back to that first compost I ever saw, and I know that mycelium, generally — the decomposer of all decomposers — has been trying to get my attention since I was young.

I never thought of it that way until I began learning of the mushroom life cycle.

As I continue to learn, for example, how much forest has been destroyed around the world, and then, on a different level, about the healing properties of mushrooms, of their use by the old healers, and the ways in which that type of healing has been suppressed by the larger culture (ahem, the Church) since the earliest days of the Roman Empire, and on into Europe, Asia, the Americas, Africa — everywhere — I have developed a deep certainty that growing mushrooms, among other things, especially in the time of climate collapse, is a sacred art.

It is no wonder that our dear mushrooms, our mycelial partners, have been kept in the dark.

That’s not the pun you think it is.

Well, it is. But of course that’s the other thing I hear at farmers markets all the time: “I feel like a mushroom at work! They feed me shit and keep me in the dark! Har de har har har.”

In pockets of Eastern Europe, and in many parts of Asia, and probably in other parts of the world (I just don’t know yet), people still know forest mushrooms, they still forage and find edible, both culinary and medicinal, mushrooms. In other parts of the world, like the Americas, the well-versed forager is the exception. Most people (usually white, usually non-indigenous North American folk) see our mushrooms and respond with shock, sometimes revulsion, and sometimes laughter — sometimes all three!

I get that.

Growing up, my experience with mushrooms included, primarily, the common can of Pennsylvania Dutch boiled button mushrooms, often added to homemade pizza or spaghetti. Mom hated them, dad loved them. I was somewhere in between. They were fine. A “fancy” mushroom was the raw, sliced button mushroom, often found in a chilled serving dish on the Pizza Hut salad bar. Ooh la la, I did like those.

Some of my more rural friends in junior high school had parents who took them “mushroom hunting” in the spring. I joined one such outing during a sleepover in 7th Grade. The mushrooms to be hunted were the famed morel mushrooms, a delicacy everywhere, not just in my native Indiana, apparently. Danielle’s dad, after proudly finding and bagging several handfuls of these mushrooms (I never found any), took us back to the house, fried them in butter, and watched our expressions as we enjoyed the offering.

They were delicious, for sure. But I remember my 13-year-old self feeling decidedly uncomfortable with the entire experience. What would my mom think? (I mean, finding something in the woods, and taking it home, and eating it? Who DOES that?)

The answer is: everyone used to do that. Maybe not the last generation, probably not even the generation before that, but keep going back in your ancestry. Go back to your people, the ones who knew how to find food and medicine in the forest.

The truth is that only a few types of mushrooms grow in composted manure; primarily those mushrooms all North Americans are familiar with, the little white ones, the cute, clean, bright little white buttons, grown in massive warehouses all over the country, in darkness. This is also the way the cremini (baby bella or portobello) mushroom is grown. These all belong to the Agaricus family of mushrooms, and for most of my lifetime, they were the only mushrooms to be found in the grocery store. Finding them raw, as opposed to canned, was a newer phenomenon as well.

Now, we begin to see the return of our forest mushrooms on grocery shelves: oyster mushrooms, shiitake mushrooms, maitake (hen of the woods), and enoki mushrooms (although the thin-stemmed, tiny-cap version of enoki is definitely factory-grown).

My dream, my wish, my vision, is to bring more mushroom growers — small, family growers — to the world. Those of us who have learned how they grow, what they require, and what they do for us, are more likely to revere and rebuild the forests (I dream of the way they were).

I’m ready to see that old fear of the forest — the fear we inherited from Empire — go away.

The old healers who walked through the woods with their baskets, gathering the food and medicine we all need — they weren’t witches. They were humans, loving the Earth, loving their families and communities, feeding and healing and living as members of the forest. I believe the mushrooms are here to remind us.

I Believe the Children Are Our Future

My favourite reaction to our mushroom stand at market usually comes from children.

I see them walking toward our stand, from 30 meters away, behind their parents, at eye level with my table usually. I see their eyes latch onto the colourful, strangely-shaped creatures covering the stand; sometimes their parents are headed my way. Sometimes their parents are busy looking for a different stand, and urging them to keep up.

But their eyes lock onto a mushroom, and they can’t look away, as they walk in front and then past my stand —

Or they come right up, and reach out to touch the mushrooms (sometimes I have to set up a “petting zoo” of mushrooms, for curious fingers).

Sometimes, they cannot hide their sparkle, looking from mushroom to mushroom, at the mushroom books on my table, and sometimes they look directly at me; some are bold enough to tell me how much they love them, or to ask me a question.

I currently know one little girl — maybe 4 or 5 — whose dear mother brings her every week to buy mushrooms for her dinners. And this girl walks right up, points to the mushrooms she’d love her mother to buy, and asks if she can please have one to eat right now. The little girl has huge brown eyes, full black hair, and a smile that fills up her face. Her mother smiles and apologizes, a little embarrassed, shaking her head.

“She loves them,” she says, shrugging. “I don’t know where she gets it.”

As they walk away, the little girl is munching happily on a raw mushroom, like a lollipop, skipping, while her mother turns to thank me, still shaking her head and shrugging.

I don’t know what the future holds for these children. I worry about all of them. But just like Denny with his pitchfork, showing 9-year-old me something I’d never seen or imagined before, I hope to maybe awaken in them a spark of curiosity, or even some old ancestral spirit.

And then I leave it to the universe to get them where they need to be.