Fun growing fungi
Mushrooms having a pandemic moment across city
Growing mushrooms has become a pandemic produce hit and a do-it-yourself obsession.
And Mushroom Queens couldn’t be happier.
The satisfaction of growing your own produce is what prompted Adam Novzen and his brother Jeffrey to start the year-old farm that provides mushrooms to restaurants across the five boroughs, and sells mushrooms and DIY grow kits to devotees at farmers markets around the city.
But even before the pair opened their farm, Adam Novzen was growing mushrooms as a hobby in his Astoria apartment.
“Luckily my roommate was living with his girlfriend, so I had an extra room segmented off to grow them in,” he says. “When I started giving reishis, lion’s manes and shiitake mushrooms to friends they were blown away by how good they tasted.”
Mushrooms are having their moment, though most people are only familiar with a couple of the 40 cultivatable mushroom varieties that are packed with Vitamins D and B as well as other immune-boosting nutrients.
Growing mushrooms on the kitchen counter only requires a grow kit that contains mycelium — the living organism from which mushrooms grow — a darkish space and a reminder to spray your kit with water every few days.
Beginners should start with oyster mushrooms, but may graduate to versatile fungi including shiitake, lion’s mane and king trumpet mushrooms.
Most mushroom kits come with a “grow block” in a plastic bag filled with dirt. The only maintenance you need to do is to spray the holes in the bags with water a few times a day.
“During the pandemic, people are continuing to look for things they can learn to grow,” says Edward Hall, co-owner with his wife, Annie Apparu-Hall, of Mushrooms.NYC, a three-year-old farm once based in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, that recently relocated to the North Fork of Long Island. The farm sells mushrooms and grow kits at farmer’s markets, restaurants and at the Park Slope Food Coop.
For Apparu-Hall and other mushroom farmers, the stability that comes with growing fungi appeals the most.
“The reason I got so excited about the prospect of being an urban mushroom farmer is that I was seven months pregnant with our second child and the idea of creating a food secure network within the city limits appealed to me,” she says. “As a parent of young children, knowing that protein is available nearby is essential to one’s mental well-being. I’m so grateful to have joined the fungi network.”