milton mushrooms

MARITA SMITH DEVOTES HER DAYS TO WONDERFUL FUNGI.

Mushrooms have plenty of virtues, not least that they can grow anywhere: a tree stump, a plastic bucket, a damp room in your old sharehouse. (And they don’t need soil, either.) So, when Marita Smith had to evacuate her family farm from the New South Wales bushfires last summer, she could load her mushroom cultures into a car and hightail it to safer ground.

“We were very lucky in that sense,” Marita says. “I have friends who couldn’t just move their gardens, and they’ve lost them all.” Marita did lose some of the shed infrastructure she used for Milton Mushrooms, the small business she founded in 2014, as well as a few months’ worth of work. “None of us could get home. On the worst fire day, we slept in our cars by the harbour. We thought everything was gone. It was horrendous.”

Things are slowly getting back to normal along the New South Wales South Coast, thanks in part to an outpouring of community support via bushfire campaigns like Spend With Them. “That’s been so amazing and heartening,” Marita says. She's just gotten back to her lab at the farm, where she’s also building a tiny house. Not exactly the farmer stereotype, Marita calls herself a “big science nerd” – she’s even authored two young-adult science-fiction books.

“I think, statistically, the average Australian farmer is a middle-aged white male,” she says. “So, being a 30-year-old science graduate and gay lady with a little mushroom farm is definitely different.” Marita didn’t plan to be a farmer, even when her parents moved the family from Sydney to a 100-acre property just outside Milton. But after studying science at uni, she couldn’t bring herself to begin her planned PHD. Instead, she spent a year WWOOFING in the UK (a program for living and learning on organic farms), where she fell in love with the routine of gardening, writing and eating lovely, locally grown produce.

“I realised I could have that life if I wanted. I didn’t have to do a PHD and be super-stressed,” Marita says. Returning home to Milton, she took a mushroom course run by Milkwood Permaculture. “I loved that it drew on all the skills I’d developed at uni, but I was also growing a nutritious product.”

Marita fashioned a ridgy-didge mushroom-growing laboratory, first out of her caravan, then her parents’ shed. She learnt to make mushroom cultures by growing mycelium (a thread-like fungus) on a combination of MILO, dry dog food, brown rice and agar agar (a jelly made from algae). Mushrooms sprout from the concoction when it’s mixed through sawdust or coffee grounds, which she sources from her brother’s nearby cafe. “It’s cool that you can grow something so good for you with very basic materials,” Marita says. “Every household could have a bucket of mushrooms in the backyard.”

These days, Marita focuses on medicinal mushroom products, like reishi powder, which is thought to have immune-boosting properties and can be added to coffee or tea. Mushrooms are totally having a moment, she says, because people are discovering all the rad things they can do. Clever folks are using fungi to decontaminate polluted land, make sustainable packaging, and provide quick-growing food to communities hit by disaster. “There’s been a resurgence of that sort of research,” Marita adds.

But what if you don’t rate mushies? “I think a lot of people have been scarred by soggy supermarket mushrooms,” she says. “But they’re so flavoursome when they’re fresh, cooked with butter or coconut oil and a bit of salt and pepper. I love them so much, especially when I can pop outside in the morning, pick them and chuck them in a pan. I'm never going to get sick of that feeling.”