When Charlotte and I took the keys to our space at Lion Works in March, it would have required a fairly generous imagination to call it a mushroom farm.
The previous occupant had used the unit to store costumes for events. We therefore began with a useful building in a brilliant location, but also with carpets, tired surfaces and absolutely none of the controlled growing spaces needed to produce gourmet mushrooms reliably.
So the first stage of mushroom farming involved no mushrooms whatsoever. It involved removing carpets, cleaning floors, washing walls and stripping the unit back until we could see what we were actually working with.
The space is only about eight metres by five metres. That forced us to think carefully. On the ground floor we have divided it into two rooms and a corridor, with a mezzanine above for storage. The largest room is the fruiting room, while the smaller room is the lab where the clean work happens.
It sounds quite neat when written down like that. In practice, it took around fifteen or sixteen visits to the site, a great many decisions made with a tape measure in hand, and a constant effort to make the money stretch further than it reasonably wanted to.
A proper bootstrapping project
We have built My Mushrooms with very limited cash, so buying everything new was never an option. Fortunately, we have been surrounded by people who understood what we were trying to do and wanted to help.
The cold-room panels used to construct the fruiting room were donated. We found the joists and flooring for the mezzanine through Facebook Marketplace at a price we could afford. UPVC doors were donated, as were parts of the mechanical and electrical setup, including fans and ducting. Friends gave us time, practical advice, painting help, cleaning help and the occasional push to keep going.
Without that support, the farm would not exist in its present form.
That has probably been the nicest surprise in the whole process. We chose Lion Works partly because the space was affordable and the practical arrangement made sense for a young business. What we did not fully appreciate at the start was how important the Kelham Island Arts Collective community would become.
We are surrounded by artists, makers, sculptors and other interesting people doing unusual things. A mushroom farm is perhaps not the most obvious addition to that mix, but we have been made to feel welcome from the beginning.
Building a controlled environment inside an old factory
Mushrooms do not care that a building has character. They care about temperature, humidity, fresh air, cleanliness and consistency.
The breeze-block walls needed plastering and a specially formulated waterproof coating. The fruiting room needed to be insulated and washable. The mezzanine had to be strong enough to support the weight of inoculated blocks. We then needed sensors, ventilation, shelving and a lab that could be kept properly clean.
My background is in IT, data centres and controlled environments, which is not quite the route into farming I imagined when I was younger. I always wanted to be a farmer, accidentally went into IT, and have now ended up building a controlled-environment mushroom farm in Sheffield. That kind of happened.
The technical background helps, but mushrooms have their own way of exposing the gaps between a sensible design and real life. A reading on a sensor is useful; understanding what the crop is telling you is something else entirely.
The first version, not the finished version
By the end of May, the lab was largely complete and we were ready to bring in our first test batch of blocks. That felt like a major milestone, because the unit had finally started to look and behave like a farm rather than a building project.
It was not the end of the build. It was the point at which a new set of problems became visible.
That is probably the most honest way to describe My Mushrooms at this stage. We have built the first functioning version of the farm. There is still finishing work to do, systems to improve and plenty to learn, but every visit takes us a little further away from an empty costume store and closer to a reliable source of locally grown gourmet mushrooms.
We intend to keep documenting that process—the useful parts, the mistakes, the donated materials, the failed experiments and the small victories. There is already enough glossy farming content online. We would rather show what building a tiny urban mushroom farm actually looks like.
If you are a Sheffield restaurant, café or farm shop interested in trying our mushrooms—or if you simply want to follow the build—you are very welcome to get in touch.