Bridgewater Pair Sprouts Gourmet Mushroom Farm (2024)

Joe Holmes has a mushroom obsession.

It started with buying mushrooms from a farmers market in South Carolina. Then he bought kits to grow mushrooms at home. Things just grew and grew from there.

“It was a gentle hobby,” Holmes said. “I had no plan; I just wanted to keep growing.”

That gentle hobby has sprouted into Shenandoah Mushroom, a gourmet mushroom farm based out of Holmes and Joann Panizzo’s home in Bridgewater.

Growing mushrooms for Holmes and Panizzo starts with a syringe of spores in a “nutrient broth” honey solution. After sterilizing grain in a pressure cooker for several hours, the pair injects the spore-nutrient broth combination into a grain-filled glass jar.

And the mushroom growing process begins.

Although, it doesn’t look like mushrooms quite yet. After about a month and a half waiting for the “spawn” to develop, the glass jar is full of white mycelium, the root-like structure of fungus.

“A really great quote that explains it all really well is from Paul Stamets, who's this famous mycologist,” Holmes said. “He said the mushroom is like the fruit of a tree that grows almost entirely underground. … It's like the root.”

After the spawn is developed, it’s used almost like a mushroom seed. The spawn is put into a plastic bag of wood pellets and soybean hulls, where it eats and colonizes the mixture.

After the mycelium takes over the wood pellets and soybean hulls, Holmes uses an exacto knife to cut an X into the bag, signaling the mushrooms to grow.

“If you imagine this is all underground, that’s the signal it gets, like, ‘Okay, we’re near the surface of the forest, we should try to jump out and reproduce,’” Holmes explained. “That’s what the mushroom is. It’s an attempt of the mycelium to reproduce.”

Then, the bag is placed into a 4-foot-by-4-foot tent that maintains high humidity so the mushrooms can grow. Depending on the type of mushroom, the bag sits for a week or two before they fruit and are able to be harvested.

Start to finish, the process takes about three months.

For Holmes, the process was “noticeably faster” than growing some vegetables.

“It’s really striking, if you tried gardening before, and then you try this, it’s like ‘Oh my god, these things just sprout up,’ ” Holmes said.

It’s been a year and a few months Holmes and Panizzo have been selling mushrooms at the Harrisonburg Farmers Market, with about six months of hobby-level mushroom growing before then.

Really, it all started with Holmes growing lion’s mane, a type of edible mushroom that resemble white pom-poms. Some studies have shown that the mushroom can support brain health.

“Lion’s mane are so cool,” Holmes said. “It was just like, ‘I want this magical-looking puffball mushroom that makes your brain grow. … I want an endless supply of that.’ ... And then it just took off.”

The pair tries to grow any type of mushrooms they can “get away with,” but right now are growing black pearl, pioppino, golden oyster, blue oyster, lion’s mane, nameko and maitake.

“My favorite is the black pearl king [mushrooms], and I think I’ve transferred that love to the customers,” Panizzo said. “The stems are really good; they’re really king of fluffy. Sometimes, mushroom stems can be sort of hard … but the black pearl kings have almost like a scallop texture.”

The mushrooms Holmes and Panizzo grow in their home farm differ from mushrooms most often found in grocery stores. Cremini, button and portabella mushrooms are all the same species at different life stages that grow on compost, Holmes explained.

The pair’s mushrooms grow on dead trees, hence the wood pellets, and have a shorter shelf life than grocery-store mushrooms.

“Most of the button mushrooms in America are grown in one place in Pennslyvania, and then they’re shipped,” Holmes said. “If you tried to do that with the mushrooms we grow, you would only get a couple days of usable time. That freshness is a big bonus for us.”

Other mushrooms, like morels or chicken of the woods, have more complicated relationships with their environment, which makes it harder for small farms like Shenandoah Mushroom to successfully grow.

One of most important aspects of growing mushrooms for Holmes and Panizzo — and for anyone interested in growing mushrooms at home — is developing a love for cleaning, the pair said.

“On the microbiological level … it’s a very fierce competition, and mushrooms are rather rare compared to the molds that typically break things down in a forest or in your kitchen,” Holmes said. “If [mushrooms] go head to head against, like blue-green kitchen mold, they will get beat every single time. So you basically create an environment for the mushroom where they have an unfair advantage so that they can win.”

Holmes and Panizzo didn’t have a professional background in mycology — the study of mushrooms — before starting their business, so getting to the point of growing mushrooms at home and for a business took a lot of research.

When they first started, Holmes took on much of the mushroom farming process, while Panizzo ran the booth. Now, though, Panizzo has taken on some of the first steps of growing the mushrooms and running the booth.

The next phase of their business they're exploring, Holmes said, is collecting data and being able to forecast ahead of time when they can expect to harvest the mushrooms. Right now, Shenandoah Mushrooms can be found at the Harrisonburg Farmers Market on Saturdays.

For others interested in growing mushrooms, Holmes warned that it can be “addictive,” but is doable for anyone if they devote time and resources to the hobby.

“It’s actually really easy to do it in your house if you are willing to make the investment and take the time to learn the biology and stuff involved, which can be challenging at first,” Holmes said, “I’d encourage anybody that wants to do that to give it a try, because it’s probably easier than you think.”