Growing year-round at 5,000 feet.

Why mushrooms, and why here

Mushroom farming is one of the few forms of agriculture that is genuinely indifferent to Colorado’s climate. We are not fighting hail, a short frost window or irrigation rights. We are building weather inside a room — and the room can be the same in January as it is in July, which is why the harvest board looks the same in both months.

What Colorado does change is humidity. Ambient air here runs dry enough that every fruiting chamber needs active humidification to hold 85–95% relative humidity, where a farm in the southeast might need dehumidification instead. It is an energy cost and a design constraint, and it shows up at every stage below.

The four stages

1. Substrate

Hardwood sawdust supplemented with bran, hydrated to a precise moisture content and packed into filter-patch bags. Getting the water right is the whole game: too dry and the mycelium stalls, too wet and it goes anaerobic. In dry air, bags lose moisture faster than the recipe books assume, so ours are mixed slightly wetter than standard.

2. Sterilisation

Bags are pressure-sterilised to kill competing organisms — mushroom cultivation is not really about growing a fungus, it is about growing one fungus and excluding everything else. Everything downstream of this step happens in front of filtered air.

3. Inoculation and incubation

Sterile grain spawn is introduced in a still-air environment, and the bags go into a dark incubation room at 70–75°F for two to six weeks depending on species while the mycelium colonises the block. Oysters colonise in a fortnight; maitake and reishi take more than a month, which is the real reason those species cost more.

4. Fruiting

Colonised blocks move into the fruiting room: high humidity, fresh air exchange several times an hour, and the light and temperature cues each species wants. Fruiting takes three to ten days, and then it is picked by hand — every mushroom on this farm is cut with a knife by a person who decided it was ready.

Timing the cut is the difference between a mushroom that keeps five days and one that keeps two. A cap picked one day past its peak has already started to open and drop spore, and the clock is running faster than it looks.

Two harvests a week, on purpose

We cut Tuesday and Friday mornings and deliver the same day. That is not a logistics compromise, it is the product: a mushroom in a Boulder kitchen six hours after it was cut is a genuinely different ingredient from one that has spent five days in a distribution chain. It is also why the shelf-life numbers on this site are higher than the ones on a supermarket punnet.

What the dry air gives back

Humidification is a cost, but Colorado’s aridity has one large compensation: pest and mould pressure is far lower here than in a humid climate. Fungus gnats and competing moulds thrive in the same conditions mushrooms do, and dry ambient air outside the fruiting rooms is a quiet, permanent, free control measure. It is a large part of why we can run clean with no pesticide use at all.

Where it goes next

Spent blocks do not become waste — they go to compost, to gardens and to a second flush of oysters. That side of the operation is on spent substrate and waste, and the week-by-week rhythm of all of it is in a week on the farm.

Common questions