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There’s something about mushrooms — their ruffled, top-hatted oddball beauty; their earthy to aquatic flavors; and their mind-blowing filamentous lives — that make a certain kind of person fall in love with them.
Rhysa Ferris fell hard at 16.
She actually developed a crush at least two years earlier after shopping with girlfriends who were spending their babysitting money on lip gloss and nail polish. Ferris bought a mycology book.
She read it, and read it again. And again.
At 16, when she moved into her first apartment, she turned a spare room into a mycology laboratory. It was a warren of petri dishes intermingled with nests of grain and straw where spores could mate and turn into a network of mycelium — the underpinning of mushrooms.
Watching that network unfurl into mushrooms was this teenaged girl’s dream.
“I wasn’t even that interested in the actual mushrooms. It was the purpose, the whole cycle behind them that I found so interesting,” Ferris, now 43, said with 27 years of hindsight.
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SUBSCRIBEFerris, who now bears the title of Mad Scientist at Monumental Mushrooms, a gourmet mushroom business in Palisade, is still mesmerized by the diploids, haploids, zygotes, sterigmata and primordia that make up a mushroom’s cycle.
She also loves the fact that mushrooms are in their own kingdom — more genetically similar to humans than to plants.
She is not alone with her obsession over what some mushroom growers call “functional mushrooms” — the kind that are great in the kitchen, but not the psychoactive variety that is making a big splash in Colorado since voters approved the use of psychedelic mushrooms.
Growers of culinary mushrooms say their gourmet mushrooms have as much magic as the “magic mushrooms” that are currently grabbing all the headlines.
“My aunt gave me a mushroom book when I was 14. It blew my mind,” said Alexis Marie Murray, president of the Colorado Mycological Society. “Before then, I just thought they were really cute. I would draw them and I would collect mushroom trinkets.”
Murray said, like space exploration, there are so many things still unknown about the kingdom of mushrooms that she expects mushroom “nerds” will never run out of new mycological fascinations.
Murray, 32, said mushroom hunting and farming is drawing younger people. In the past five years, millennials and Gen Zers have significantly boosted the membership in the Mycological Society that used to be the purview of older folks.
The social media Cottagecore aesthetic that leans heavily on woodland sprites, flowery dresses, and foresty vibes has helped propel the boom in mushroom interest, Murray said.
On the other end of the spectrum, horror-genre fungi are also capturing the attention of a wider audience and likely creating a whole new class of mycophobes — that is those who find mushrooms and fungus frightening.
“The Last of Us” television and video game series highlight a world where a fungus is colonizing brains and turning humans into zombie cannibals.
The wide world of fungi
The world of gourmet mushrooms flips that script for those who like nothing better than a seared lion’s mane in wine sauce or a blue oyster crostini. In Colorado, there are at least 100 varieties of edible mushrooms to choose from.
Worldwide, there are an estimated 14,000 mushroom species out of 2 million to 3 million species of fungi overall. The fungi class includes the less popular molds and harmful types of fungus (back to those zombie cannibals).
In the culinary mushroom world, it’s the job of growers like Ferris to tease out delicious and beautiful edibles from the billions of microscopic spores that are constantly carried by wind, water or animals until they land on a suitable substrate such as wood, soil or decaying material.
When spores germinate, they grow into threadlike structures that branch out and form the network called mycelium. As the mycelium matures, it begins to form knots — if the temperature, humidity and light are right.
The knots form tiny “pinheads” that also need adequate moisture, fresh air and the right temperatures to transform into mature mushrooms exhibiting the typical stems, gills, caps and cups.
“Typical” may not be a word appropriate to a species that can resemble frozen waterfalls, ocean waves, red-carpet-gown ruffles, sombreros, oysters and fronds.
Mushrooming interest
There are at least a dozen commercial Colorado gourmet mushroom farms from Durango to Fort Collins that are populated by mushroom enthusiasts who provide chefs and markets with gourmet mushrooms.
Murray knows there are likely hundreds more spawning fungi in home basements, sheds and backyards.
She said they mostly fall in the camp of “mushroom weirdos.”
Tylor Berreth owns Alpine Valley Mushrooms in Saguache with his wife, Danielle, and has a 3-year-old son named Boletus. He said he can relate to all this mycological fascination.
“I definitely consider myself at the fringe,” Berreth said.
Berreth has taken his mushroom fixation to a new level with mushroom landscaping.
He has a side gig landscaping yards with mushrooms that will give homeowners a unique alternative to grass, and an edible eye-catcher to boot.
“Yes, mushroom growers can be kind of an oddball group. Mushrooms are a niche thing,” said Luci Womack, co-owner of Hazel Dell mushroom farm a short jaunt from Interstate 25 near Fort Collins.
Murray believes the COVID-19 pandemic gave mushroom cultivating a big boost because people had time outdoors to look around and question, “What the heck is this?” They had time to study mycology and maybe to build labs and grow areas in spare spaces.
Murray said the mushrooming of mushroom interest is propelled by gourmet cooking, fungi health effects and, most recently, by some mushrooms’ psychedelic properties.
Colorado is currently in the process of issuing licenses for “healing centers” that will offer psychedelic mushrooms to treat a variety of mental problems. Grow kits seeded with magic mushroom spores are being sold. And anyone in the state 21 and older can now legally grow, use and share psychoactive mushrooms for personal use.
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Some commercial gourmet mushroom operations make medicinal mushroom tinctures, but they steer clear of the magic “shrooms.” Their mission is focused on growing the tastiest, showiest mushrooms that take fungi far beyond the traditional buttons in beef bourguignon or the ubiquitous stuffed rounds on appetizer platters.
“I err on the side of beauty. The product has to be gorgeous,” said Ferris as she cuddled and patted a newborn-sized bag of substrate that is the sawdust and soy pellet medium for propagating spores she hopes will sprout into delicate blue-edged trumpets.
Berreth’s pride and joy is a mushroom with white flesh and a pearlescent sheen that he calls the Salida. Berreth said that Boletus found the mushroom near the Arkansas River in Salida when he was toddling around at the age of 1. Berreth decided to propagate it in his former bakery/café that he turned into his mushroom-growing operation three years ago. The Salida Pearl is now one of his most in demand mushrooms among the 50 pounds of fungi he produces weekly.
Hazel Dell, which was established in 1995 well before the gourmet mushroom wave steamrolled across the culinary scene, grows 14 varieties — up to 8,000 pounds a week. The biggest seller is the relatively unexotic shitakes that are in high demand at Whole Foods and Sprouts stores in four states.
A monument to mycology
Ferris can produce 500 pounds of mushrooms a week from a former woodworking shop perched on a hill a quick walk from downtown Palisade.
The 6,000-square-foot metal building has no sign because visitors aren’t welcomed at a mushroom grow facility where sterility is key. Developing mushrooms can get infected as easily as kindergartners at a school picnic during cold season.
A cream-colored 1969 Lincoln Continental parked out front is the only indication that perhaps something cool is going on inside the nondescript building. The sleek, finned coupe also drops a hint about Ferris’ other skills and interests.
Ferris has degrees in auto mechanics and diesel engines. She has rebuilt motorcycles and cars and retrofitted farm equipment at her uncle’s seed corn operation. She has “Frankensteined” castoff parts for her fungi operation.
Monumental Mushrooms is a monument to Ferris’ ingenuity and quirkiness. There is a sterilizing autoclave she has named R2-D2 and a party tent wrapped in thick plastic to serve as a sterile mushroom grow room. Her grandpa’s 115-year-old scale squats on a table to weigh mushroom-grow materials and his custom-made, two-shovel scoop hangs nearby to transfer sawdust from bag to bag.
Rhysa Ferris inspects petri dishes and grain bags inoculated with mushroom strains at Monumental Mushrooms, her growing facility in Palisade. (William Woody, Special to The Colorado Sun)
A cement barrel mixer twirls spores through sawdust, and a refrigerated unit houses fresh mushrooms and hides the table where Ferris sits straight-backed, filling notebook after notebook with details of how the spores are performing magic all around her.
In what were formerly offices for builders, there are isolation rooms for mushroom grow bags that she suspects could be infected and there are her laboratories behind signs that warn “Cuidado, Do Not Enter.”
Ferris’ indispensable helper, Maria Elena Padilla, is busy weighing and bagging grain and sawdust into bags that serve as incubators once Ferris inoculates them from carefully chosen spores that will birth mushrooms.
Padilla’s son Angel is there to sling the heavy sacks of pellets and to keep the place clean and organized.
There is also an in-house business whiz named Marc Hebert. He is Ferris’ business partner and has helped Ferris expand her previously scattered, ramshackle grow operations into a comparative empire of mycology.
Hebert moved to Palisade after retiring from 40 years as the owner of a financial consulting firm in New Hampshire. He and his wife had dreams of buying a winery or a peach orchard.
He was waylaid by mushrooms while taking a mycology class Ferris teaches at Colorado Mesa University’s Community Education Center.
“I’m here because I love a challenge,” said Hebert, who has become a mushroom gourmand.
While Ferris devotes her “motherboard” to all things mushroom and speaks in a language nearly indecipherable to all but fungophiles, Hebert drums up new customers and deals with all the regulatory hurdles of selling gourmet mushrooms.
He dreams of expanding outside the Grand Valley with products like mushroom jerky that could be shipped to widespread markets. For the time being, Monumental Mushrooms only sells mushrooms at a handful of Grand Valley markets and to local chefs. The company is not able to ship mushrooms.
Rhysa Ferris poses with her 1969 Lincoln Continental. (William Woody, Special to The Colorado Sun)Ferris and Hebert are also devoted to “mico remediation” and recycling. Their growing mediums are local. They use up the sawdust that is a leftover of production at the nearby Lincoln Woodworks shop. They also buy soy pellets from the Olathe area and use coffee bean bags from a Palisade roaster.
Monumental Mushrooms’ bags of used substrate are composted to create rich soil for gardeners and farmers in the Grand Valley.
Ferris and Hebert say sharing the love and knowledge — and the leftovers — of mushrooms is all part of being fungophiles.
Peering into Monumental Mushroom’s ready-for-market cooler makes it easy to see where that love is rooted.
There are mushrooms that look like brown chestnuts, golden trumpets, denim-blue trumpets, frothy white waves and rosy ruffles.
“This helps me to live a brilliant, adventurous, colorful life,” Ferris explained as she looked at the fruits of her labor.
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