Sheffield · Gourmet mushroom growers
Picked this morning, on your pass tonight.
A small growing room in Sheffield, growing the varieties a wholesaler can’t get to a chef fresh — for kitchens, farm shops, and anyone curious enough to ask how it’s done.
What we grow
Three standing lines, plus whatever the room is doing well.
Everything is grown to order on a weekly rhythm. Prices are per kilo, trade, including VAT, collected or delivered across Sheffield.
Lion’s Mane
Hericium erinaceus
Cascading white spines. Cooks like crab meat — sears down to a dense, faintly sweet crumb that holds a pan sauce.
£20 per kg · inc. VAT
Oysters
Pleurotus ostreatus · eryngii
King trumpet, golden, pink, pearl, and our own king hybrids. The everyday workhorse, five ways — and the one most kitchens start with.
£15 per kg · inc. VAT
Limited editions
Pholiota adiposa · Agrocybe aegerita · Lentinula edodes
Chestnut, pioppino and shiitake. Short runs in small numbers. Ask what’s fruiting this week — it changes, and that’s the point.
£20 per kg · inc. VAT
A wall of chestnuts, four days from pin to plate.
Pholiota adiposa · Sheffield
For kitchens
Tell us what you’re cooking. We’ll tell you what’s ready.
We are small on purpose. That means we can grow to your covers rather than sell you what a wholesaler has left.
First
A conversation
What’s on the menu, how much you get through in a week, and which varieties actually earn their place on the plate.
Then
A standing order
We set a weekly quantity and start blocks to match it. You get the same varieties, the same day, every week.
Every week
Picked to order
Picked for your delivery rather than pulled from a chiller — knife where it helps, twisted clear of the substrate where it doesn’t. Whatever is over-fruiting that week comes as a sample.
The growers
It was a costume store in March. Now it grows mushrooms.
Charlotte and I took the keys to a unit at Lion Works, Kelham Island, and inherited carpets, tired surfaces and absolutely none of the controlled space you need to grow gourmet mushrooms reliably. So the first stage of mushroom farming involved no mushrooms whatsoever — just stripping the place back until we could see what we had.
Five metres by four. A fruiting room, a clean lab, a corridor and a mezzanine, worked out over about sixteen visits with a tape measure — and, before that, in balsa wood on a desk. Our first test batch arrived in a heatwave and most of it was dead on delivery, which was gutting and instructive in roughly equal measure. Mushrooms are not interested in your morale.
Co-founder
Charlotte
Charlotte has run CharlArt Entertainment since 2022 — fire performance, bubbleology and flow arts at festivals, weddings and corporate events, plus hoop classes for anyone who fancies a go.
Years of teaching rooms full of mixed ages and abilities turns out to be precisely the skill a grow-kit workshop needs. The workshops at Lion Works are hers, and they are the reason we would rather you came and built a kit than had one posted to you.
Co-founder
Duncan
Duncan runs Myrmekes, an independent IT hardware support and procurement business, which is less of a leap than it sounds.
A fruiting room is an environmental-control problem — temperature, airflow, carbon dioxide and humidity, all monitored, all capable of quietly ruining a week. That is uncomfortably close to the day job. He keeps the logs and writes the journal.
The build
Three months in, and not a single mushroom.
Five metres by four, stripped back to the block and rebuilt as a fruiting room, a clean lab, a corridor and a mezzanine. Everything below happened before a single mushroom was grown.
Proposed layout, not to scale
Drawn on 26 March, once the unit was empty enough to measure properly. Fruiting room on one side, lab on the other, cold room panels forming the walls between them, and two doors positioned so you never open the fruiting room straight onto the outside air.
Everything that got built came off this sheet of paper.
Fruiting room — 3m × 3m × 2.2m
The whole unit — 5m × 4m
February
Built it small first
Before any of it was real, it was balsa wood on a desk. Fitting two rooms, a corridor and a mezzanine into a space this size is easier to argue about at one-twentieth scale.
March
Someone else’s costumes
We took the keys to a unit that had been storing costumes for events. Their banner was still on the wall. Before anything else could happen, every last piece of it had to go.
March
Carpets up, walls back
Removing carpets, cleaning floors, washing walls, and stripping the place until we could see what we were actually working with.
April
Rooms inside a room
Cold room panels went up against timber bracing to make two sealed spaces you can actually control. The lab was finished by the end of May — just in time for the heatwave that killed the first batch.
Journal
What the room taught us this month.
Growing notes, failures included. If you want to have a go yourself, start here.
-
Why We Want People to Make Their Own Mushroom Grow Kits
We do not want our grow kits to be anonymous boxes that arrive with a sheet of instructions. Our plan is to begin with…
-
What Our First Crop Taught Us About Temperature Control
Our first test batch arrived during hot weather, and many of the blocks were already in poor condition. It was a frustrating start, but…
-
From Costume Store to Mushroom Farm: Building My Mushrooms in Kelham Island
In March, our unit at Lion Works was still a former costume store. What followed was a proper bootstrapping project: donated cold-room panels, second-hand…
The rest of the time
Mushrooms are not the only thing the two of us do.
Charlotte
CharlArt Entertainment
Bubbleology, flow art and hoop performance and classes, for festivals, weddings and corporate events across Sheffield.
Duncan
Myrmekes
Independent IT hardware support, technology procurement and engineering resource for businesses that need a straight answer.
Also on LinkedIn: Myrmekes Ltd · Duncan’s profile