BY RICHARD CORNISH

*Magnificent array of mushrooms are being grown by Jason Crosbie, The Mushroom Connection.*

Jason Crosbie has always been fascinated by fungus. He grew up foraging for mushrooms in the paddocks out back of Ballarat and bushwalking in the forest around Buninyong looking for wild fungus.

After a career in IT, he focused on his love of growing plants, then turning to experimenting with fungus eight years ago. Last year, deep in lockdown, he finished his purpose-built mushroom growing facility at Scotchman’s Lead south of Ballarat. In his spotless and expansive shed, he grows different varieties of edible mushrooms such as king brown, oyster, lion’s mane, enoki, and shiitake mushrooms.

The process starts with the ‘substrate’, a blend of bran and soy hulls, grain, and other plant material. Jason mixes these and then heats the mix to sterilise it. He then inoculates the substrate by adding the spores or ‘spawn’ and blends this through in a converted clothes dryer. The inoculated substrate is packed into plastic bags and sent to a warm, dark room to allow the spores to grow. “Mushrooms are the fruiting body of the fungus,” says Jason, pointing to a fan of fine filaments growing inside the plastic. The fungus-filled bags are wheeled on multi-tiered wire trolleys to a cooler room where the fungus fruit, sending up small nodules that expand into the mushrooms we love to cook.

He carefully harvests the fungus and packs them into biodegradable trays and delivers them to us here at Blakes.