A windowless garage might not sound like the best spot to grow food, yet Joel Orchard is doing just that.
Out the back of his Lismore rental, in northern New South Wales,Joel and his sister Chez are "vertically farming" inside their shed — growing enough nutritious oyster mushrooms in stacked buckets to feed both themselves and their local community.
It was a hobby born out of the COVID-19 pandemic, which grew into a small local food business. Each bucket yields about a month's supply of mushrooms for a small family, Joel says.
He believes almost anyone can grow their own mushrooms in reusable buckets —even folks with limited space or no room at all for a veggie patch.
We spoke with Joel, who's also founder of the Young Farmers Connect non-profit, to find out more.
What's the basic process of growing mushrooms in buckets?
You need to give the mushrooms something to eat — we use organic sugarcane mulch. So we firstly pasteurise the sugarcane mulch using hot water or lime.
The pasteurised mulch then gets packed into a 20-litre bucket that's been pre-drilled with small holes, which is where the mushrooms will grow out of. As we're packing the buckets, we sprinkle in some inoculated grains that contain mushroom mycelium.
In about 20 days' time the mycelium will have colonised all the straw and be starting to fruit — that's when the mushrooms pop out of the holes in the bucket.
Does the bucket-growing method avoidsingle-use plastics?
Yes.I'm really passionate about reducing single-use waste through the entire system, because the majority of gourmet mushrooms are grown in essentially a single-use plastic sock.
We've replaced that sock with buckets that we can wash and reuse indefinitely.
It's also avoiding packaging. These days I go to the supermarket and see mushrooms from who-knows-where wrapped in plastic, on polystyrene trays, and I think: "These are miserable excuses for mushrooms!"
Is it easy to learn to grow mushrooms,especially for folks in urban areas or without much space?
A great place to start is to go online and look for a mushroom-growing kit. They're so easy to do as a kind of taster.
And then once you're ready to try growing in buckets, with less waste, there's so many resources. You can do workshops online and in-person all over Australia. I used Facebook forums to fast-track my learning.
Pasteurisation is probably the only challenging thing for kitchen-scale mushroom growing, but you can do it in a big saucepan on the stove. Or you can use lime.
The advantage of growing in buckets is you can stack them about five or six high, so really maximising small spaces. Our whole mushroom farm sits in our garage — we're almost vertical farming.
I guess our little vision was: "Can we pay the rent from the mushrooms that we grow in the garage?"
We're at that point now. We also knew we couldn't invest heavily in infrastructure or build anything, because we're in a rental. So we managed to make it really low tech.
What are the benefits of growing your own gourmet mushrooms?
When you haven't got much room to grow food, growing mushrooms makes sense. They're expensive, so you've probably saved yourself quite a lot of dollars. And they're really nutritious.
I've never in all my life been able to afford to eat so many gourmet mushrooms. We'll have friends over for dinner and cook a massive rich, creamy pasta with mushrooms —it's like $100 worth of mushrooms, just amazing.
We also dry the mushrooms and make them into salts and seasonings. And we make a bit of mushroom jerky, which is delicious.
You've converted half your rental property to produce veggies, meat and edible insects?
Yes! Often people feel they can't grow food when they live in rentals. We've proven that you can.
We grow our own ducks for meat in the backyard, we've got chooks for eggs, we've got the mushrooms and so many veggies too. More than we can eat, so we share some for free on our little garden gate stall.
We also grow crickets for protein and then roast them in the oven. They're deliciously crunchy, like a wafer biscuit — nice on a pizza, in a stir fry, or baked into cookies or bread. Chocolate-coated crickets are amazing.
Growing food to me feels like a really tangible form of activism. It's such a powerful way to reduce our impact on the earth,reducing huge amounts of waste and the carbon required for food production.
I take so much joy and power from being self-sufficient and able to provide for others.
My advice is to just start. Start with anything — there is no space too small to grow something.
This article contains general information only.Mushrooms can be toxic and deadly, so only grow and consume mushrooms that are safe to eat and not foraged or found.
Koren Helbig is a storyteller who practises permaculture and grows organic food in the backyard of her small urban Kaurna Land (Adelaide) home.
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