Master My Garden Podcast
Master My Garden Podcast
EP192- Eilís & Michael From Gaelic Fungi Farms Chat Growing Mushrooms In Carlow, Health Benefits, Growing At Home & Much More!!
Ready to embark on a captivating journey into the world of mushroom cultivation and their medicinal properties? We've got you covered! Join us as we welcome the dynamic owners of Gaelic Fungi Farm, Michael and Eilís, who reveal the intricate process of growing medicinal mushrooms like Lion's Mane and Turkey Tail. Discover how these healthy fungi are gaining popularity and the beautiful culture behind starting a mushroom farm.
Imagine balancing a unique lifestyle with the hands-on process of cultivating fungi. Michael and Eilish open up about how they juggle their world of mushroom cultivation with family life. Prepare to be amazed as we delve into the profound effects of Reishi and Lion's Mane mushrooms on mental clarity and their potential in reducing the severity of diseases like Alzheimer's and dementia. We also touch on the importance of including certain herbs in the diet and their contribution to overall health and wellness.
Finally we explore the fascinating world of Gaelic Fungi Farm's indoor kitchen countertop grow kits. Michael and Eilís walk us through the ideal climate for mushrooms, the various substrates used, and the intriguing use of rock dust to enhance flavor and health benefits. They also highlight the critical aspects of quality and environmental protection when purchasing mushroom products.
It's a fascinating chat with Eilís & Michael and its great to hear the passion they have for their product and growing in general.
You can find Gaelic Fungi farm and their amazing products here
https://www.gaelicfungifarms.ie
There will be a blog post on this episode very soon on my website. This blog and previous blogs along with all podcast episodes are available on my
Website :https://mastermygarden.com/
If there is any topic you would like covered in future episodes, please let me know.
Please like and follow Master My Garden on the following channels
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mastermygarden/
Instagram @Mastermygarden https://www.instagram.com/mastermygarden/
Twitter:https://twitter.com/tweetsbyMMG
or email info@mastermygarden.com
Until next week
Happy gardening
John
If there is any topic you would like covered in future episodes, please let me know.
Email: info@mastermygarden.com
Master My Garden Courses:
https://mastermygarden.com/courses/
Check out Master My Garden on the following channels
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mastermygarden/
Instagram @Mastermygarden https://www.instagram.com/mastermygarden/
Until next week
Happy gardening
John
How's it going everybody? Welcome to episode 192, master MacGarden Podcasts. Now, a couple of weeks ago I mentioned that over these next few weeks we might be going off topic a little bit, and this week's episode I'm delighted to be joined by Michael and Eilish from Gaelic Fungi Farm, and this is an interesting topic. As I say, strictly speaking, it's gardening vaguely gardening, I guess but fungi, mushrooms, mycelium, they're all very much related to growing and I suppose we talk a huge amount on the podcast about vegetable growing through the months and we've just had the episode a couple of weeks ago where we're talking about what to grow in September and that list is getting substantially smaller.
Speaker 1:So I think there is an opportunity here to maybe branch out a little bit and try or have a go at growing our own mushrooms at home, and the guys sell a homegrown kit, so we're going to talk about that. But also they sell some unusual mushrooms well, not unusual but highly acclaimed mushrooms like Lyons Main and that's widely claimed to have huge medicinal benefits. Turkey Tail as well, and I suppose in my house I'm a bit of a fungi fan. I've watched fantastic fungi on Netflix about five times at this stage and I always find it interesting. So I think it's going to be an interesting topic. As I say, a little bit off topic for our typical garden stuff, but, guys, you're very, very welcome to join our garden podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, John. It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 3:Thank you, John. Thank you for inviting us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're very welcome. So I suppose I only recently came across to you guys. You're not that far from me, so I'm on the east side of Kerala town and I think you guys are like on the Wexford side of Kerala town.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're just outside the town in Balan.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. Yeah, so it's great to see businesses like this and obviously, as I say, I've read a lot about Lyons Main and the benefits of that and then to see somebody producing the mushrooms themselves and drops and I think powders or tablets so close to home is quite good. So maybe tell us a little bit about your story first and how this came to be. I know it's quite a relatively new business, but tell us all about it.
Speaker 3:So we got started initially as a I suppose as a hobby at first, just to see if we can get our hands accustomed to the intricacies of growing mushrooms. I'm from California originally. That's where Eilish and I had met first, so we, like anybody else really, we got into mushrooms kind of just randomly. We all grew up accustomed to either your basic like portobello and button mushrooms, cremini mushrooms, but then, thankfully for us, being that we were living in the Bay Area in California, around the San Francisco Bay Area, you run into a beautiful eclectic mix of people and cultures and everyone has so many different ways of preparing particular dishes, and a lot of those dishes at the time for us were really aimed towards more plant based. So because of that, we were looking for great alternatives for protein and one of the biggest ones that we were always led to was usually gourmet exotic mushrooms. You know, at least in regards to the stuff that we were mostly accustomed to. So for that we would go into higher end grocery stores in order to find them and luckily enough they'd be there because there was a demand for them. There's a, as I'm sure, in any other city or any other location that you find, you'll find a nice, strong hub of people that are real conscious and real forward as to the types of produce that's available to them and what they'll ask the grocery store to order for them. So in this instance, we were able to find everything from lion's mane to oyster mushrooms, shiitake and what's another one chanterelles, and then they'd also find some seasonal things too that were, I'm sure, were probably foraged. So that's really what got us started with it, but, as with anything, especially this day and age, it started getting really expensive. You know that produce. It was wonderful to come across, but it was something that we required pretty much daily, and because of that, it started to burn a hole through our wallets and we found loads of information on the internet and we started buying more books in regards to mushrooms, a lot of them from your man, paul Stamets, one of the producers and creators of the Fantastic Fun guy that you mentioned earlier, and in these books they outlined the procedure in which how to start a mushroom farm, whether it be in a small scale to a much commercial scale. And, reading this honestly, all the ingredients that we needed were right at our local hardware store. So we just started the journey there. We just started slowly, every week, with every paycheck, we would go in and go acquire all the different pieces that these books recommended, these YouTube videos recommended.
Speaker 3:And then the most difficult thing that we found not difficult in hindsight, but at that time the most difficult thing for us to source would have been the cultures, the actual mycelium, or the mushroom cultures to create the mycelium. But the beautiful thing about fungi and about mycology and then anything that involves mushrooms is there's a beautiful community and culture revolving around it where a lot of these folks which I'm sure it's the same, when you get into heirloom farming, you get into regenerative farming, no-till farming and anything that has to do with farming. That's really you kind of find and gravitate towards your tribe and within that tribe everyone's going to have their little bits here and there on how to source particular ingredients, particular materials. So that's basically how we found them and from there we just started growing them in plastic containers in our wardrobe, and this is still in California.
Speaker 1:You're not in Ireland at this stage.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is in California and also we were really into growing our own herbs and medicinal side of things.
Speaker 2:So that was obviously a main attraction of the medicinal mushrooms and so, yeah, it was just as a hobby, just for ourselves, we would share with friends. The demand was growing quite big. Once everybody knew that we were growing it, they wanted to get some off us. You could grow a lot in your wardrobe. Surprise, yeah. But yeah, where the ideas sparked to potentially start a farm in Ireland was my dad had gotten some surgery and he had a reaction to the anesthesia. I was trying to get some lines made because his memory was just really atrocious for a few weeks and quite frightening.
Speaker 2:So I was messaging farmers or trying to find somebody online and I got absolutely zero response. So I was like, wow, there's no access to this in Ireland and obviously with the huge medicinal potential of them, a lot of people need it. Yeah, so that was the first little seed drop.
Speaker 1:And when was that?
Speaker 2:Um gosh, like maybe 2017, 18. Okay, and then we had our son in 2019. And then so he was about six months old when COVID hit and the whole city shut down and the world went mad. We decided we should leave the city and move to Ireland for so many reasons, but, yeah, that was our chance to take it to the next level.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's funny you say that because, um, lyons me and I've been, I've been reading a bit about it for a long time. I've never actually started taking it yet, um, but I've been reading about it and the benefits and potential benefits and, uh, the reason I asked when was that was? I researched it a couple of years ago and you're right, there was. You know, there was very few people that you could say, um, you know very few places you could get it. But, funny enough, now, when I, when I look it up, you guys are coming up, which is good.
Speaker 2:Great.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that was, um, as I mentioned before, the place that we would find it in, living in the Bay Area, would either be at that high end grocery stores or, on occasion, if we were to stumble upon a farmer's market, either in the Berkeley area, um, there you'd find mushroom stalls and then there they give you an array of choices to pick from, as well as all the education behind it. That's where we actually got the idea to form a, a direct to consumer business model where it's not only just having the mushrooms available but it's also educating folks on the, the, the magic, I guess you can say, of these beautiful mushrooms as the potential for healing and the potential for, um, the holistic way of utilizing the minerals and and and particular bio available chemicals that are in these mushrooms to benefit your overall health. Anything from your mind for Lyons main to your heart. Health with shiitake, your overall health with my personal favorites by the name of Rishi. Okay, yeah, so from there, as Eilish was saying, that we decided, you know, we should just uproot, move across the world and then see what we can do here in Ireland for ourselves.
Speaker 3:At first and then it was always an idea we wanted to play with, with upscaling that production from our wardrobe to just see what potential can go from there.
Speaker 3:You know, we're just with the bright idea and sure enough, you know, we decided to put the work in and we, we got access to a family farm of her, of her uncles, and and then from there we just started buying up the pieces, like we did before. You know, we utilize shipping containers and we refurbish them, and from that we just started adding little bits here and there. We created a laboratory where we do all of our mycelia work. We created a kitchen where we do all of our clean production, for the powders, for the liquids, even for preparing the grow kids. All those little pieces were so intricate and and unique to the business model that so, can I say, the attention to detail, to where we really wanted to make sure everything was done just right, before we ever got started in full production. You know. So that took a bit of took a bit of time, but we finally got there and now we're finally getting the ball rolling. You know, this year, yeah, and so you're.
Speaker 1:You're producing from what I can see from your website and correct me if I'm wrong you're producing Lionsman, rashi and Turkey Tail currently and you have grow kids and we talk about those, like the Lionsman from medicinal. From medicinal purposes, lionsman is seen, as you know, that I suppose one of the top mushrooms that you can grow. Maybe tell us a little bit about the potential benefits of Lionsman Rashi and so on?
Speaker 2:So, yeah, lionsman is definitely most famous for its cognitive support. It's a neurogenic mushroom, so it actually creates new neuro pathways in the brain there's. It's amazing now like everything's become a mainstream and all this information is easily accessed by people Because there's so much studies. There's a lot of clinical trials. It's Turkey Tail and it's cancer research. Turkey Tail contains these polysaccharides PCP and PSP and PSK, and they're been isolated and studied for their cancer killing potential. So that's a really popular one. Honestly, they're all just as popular. Rashi is native to Asia and it's known as the mushroom of immortality, so it's been used. All of these have been used in traditional Chinese medicine for thousands of years, so we have the knowledge of the ancestors and, as well, modern scientists to really back up how these work. And it's just, it's really phenomenal when you give somebody a Rashi tincture and they come back a week later almost in tears because their blood pressure has come down. They've been trying to get off pharmaceuticals for so long and it's just dramatically changed the life really quickly.
Speaker 1:And I know obviously any claims. You know you're always you have to caveat them and all the rest of it. But on a personal level, do you take all these mushrooms and you know from the time you started what difference like you're obviously very healthy looking people. You're growing your own herbs, you said which would be interesting to hear which ones you were growing as well for medicinal purposes. But, specifically to the mushrooms. Have you seen any personal benefits differences?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the most hardcore physical difference I would notice is that we haven't gotten sick in a really long time, like no colds or flus. We would have been quite healthy anyway, like just normal diabetes or anything. So for us personally, improve, sleep more energized, not getting sick, which was a big one for me. I would often catch colds or whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I noticed when we started taking the lines I was actually making our website at the time I had no idea how to make a website, but I really, really noticed good cognitive function on just getting up and being very productive with that, because I don't normally do office works, not what we're doing where it runs on in the mushroom farm. So that was a key note standpoint for me as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, for myself, a lot of this work that we do because we're still small scale, so a lot of it requires everything to be done by hand, whether it be creating the substrate that the mushroom and the mycelium grow from, everything's just done from the bottom up, so we don't have any heavy machinery to, I guess, to make our lives easier just yet. So because of that, a lot of what I do requires being up even at the crack of dawn. Same with Ilys she has to get up early just to go harvest and then make sure that the grow room is optimal, all the meters are reading correctly, and then we split our shifts by the time she's done with her end of the shift, usually around the afternoon. That's when my shift starts, and it can run all the way until about half one to two in the morning.
Speaker 2:You're juggling it with your small child.
Speaker 3:that's why yeah, and then just also juggling our own personal time, time with our son, time with our dog and our cat all that it's all intertwined into the whole lifestyle, as most farmers would know. So because of those late hours I find my mind from going to bed late to waking up early. My mind would just be razzled. Most of the time it's just lack of sleep. My attention wouldn't be quite there. You and I could be talking for a good hour to face to face, and I'd be agreeing with everything you're saying or disagreeing with it. You asked me five minutes right after that conversation and I just give you a blank stare as if I have no idea what you're talking about. So after we got enough production to where we can have this as a supplement for ourselves daily, then I started seeing the big positive difference, and for me it took all of its anecdotal, of course, and everyone's going to react to things differently. So for myself, taking these mushrooms daily between anywhere between three to and I say three to seven weeks, that's where, myself, I actually started to be conscious enough of the difference that I was making for myself In terms of my for Reishi, the reason why I mentioned that one would be my favorite is because it reacts to my body. As far as I noticed the most positive in regards to my anxieties, a lot of my stress the lion's mane would have been more functional for me in terms of clearing a lot of that mental fog that I deal with in the morning. Long term, I hope that it'll be something that I can rely on for minimizing if and when I may be susceptible to things like Alzheimer's or dementia, which you know, that's one thing that I study often, just because my granny had unfortunately succumbed to that and, from what I'm reading, they reckon that it could be hereditary. They're still trying to do long term studies to see how you know whether that is or not. So because of that, it's still too early to tell whether her kids, my aunts and my uncles are susceptible to it and if not, it could jump onto myself. So that's something that I worry about and throughout the research that we've done for these mushrooms, we find that lion's mane can help in the reduction of the severity of that disease.
Speaker 3:It's a daily thing that you really need to be conscious and aware of within yourself. You know it's a question we often get asked from folks whether it's something that they can feel the benefits of right away, and it's the same as anything else Any other vitamin that I'd like to mention. It's just you may or may not feel an immediate reaction within the first few days. It's really something that's. It's a lifestyle. You know it's. You're not going to, you're not going to become the most healthy person overnight by just completely changing your lifestyle and diet in just a 24 hour period. You know it's truly a lifestyle choice and a lifestyle change that can take weeks, months for some folks, but where we're at now for myself at least speaking I can definitely feel a positive difference when I'm using it and when I'm not using it. There's a noticeable difference there that I could actually write down on paper and then, you know, explain to people and that's in relation to the, that's in relation to you know, feeling a bit stressed or your mind racing or whatever it's.
Speaker 1:it's that difference.
Speaker 3:Yeah, even even to things as simple as your gut health and the microbiome that's within your gut that can affect things like inflammation, affect things like anxiety and mild depression or just digestion. You know, you could, I can notice we stay as healthy as humanly possible. You know, with our diet. Choices are the things that we grow, the things that we consume from local farmers, organic farmers. We do the best that we can, you know, with what's available, but at the same time, certain factors being it that we're first time business owners, first time large scale farmers, a lot of it entails some sleepless nights, you know, some really early morning, some working out in very torrential weather, very cold, stormy, lifting, heavy, bending low. A lot of this stuff that we were raised around, fortunate enough, but we didn't necessarily grow up doing it ourselves. Yeah, yeah, you know so it's giving us a whole new respect and a whole new appreciation for where our food comes from.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure, just to go off topic, you mentioned you grew herbs medicinally. What herbs were you growing yourself? As you said, you said you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we have a lot of mugwort. I have St John's wort, comfrey rosemary thyme, we have mullin. What else do we have?
Speaker 3:White sage.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we had like the regular kitchen stuff. Yeah, but a lot of mugwort and St John's wort and then I forage as much as I could as well. Seabox thorn are just foraged for the first time.
Speaker 1:Very good. Yeah, you have to go somewhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah, luckily for us, my mother has a caravan down in Morris Castle. Yeah, so there's tons.
Speaker 1:Yeah, brilliant, yeah, so grow your own kids. Yeah, obviously a lot of people online. You'll see them doing the. You know get the hardwood timber has to be cut down I think it's no more than a couple of months beforehand and then you drill the holes, put in the dowel and cover with beeswax. Yeah, and that's one way of doing it. I think it can be quite slow to get a return on them and I think anything from anything from one to three years before you'll start to see any yeah any harvest, so tell us about your kids.
Speaker 1:They're slightly different, so these ones are.
Speaker 2:So the dowels that you're talking about, that's for outside and you're really working with nature there. Yeah, the dowels, I mean that's great. It would allow to a lifetime, like once you do start getting the mushrooms. They keep coming and we don't provide that yet we do an indoor kitchen countertop little grow kit. So I think it's two pounds or something. It is. Yeah, and so basically it's a condensed version of what we have in our grow room.
Speaker 2:So we have like a 10 or 12 pound substrate block in our grow room and, yeah, so everything's done. The mycelium, it's finished this incubation stage and basically when you purchase it, you just make a little incision on the grow kit, you put it on your kitchen countertop or a windowsill and we give you a little spray bottle and you're just keeping it really humid. So a lot of good light and humidity and the kitchen is, it's warm enough. We do it with lion's mane and oyster mushrooms. They're quite easy to grow. So yeah, it's been really successful.
Speaker 3:And those would be the fastest way of getting a actual yield within a few days. I mean it can differ, of course, because with everyone's climate inside their house can vary. So at the very least you'll get a yield within the first two weeks, you know like it kind of needs to be 20 degrees, doesn't it For?
Speaker 2:for mushrooms roughly it can go as low as 16.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, between 16 and like 23, something like that.
Speaker 1:And optimum and you're guys in for your houses that you're growing yourselves in. Like what are you in for there? You're trying to keep it at what? 20 degrees?
Speaker 2:In our grow room. It's about, yeah, between 20 and 22. Okay, we grow a variety of mushrooms in the long grow room at the moment, so we tweak it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that took that took a bit of work, a bit of research and development to find a kind of a golden space where turkey tail can live amongst racie, can also live amongst lion's mane and oyster mushrooms.
Speaker 3:Now the oysters. Those have always been known to be I guess, for lack of a better word probably the easiest mushroom to grow, because the mycelium is so aggressive that it's basically pushing itself out of the bag. So, as Eilish had mentioned before, with the grow kits, as soon as you pull it out of the, the hemp sack that it's sitting in, you just slit a little hole in there or you can slit a straight line just to expose fresh air into the actual growth kit bag. In regards to the larger versions that we have in our grow rooms, these guys, if they're ready to go and, let's say, we happen to forget to slit it for whatever reason, we'll come back the next day and you'll just see them starting to push out through the bag. Yeah, because it's just so aggressive, which is beautiful, because it's a very nutritious mushroom that you can. I've seen people grow on old books. We've seen people grow on old pairs of jeans, stacks of cardboard.
Speaker 2:You don't eat those mushrooms though. Yeah, I wouldn't suggest eating them, show them how easy it is to grow those.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because those mushrooms, they will absorb everything that they're growing from the growing medium and they'll uptake all that into the fruit body. Okay, so if you're eating something that grew off of blue denim, then you're going to get a lot of that blue dye and you dye it. No, it's not good.
Speaker 1:What about the grow kits? What's the growing media that they're in?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's your stuff.
Speaker 3:So the grow medium for the kits it's a mixture of native hardwood.
Speaker 3:So we source all of our material to create these substrate blocks from either the forestry industry local saw mills local saw mills and local farmers, who a lot of the material that I'm going to outline is considered a byproduct, and so we use an Irish hardwood it be it either ash or oak Oak preferably, but you know, ash is a wonderful alternative straw. So we will source an organic straw and then we'll also utilize a soil hole. Now, those are the three essential basics. You can do without the straw. The straw is something I utilize, particularly when producing oyster mushrooms, just because I find that straw helps to expand the substrate potential for the hardwood and the soil hole. If I was just doing soil hole and the hardwood, I'd have to be utilizing way more than that's necessary. So I'll use equal parts of all three of them to create the oyster mushrooms and then basically to fertilize the blocks.
Speaker 3:We use rock minerals. So we utilize all natural fertilization, nothing chemical laced, nothing liquid. It's all rock dust. So it'll be either gypsum, which you can find all over the country, and then a favorite of mine is a rock mineral known as azomite, and the azomite is a volcanic rock dust that carries thousands of trace and macro minerals. So you can do without that as well, but that's something that I find really produces a wonderful flavor in the mushrooms, but also it has the potential of leaching in a lot of those trace and macro minerals. So you'll end up with that in the fruit body, which I find has a far more superior health benefit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was interesting you said about the rock dust, because there's a gardening products called rock dust, which I've never used, by the way, but I know a lot of gardeners who are growing vegetables for show gardening absolutely swear by this rock dust and the product is available in Ireland and it's supposed to be superb at growing vegetables, but I've never used it. So it was interesting that you said that now as well, because it's loaded with minerals that you just won't get in any other fertilizer, I guess.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, a lot of what we, because, as I always outlined before, we both enjoy growing herbs. Amongst growing herbs, we also really enjoy growing other unique plants and fruits. So we'll source heirloom apples, we'll source heirloom veg. I really enjoy growing cacti. Cacti has always been a really fun plant for me to grow, especially coming from California. Yeah, it was just the right temperament for it. It was a great introduction to learning how to care for a plant, because it's a great lazy person's plant. You know. It's their drought tolerant. They don't require a whole lot because in their natural habitat they're basically growing an unfertilized sand. But if you really take into account that, it's a plant like any other, with unique properties, obviously, but they basically, if you treat them in a unique way, with particular ratios rock minerals, fertilization, different compost mixtures, whether you practice a no-till regenerative farming all those things have a pretty quick reaction.
Speaker 3:In regards to cacti, a lot of them could either be very slow growing or very fast growing. Within the year you can double up in size. So they're very responsive to what it is that you're feeding the soil. So a lot of what I learned about rock minerals came from having to feed my cacti, basically because I could see an immediate reaction. But if I feed it on a Monday by, I say, the following Thursday or the week after, you'll find a unique amount of growth. It could be fractional, probably about a few inches, if you're monitoring it closely. But in regards to something that's known as a slow grower, it's tremendous and to see the vigor and the health. So, rock minerals for your audience. I would highly encourage all of you to really look into it because there's especially for those who want to practice a regenerative farming. I find things like rock mineral cover crops utilizing herbal teas as well, compost teas like nettles yeah, nettles is a favorite of ours. So I highly highly recommend everybody get on the rock minerals.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's something I'll have to look into a bit more because, as I say, some people that I know that grow for shows and so on. They swear by it. So it was obviously something that they give their plans everything to try and win the competition. So there's obviously something, something good there. Just to go back to the kits for a second so they're coming in a mesh bag, you slit it open, you water are sprayed regularly not water regularly sprayed regularly. Do you sit it on some kind of a tray or what's?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you could. Yeah, just to absorb any residue water, just put it on a plate or something simple.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're going to get one flush of crop from that, or?
Speaker 2:you can get up to three flushes, yeah, so once you harvest the first flush, you will rehydrate the block, put it in a big bowl of water overnight and then you just leave it back and do the process again. Just missed it about three times a day.
Speaker 1:And roughly between each flush. You're looking at a week, are you?
Speaker 2:It gets longer after each flush, but you just have to have patience.
Speaker 1:It's not dead. So a couple of weeks, so you get a couple of flushes and you definitely get two flushes. And what kind of harvest are you talking about? So you know 10 good pieces of mushrooms.
Speaker 2:You could get at least a quarter of a kilogram.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah, so at least 250 grams. You know it's in regards to the oysters. They come out as a nice, beautiful bloom.
Speaker 2:It's quite big. It's about like you can grow like three times the size of the actual block.
Speaker 1:Wow, and you're doing your kits in three different farms, are you or so?
Speaker 2:oysters. You have three oysters, and a lion's mane and a female oyster. Yeah, we're good.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we're still working to master the other unique types of oyster mushrooms in order to present them as a girl kit as well, but those I found to be quite susceptible to temperature change, more so than the one we offer now. So, in regards to, like, pink oyster, golden oyster and other unique forms of oyster mushrooms, those are very responsive to temperature change, whether positive or negative. So because of that and we haven't mastered it quite yet we wouldn't offer those particular ones in girl kits, but it's something that will be on the horizon.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for the next couple of years. Obviously, mushrooms, and particularly the medicinal side of mushrooms, is obviously a huge growth area and, as you said, there's massive research now starting to back up the claims. Where do you see Gehlig fungoi fargo on over the next couple of years? What's the wish that? I suppose the plan.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the plan is to expand. Currently, we're at Calo Farmers Market every week. We provide mushrooms to a new restaurant in Cookehine, higgs Field. Great guy Connor there he's the chef. Yeah, so just we'd love to get up to Dublin, be in America. Up there, we sell online. We sell all our medicinal products online, which is great, so we're shipping them across the country. Yeah, get into a few more restaurants, have a few fast food orders. Yeah, have fun with it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, a lot of it now at this moment is just getting people familiar with the brand and educating people on the potential of these mushrooms. As you mentioned before for yourself that the mushrooms that kind of put this whole thing on your scope was lion's mane, and we find that a lot of the folks at our local farmers market are the same. They either heard about lion's mane through TikTok or through Instagram or somewhere on the internet, or a friend, a family member, somebody had mentioned it to them. So once they come across ourselves and they see the products that we offer in the range and they can actually see a fresh lion's mane presented in front of them, because we sell them also fresh for chefs and for at home cooks. So for someone to just maybe the closest you've ever gotten to a lion's mane would have been Google, a Google image search. Now you're actually standing in front of one and we encourage everyone to be familiar with it, to look at it, to touch it if you like.
Speaker 3:So a lot of it is based on just getting the education portion right and getting people comfortable with knowing how to consume that mushroom. Our suggested means of dose for either it be a liquid or brewing your own tea with our powders. So that's been the fun part of it. It's, in this beginning stage for us as the educational portion of actually getting this chat with folks If they're willing to give us a good five minutes or 10 minutes of their time.
Speaker 3:We're basically hosting a podcast there at our mushroom stall every weekend. So it's a beautiful thing, you know, because most Carlovians, and even folks that come from different parts of the country as well, we've had folks come in from Galway, from Cork, from Dublin, from the UK, some folks from the States, whether they be just visiting or they heard about us and they wanted to come by and actually come check it out. So it's been a lovely thing just getting to see people's reaction. And then, obviously, the die hards, as I like to call them, the folks that come in every weekend to buy their fresh mushroom or to buy a new supply of their powders or their liquids and just to hear their reaction and how they've been benefiting from it.
Speaker 3:you know it's a beautiful thing. It's more than we could have ever asked for. You know, it's one thing that you can feel it amongst yourself, but to really see it working in real time and its reaction to people in the field you know it's a big nerd like ourselves it's a great way for us to conduct live action research.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it gives you a good feeling that what you're doing is having an effect and having the effect that you want. It was a question I was going to ask and you started to touch on it a little bit. You're going to Kerala's Kerala Farmers Market now. For how long?
Speaker 2:We've been there for almost a year now, right.
Speaker 1:So over that period of time, obviously not in specific, but what are your customers saying? Repeat customers in terms of medicinal benefits. You know what are you seeing people coming back and saying this has happened or that has happened.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, rashi, definitely the lowered blood pressure and less stress, improved sleep that would be specific for Rashi.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have a lot of folks that are under a bone chemotherapy or have done recently and that they come in for a turkey tail. That's quite sought after. He's main for mental clarity. A lot of parents, mental fog, people that are doing exams and working offices and stuff like behind a computer all day. That's really strenuous on your brain, yeah. So I mean, I have one customer and she's doing a master's in cyber therapy and she just swears by it.
Speaker 2:We have a mix of the three and she's just like every time I get a test result back, I'm like these mushrooms, so like there's so many different stories and it's kind of hard to believe for this right there in your face. And these people are just so happy and we're just happy to be able to give them a really high quality product you can't find. Really, we're probably the only people in Ireland that grow and produce it all ourselves. Like you said, there's a lot of mushroom products out there. They're not grown in Ireland. We have to be really conscious about particularly Chinese grown mushrooms because the pollution level is so high. These mushrooms absorb a lot of the toxins that are in the air and in the ground.
Speaker 3:Particularly heavy metals.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:So that's something to keep in mind.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's one thing that we like to reiterate to people, because we emphasize so much on the background and educational portion of it. I like to remind folks, whether you purchase anything for months or not, the important thing is that you ask these questions. It's like where were these mushrooms grown? Where were they sourced from? Is there a transparency there? Can that brand that claims to be an American brand wholeheartedly claim that they're where mushrooms are American produced or Irish produced or what have you?
Speaker 3:Some place at least that has a known track record for environmental protection, where there's a chain of awareness and a chain of command in terms of knowing what can and can't go into these fruit bodies? Is there a certain analysis that have been done on it, as Eilish had pointed before that? The Asian market. Unfortunately, that's one of the places where you could get bulk amounts of it at a fraction of a price that you'd find if you were to get purely Irish grown, for instance. But it comes at a cost because there's already independent lab research. There's a crowd in Italy that have done recent research I see it as recent as this year where they've tested about 10 of the most popular mushroom brands and they noticed that at least 70% of them didn't have the mushrooms that were advertised.
Speaker 2:Or the actual mushroom fruit body. So there's a lot of misconception about mycelium and mycelium have a higher medicinal content, so a lot of mushroom powders in the market would be a grain and the mycelium. So essentially you're getting like 78% rice but a mushroom mycelium.
Speaker 1:It's not the same as a mushroom powder. That has been.
Speaker 2:It's not the actual, even mushroom.
Speaker 1:Okay, it's just the mycelium, yeah.
Speaker 2:I feel like that's a topic for another day.
Speaker 1:It's a topic for another day. Yeah, right, but it is true that and to go back to my situation, where I was looking at Lion's man and you see online there's any amount of sources of it you really do not have any clue what you're getting in that talk.
Speaker 2:They don't tell you where it's grown. Very rarely they'll tell you where it's grown or if it's actual mushroom fruit bodies.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's along the lines of being vigilant in terms of looking at all labels. When you're going to a shop or a health shop or any place where you're going to consume something, I think it'd be beneficial for the person to really take the extra time to at least go and scan over the label, look at the way things are worded. That's one thing that really put that into our scope as well was when we wanted to. There's certain mushrooms that we can't cultivate that we really enjoy. One of my favorite ones would be chaga. Now, chaga typically grows on birch trees living birch trees Now you can definitely find it out in the wild if you know what it looks like, but the problem with it is because we can't cultivate it indoors and in our farm. It's something that we really had to be diligent about sourcing it from high quality producers and then had forged it responsibly, someone who processed it responsibly, and that takes a bit of homework, which some folks do not like homework I could understand that but it's worth the effort because at least you know that you're not doing more harm than you are. Good Because if you're sourcing something that comes from a place that has a long history of heavy manufacturing and all the exhaust goes right to the atmosphere. You know as well as I do what goes up must come down. So all those toxins and heavy metals that are in the atmosphere are going to find their way into the soil, can be taken right up into the fruit body. And if you're even given the fruit body, as Eilish had mentioned, because most brands tend to utilize mycelium, because it's far easier to create mycelium than it is to create the fruit body and it's far more profitable by expanding on just mycelium based supplements and then just pumping that out in a factory, because mycelium and if you have a really good mycelium based to start with, when you grow it from beginning to end, it could take maybe, I say, two weeks tops. So if you're doing that on a mass scale, you can pump out a lot of stuff. And if people aren't too aware about the differences between whole fruit and just mycelium based supplements, then they're throwing their money to the wind. They're hard on money and they're not quite aware of the differences between something that's time tested, which would be the fruit bodies, like in regards to Rashi, that has over a millennia of documented use in Ayurvedic and Chinese medicines.
Speaker 3:Turkey Tail, as Eilish mentioned before, that's one of the most studied mushrooms in clinical trials in regards to the immune system and fighting cancer cells and tumors. But scientists will extract a synthesized version from the actual fruit body of a Turkey Tail and then things like lion's mane. Like all of our ancestors who have been utilizing these mushrooms as a source of nutrition or just a source of food, as far as I know, none of them were digging into the ground just to source the mycelium. They were getting the fruit body from the dead tree or the ground or wherever. The mycelium mat. I'm certain it has its own nutritional values, of course, but when you're comparing them to the fruit body it's a tough comparison really. So that's our life's model is producing whole fruit byproducts. So whether it be the powders or liquids, those are always going to be 100% whole fruit. And then for the fresh stuff, obviously it's going to be whole fruit, because we just can't sit there with just a big mat of mycelium and expect people to know what to do with that it's really interesting.
Speaker 1:As I say, we've sort of got around a lot of topics here and while in some ways it's not gardening as such but I think for listeners in the podcast, a lot of them are growing their own food the thing with mushrooms is that you can grow it all year round. That's a huge advantage to have something that you can harvest all year round from the growkits. I know you guys have websites. Maybe tell people where they can find you. I know you're doing the Carl Oak Farmers Market on Instagram, I think, so maybe tell everybody where they can find you, where they can check out Gaelic Fungi Farms.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's gaelicfungifarmsie. We're on Instagram as Gaelic Fungi Farms. You can hit us an email if you've got any questions about any of the products, or come by Saturday mornings at the exchange in Carlotown.
Speaker 1:Brilliant, as I say, it's been a really interesting chat. We've gone around the topics. We've had the dog entering the room a couple of times to say hello, but it's been fascinating. And I suppose Fungi is something that gardeners are well aware of, but I'm not sure that we've. You know, this level of expertise and knowledge is something that's great to introduce into. So, Eilish and Michael, thank you very much for coming on. Master McGarrett and podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, john. Thank you John.
Speaker 1:So that's been this week's episode. A huge thanks to the guys for coming on. It's a really interesting chat. As I say, I've come across Gaelic Fungi Farm only recently and the products and, as I say, I have been doing a good bit of research on Linesman of late. So, yeah, really interesting. The grow kits are really interesting. You know, as I say, something that you can have growing all year round and maybe as an additional to your veg and fruit gardens outside. I think the grow kits will be a nice addition. So, really interesting chat. As I say, we've gone off topic a little bit this week, but it's a really interesting chat and something that I think we can all learn from. So that's been this week's episode. Thanks for listening. Until the next time, happy gardening, bye.