Hi, I’m Harry, the founder of Mushroom Culture!

Harry Allen founder of Mushroom Culture

Growing up on a farm, I have always had a strong connection to where our food comes from and a vision to improve agricultural systems. It’s in my roots to grow food and when I first successfully cultivated mushrooms I was transfixed. Whilst studying Biology at university I learnt more about their fascinating ability to grow, heal, live, spread and greatly influence the animal and plant based environment.

Combining mushrooms enchanting growth forms, numerous health benefits and diversity in taste and texture, I knew I wanted to work with them and be involved in the exploration of their future potential.

I’m proud to have created a business that provides healthy, locally grown food with minimal environmental impact. All of our products are grown, processed and packaged on our Wiltshire farm to ensure we provide our customers with the highest quality gourmet and functional mushrooms.

My favourite part of the job is in sharing peoples excitement to grow their own unique food at home. It’s my mission to introduce more people to the benefits of functional mushrooms enabling their positive effects to improve peoples quality of life. So please get in touch or visit us at a market and thank you very much for your interest and support!

Frequently Asked Questions

  • Primarily we grow indoors using a high yielding mix of beech wood and soya hulls (“masters mix”) which requires heat treatment to sterilise. This mixture is then inoculated under sterile conditions in the lab with mushroom spawn made using grain grown on our farm. This is also the method used for our mushroom grow kits which make it very easy for you to grow mushrooms at home without any equipment needed.

    We are also using lower input growing methods with outdoor mushroom woodchip patches and inoculating fallen trees/stumps with mushrooms. These will take longer to produce mushrooms but will provide naturally outdoor grown mushrooms with low energy input.

    Where possible, we try to use local materials and mushroom strains.

  • We’re currently in the process of gaining organic certification.

    We never use any chemicals in the growing process and all of the materials used to grow our mushrooms are organic.

  • Yes, we sell fresh mushrooms at local market. Please get in touch to find out dates or check our socials.

    We also supply local shops, restaurants and veg boxes.

    We currently don’t ship fresh mushrooms online, but if you are local then please contact us about fresh mushroom availability and we can arrange for collection or local delivery.

  • We are about to start selling liquid mushroom culture and second generation grain spawn which are perfect for growers to make their process easier.

    We have a laboratory facility so we can assure clean mushroom cultures. All strains will be the ones we use to grow our mushrooms so they will always be vigorous and ready to produce lots of mushrooms.

    Some of our Oyster mushroom cultures are from wild oyster mushrooms found locally. Our Turkey Tail mushroom culture is from a wild mushroom found locally.

  • There are lots of useful ways to utilise old “spent” mushroom blocks. Mostly we mix them with woodchips and spread them at the base of newly planted hedgerows and trees on the farm. This helps retain moisture for the young plants and provides a slow release of nutrients.

    We also mix some blocks into compost for our vegetable garden. Spreading spent mushroom substrate as a top layer of soil provides benefits to the soil and you can get edible mushrooms growing in your garden.

    If you are local and interested in spent mushroom substrate for your garden or plants please contact us.