Thank a Farmer: Passion for mushrooms leads couple to start Fungi Meadows

A couple of years ago, Logansport residents Matt and Michelle Kennedy’s daughter, then a tween, expressed interest in mushrooms. She loved anything with mushrooms on it, mushroom themed items and drawing mushrooms.

It was that interest that led to her and Matt starting to grow mushrooms, which took off into their current day business Fungi Meadows.

Yet, despite that interest, Matt said their now-teenage daughter will not eat mushrooms.

At Fungi Meadows, the Kennedys grow edible mushrooms lion’s mane, blue oyster, chestnut and pink oyster mushrooms on their Logansport property. Matt originally worked at Chrysler in maintenance.

Michelle works three days a week for C&J’s Gourmet Foods, a Delphi-based business that makes dip mixes and dry soups. However, she plans to make the mushroom business her full-time job.

“... this is a two person [job], and I think maybe if both of us are here, it won’t be a two people, 12, 14 hours a day job,” Michelle said. “Hopefully that will be a little slacked off because, you know, we’d both like more time with our kids, of course.”

The multi-step process to grow and harvest mushrooms starts in their barn with a liquid culture, which Matt said is basically a mushroom suspended in liquid, on agar. After two weeks, it is then transferred onto a petri dish and then into sterilized grain, where it colonizes and sterilizes the oats for another one to two weeks.

“We do all our work from liquid cultures that are gathered from different places,” Matt said. “I’ve got some... some of the blue and the darker ones are from Colorado, some of them come from Maine. We got one from North Carolina.”

After about a couple of weeks, the oats are moved into sterilized, hard wood substrate to colonize again for one to two weeks. One block of this substrate can roughly produce up to a pound and a half of mushrooms, Michelle said.

Matt and Michelle then move the blocks to an incubation room in a storage container to colonize again, and once they have fully colonized, they are taken to a fruiting room back in the barn. After another week to two weeks, they are harvested and kept in a walk-in cooler in their barn.

How long they remain in the incubation room depends on the type of mushroom, as Michelle said most of the oysters stay in for seven to ten days, while the chestnuts take about six weeks. Used blocks, or what they call spent blocks, are thrown in a compost pile on their property, and they spend around 100 blocks a week, Michelle said.

“Next year, we can sell it for compost because it’s wood and mushroom, mushroom mycelium and well, just compost,” Michelle said. “It’s great for potted plants, gardens, helps to enrich the soil plus helps contain moisture in it.”

The pair harvest mushrooms twice a day all year, although winters are rougher because they do not have the heavier markets. Matt said they like to grow mushrooms based on their textures, flavors and how appealing they are to the eye.

“I took the class to be an identification expert and I have harvested oyster mushrooms and then grown them but... our oysters here are boring,” Matt said. “They’re pale-colored, they’re real thin.”

Michelle usually comes out at 7 a.m. to leave for work and makes a batch of substrate, which she said they make two batches of a day. Depending on how early she gets out to the barn, sometimes she will take mushrooms in from incubation. Matt does grain transfers throughout the day and also brings them out to incubation, she said.

When they end their routine depends on the day, but Michelle said Fridays usually start between 6:30 to 7 a.m. and end between 8 and 9 p.m., with these nights spent packaging for Saturday markets. Usually, they each take 30 pounds to markets and sell out, she said.

They take these mushrooms to farmers markets in Fishers, West Lafayette and Lafayette, which are sold in four different sized boxes. A pound of mushrooms costs $17, a half pound costs $10 and a quarter costs $5, Matt said. They also offer a variety box that has multiple types of mushrooms.

“We try to offer not just a variety in our mushrooms, but, you know, if you haven’t had them before, you don’t want to spend a ton of money, five bucks isn’t terrible...,” Matt said.

In addition to their mushrooms, Matt said they also sell the blocks of wood substrate for people to grow their own mushrooms on, along with dried mushrooms and mushroom powder, at farmers markets. They also deliver their mushrooms to Oscar’s Pizza in Kokomo, Convivio in Carmel and Zionsville, and Black Sparrow in Lafayette for use in their cooking, Matt said.

They also sell them at the Sunspot Natural Market in West Lafayette and Kokomo, and Michelle said they previously sold them at the D&R Market in Logansport. She said word of mouth is usually how people find out about them.

“We had somebody contact us today, I have no idea how he heard about us, and he’s like, ‘I want to buy a pound of mushrooms.’ And we’re like, ‘okay, we’ll meet you tomorrow in Kokomo,’” Michelle said.

Michelle said their business is growing, with Fungi Meadows growing up to about 150 to 200 pounds of mushrooms a week. With their business growing, they were able to buy two more autoclaves and build a walk-in cooler.

Matt and Michelle hope to build a facility, as they have quickly run out of room in their current setup. Michelle said they would like to build something that is a little more fluent due to their current system of transferring them from place to place not being time efficient. She also hopes to pick up a few more restaurants.

“And it’s a lot of work, you know, so we would like to see a building get built, hopefully,” Michelle said.

Michelle’s favorite memory with the Fungi Meadows business was watching the first mushroom grow, and seeing how fast they grow is still rewarding to them to this day. But one part of the business she enjoys is going to farmers markets and educating people on mushrooms.

“A lot of people don’t know them because they’ve never been around, you know, they haven’t been at farmers markets, so people don’t know what to do with them a lot of the times,” Michelle said. “You can cook them just like a button mushroom. They’re super simple, just sauté them, or you can get as fancy as you want.”

Fungi Meadows can be found on their Facebook and Instagram pages.