About Southwest Mushrooms

I am a small mushroom grower in Santa Fe, NM. The process started about 15 years ago with a 2 day seminar I took from Paul Stamets. After the seminar my mind was reeling with the possibilities growing mushrooms could take in my life. I started by dutifully transferring 7 strains of mushrooms from the test tubes I had received at the seminar to various growing mediums. It all started as a hobby that I was quite frankly, not very good at. Slowly my successes began to be more prevalent and each one was such a delight. I kept moving forward, trying to figure out what mushrooms I could grow here in New Mexico using our local inputs as fruiting substrates. I had my initial success with growing oyster mushrooms about 14 years ago and then decided that I had to grow shiitake mushrooms, after about 3 years of trying I started to have predictable successes with the shiitakes as well and occasionally was able to attend the farmers market in Santa Fe with small offerings of oyster and shiitake mushrooms. The response from the patrons of the market was very good, I soon realized that I did not have enough mushrooms and was repeatedly asked to grow more, so using my local community’s help, I started building one mushroom room, a cook room for sterilizing and inoculation, then a second fruiting room, then an incubation room, a prefruting room and finally a walk in refrigerator (coolbot). My vending at the Santa Fe Farmers Market slowly became more and more reliable- I now attend regularly! 6 years ago I started making a mushroom soup with all the trimmings from the shiitake mushrooms, it is delicious and a big hit with the regular market shoppers and tourists alike and it gives me great pleasure to give everyone who has the soup a medicinal dose of shiitake mushrooms. I had always been curious about growing medicinal mushrooms (Let’s face it-ALL mushrooms are medicinal) so I started trying to grow them, so far so good, Lion’s Mane, Turkey Tail and Reishi appear to be doing well here in New Mexico. I wanted to give the people around me these mushrooms in a form they could really use so I started making extracts and capsules of myceliated rice. Now I am exploring all that I can with medicinal mushrooms (new trials growing cordyceps, etc), different combinations of mushrooms and herbs and anything that moves forward the core ideal I have of nourishing myself and my community. As always I am guided by the requests of the people around me, who are an endless well of ideas on where to go next.