Our mushroom man, Shawn, has arrived and here is the proof!
With his help, we have spent a long time and put in a lot of hard work to prepare the farm for growing mushrooms. We have made many changes to the various stages of mushroom cultivation including the lab, incubation room, and grow room. Mushrooms are finicky organisms and all our hard efforts are finally starting to be realized!
Just as trees bear fruit and plants bear flowers, fungi bear mushrooms. The culinary delicacy we are familiar with - the mushroom - is the height of growth, just as the flower is on a plant. The body of the mushroom is actually the microscopically colonized substrate from which it grows. The mushroom body breaks down this substrate into nutritious food; in a sense it is similar to the soil that provides nutrients and holds water for a plant. Mushrooms are, believe it or not, more closely related to animals than plants. Wherever you may see them growing, it just may have been the result of the stars aligning, for they require just the right conditions to grow. Here at Paradise Farms, we are growing oyster mushrooms, a versatile mushroom delicious grilled, roasted, sautéed. . .so many ways!
Not only versatile in culinary dishes, it is a medicinal mushroom that has shown activity against cancer and high cholesterol. They can also break down petroleum products into harmless compounds (using fungi to clean up the environment is a field known as mycoremediation).
Shawn fruited this bag early. As they say, the proof is in the pudding and I can say that with a little butter, salt, onion and garlic, the “pudding” (in this case mushrooms) is delicious! Full production will shortly be underway! Our tummies and taste buds await anxiously.
