11/26/22, 10:42 AM Fungi for all the fam­ily: Kew lead­ing the trend for grow­ing mush­rooms

Fungi for all the fam­ily: Kew lead­ing the trend for
grow­ing mush­rooms

The Guardian · 26 Nov 2022 · 35 · Helena Hor­ton Envir­on­ment reporter

An increas­ing num­ber of garden­ers are grow­ing mush­rooms in their veget­able

patches in order to improve soil qual­ity and grow food in small spaces.

There are now mush­rooms grow­ing in the kit­chen garden at Kew Gar­dens in
south-west Lon­don and vis­it­ors have been very inter­ested in grow­ing their
own.
Helena Dove, head kit­chen gardener at Kew, says: “Mush­rooms have seen a
great rise in pop­ular­ity in recent years, and we’ve seen a huge amount of
interest from vis­it­ors since we installed our new mush­room beds in Kew’s kit­-
chen garden this autumn.
“Much of the interest comes from grow­ing a food in what is typ­ic­ally an
unused space – the shade below a tree or even a shed. For those without a
garden, mush­rooms can be grown very eas­ily indoors, and as pre-inocu­lated
kits are easy to grow, it is a suc­cess­ful crop for those who don’t yet have green
fin­gers. It is also rel­at­ively hard to find a wide vari­ety of mush­rooms in the

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11/26/22, 10:42 AM Fungi for all the fam­ily: Kew lead­ing the trend for grow­ing mush­rooms

shops, whereas grow­ing your own opens up a world of choice. Aware­ness is

also grow­ing around the poten­tial risks that for­aging from the wild can pose to
fra­gile eco­sys­tems, and grow­ing your own can help reverse this trend”.
The Royal Hor­ti­cul­tural Soci­ety (RHS) plans to cre­ate a fungi dis­play at Chelsea
flower show for the first time. Lor­raine Caley, who foun­ded her mush­room-
grow­ing com­pany in 2018, will be show­ing her oyster mush­rooms in the Great
Pavil­ion in May, after more and more people expressed interest in grow­ing
fungi.
She and her sis­ter star­ted grow­ing mush­rooms at their Sus­sex home as they
could not find the exotic vari­et­ies they like to eat in their local super­mar­ket.
“That was only because back in 2018, we phys­ic­ally couldn’t get the gour­met
mush­rooms we wanted to eat. We changed our diet because our dad was
poorly, and we wanted to expand from the but­ton mush­room,” Caley said.
“We’d seen this stuff online and just star­ted grow­ing for ourselves. But then
we had so much demand, and it was people’s curi­os­ity that forced us to then
start mak­ing our own kits. Then, in lock­down, every­one we sup­plied fresh
mush­rooms to wanted their own kits to grow them at home. It’s been phe­-
nom­enal.”
The pair used cof­fee grounds as a sub­strate, and also grow the fungi out of
wood. Now they have been approached by Chelsea garden­ers to sup­ply mush­-
rooms and have given some of their kits to the kit­chen garden at Kew.
“I can’t believe how much interest we have had,” Caley said.
Part of the reason her mush­room kits have been so suc­cess­ful is that they can
be grown any­where, whether that is out­doors in a veget­able patch or in the kit­-
chen of a small flat.
“You can then take your kit and put it into the garden where it will then get you
more nutri­ents for your soil,” said Caley.
“At Kew, we’ve installed an out­side mush­room bed, and that’s nine dif­fer­ent
mush­rooms that can be grown in seven dif­fer­ent medium – so mush­room
beds, totems, logs, straw bales … We were try­ing to encour­age people with
space to go out­side but you can also put a couple of logs on your bal­cony. Or if
you’ve just got a small flat, like I have, you can grow in your kit­chen as well.”
Fungi are cru­cial for the health of the soil. While we see the caps of a mush­-
room, these are only a small part of the organ­ism. Under the ground, they cre­-
ate a liv­ing net­work called a mycelium, which helps the soil.

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11/26/22, 10:42 AM Fungi for all the fam­ily: Kew lead­ing the trend for grow­ing mush­rooms

“This con­di­tions soil and it breaks down the detritus on the ground and takes it
down into the soil and that helps enrich it. And you get a lot of worms. It also
aer­ates the soil, and it cre­ates the con­di­tions you need for soil biod­iversity,”
Caley said.

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