Raglan foragers Emily Eldin and Sean Mills' new business, Mushrooms by the Sea, has mushroomed out of lockdown and is taking them on a wild journey.
The real-estate agent and hospitality worker couple were foraging for wild edible mushrooms during the first lockdown in March 2020.
Little did they know the fresh pink and grey oyster mushrooms that they then decided to have a go at themselves would soon be selling out at Waikato farmers' markets.
Photo: Mushrooms by the Sea
Living next to a farm full of paddock mushrooms, the pair became curious about their fungi neighbours and dug into some research.
“Then we discovered oyster mushrooms and got a growing kit ourselves and then just got fascinated and went down the rabbit hole from there,” Sean tells Kathryn Ryan.
By then, Emily says she was out of work because of the lockdown and so Sean suggested they try this venture out.
“We just thought originally it’d be a good idea for Emily to do instead of going to back to hospitality,” Sean says.
“I met a mushroom grower not long after the first lockdown and found out there was no one doing the farmers markets in Waikato, Hamilton or Cambridge so we knew there was an opportunity there and just went for it.”
With the help of a couple of books and a lot of YouTube videos, they undertook their own trial and error of growing mushrooms on wood.
Sean says they found the best efficiency when using sawdust.
“That’s just the way we can grow large amounts in a small space, because the mycelium of the mushrooms will colonise the sawdust much faster than an unbroken down log.
“You can definitely grow mushrooms on logs, we sell spawn which you can plug into a freshly cut log and it will grow mushrooms if it’s kept in a nice shady spot, but the turnaround time for that is about 12 months compared to 10 days on the sawdust.”
“But it [mushrooms on sawdust] also produces for a longer time,” Emily adds.
Demand is outstripping supply and they’ve had to invest in growing their space, they say.
“We did realise pretty quickly the high demand,” Emily says.
“But what really took off was the last time the 2021 level four [lockdown was imposed] and obviously we had to stop going to farmers’ market, because they were closed for quite some time.
“So we just started posting on social media and the website just took off from there, and that’s why we haven’t been back to farmers’ markets apart from our local one here in Raglan.”
They are also selling growbags and dried powder products as seasoning for dishes and moving into the field of medicinal mushrooms.
“We do lion’s mane powder which there’s lots of studies on that, that is not for cooking, that is more for health benefits. You have it in the morning with your coffee or your smoothie,” Emily says.
“We’re working on more; as we develop more mushrooms, we’ll get more dried products out there.”
In addition to grey oyster and pink oyster mushroom products, they’re looking to scale up on shiitake mushrooms.
“We’re just working on building up our stock of them at the moment, and we’ve just done a pretty successful trial on a homegrown kit for the shiitake ones as well,” Sean says.
The pair are now operating the business full time and haven’t looked back since their days at the farmers’ market.
