Everyone asks if his mushrooms are hallucinatory, notes mushroom farmer Joe Foster as we head down in the woods to check out his crop of shitak emushrooms.
“Those are medicinal. I only grow culinary mushrooms,” he says.
While they don’t produce visions, the shitake, among other native fungi, are touted to have immense immunological powers, according to WebMd. Some say they can protect you from cancer and other dread diseases. And if you are interested in just eating these delicious morsels, as I am, the stats are favorable. One/half cup has just 35 calories,and loads of elements that we don’t get otherwise: copper, selenium, potassium, and all the vitamin D you need in a day, among other nutrients.
Foster grows shiitaki in the most environmentally sustainable way possible. Way down in the forest by a rushing stream in the pure clean air of northern Halifax County. Nathalie is the nearest town, population 183, at the last census available. We pass a variety of wild mushrooms along the path on this day after rain—morels, oyster, and lion’s mane. “Most of the ones that grow in the dirt are not edible,” says Foster, pointing out a bright red specimen standing alone, tiny in a grove of pine trees. And a number are poisonous.
Shiitakes grow in wood logs. Over a thousand years ago, samurais cultivated them to serve as a delicacy for aristocrats in Japan.
As we drive through Foster’s 40-acre property, I see how Foster has cultivated the landscape, from the apple orchard by this house to the pond lined with bald cypress trees and stocked with bass. We finally come to a clearing beside a swirling pristine stream, where the white oak logs are set up and shot up with mushroom spores or spawn. It’s a beautiful spot, with the trees offering shelter for a neatly ordered system of logs. You can smell the decaying bark, the richest, best foundation for the mushrooms, and the clean air freshened by the stream.
Foster cut over 250 logs from white oak trees on his property and bored holes 5-6 inches apart in each. Then after he inoculated the logs with the spores, he sealed each hole with a little beeswax. Today after a year, mushrooms are sprouting out of the logs like slow motion popcorn.
Just this week, he sold seven pounds to Molasses Grill, the best restaurant in the area, specializing in local food. “It’s really amazing to get food from your own county,” says Chef Steve Schopen, who does his own bit of foraging for exotic native species, like pawpaws. “And Joe’s home grown shitake mushrooms are among the best and freshest you can get.”
For this retired landscape developer who had a thriving business in Farmingdale, N.J., the role of mushroom farmer seems a natural development, though not at all planned. When he and his father Joe Senior finally bought this old tobacco farm, known as Old Chester Farm deep in the Halifax County country, they were thinking primarily of a place to store their collection of antique gas engines.
His father Joe Senior, who had worked for International Harvester for 27 years, was an avid collector of these heavy gas-powered motors, which used to run farm machinery before electricity became standard. They are not exactly the kind of heirloom to display on a mantel piece. Carting their antiques in a truck, father and son would travel to shows all over the country. They were displaying their collection at the Heritage Festival in South Boston in 2006, when a realtor showed them Old Chester Farm.
The property in Halifax County was a find: a fraction of the taxes he paid in New Jersey, 20 times the acreage, plus a barn for the storage of their collection. Joe built a log cabin for his father, who unfortunately passed away this spring.
“I was just a hands-in-dirt kind of guy,” says Joe, who attended University of Maryland agronomy school and went onto run a successful landscaping business in coastal New Jersey. After settling on the farm, he attended a mushroom cultivation seminar by a master gardener from Japa. Foster recognized that he had everything that she listed as essential: “the live, healthy white oak trees, a source of water, the best air circulation.” He also had chain saws to cut the logs; a drill bit for boring holes; and he could order the spores from a mushroom catalog. The catalog, which had the slogan, “Proud to be Part of this Rotting World,’” offered many varieties of mushrooms and kits for growing them in your basement, if you so desired.
But growing them outdoors in their natural setting was the attraction for Foster.
“I don’t make a lot of money off it. It’s such a seasonal hit and miss thing. I do a lot of bartering and trading.” He’ll get a summer worth of corn in exchange for a supply of mushrooms.
He sells the mushrooms to farmers’ markets and local restaurants during the fall and spring harvests.
Fresh mushrooms are fruiting through November, but he is trying to convince his customers to try the dried ones, which he claims are just or more flavorful and longer-lasting. “They have 40 times more Vitamin D!” Foster says.
In addition to the fresh mushrooms, he grows apples and all kinds of flowers that attract goldfinches and hummingbirds. In his spare time, he makes tinctures of mushroom, which many health food customers believe provides the ultimate potion for boosting immunity. Foster makes the tinctures at his kitchen table.
First he packs in dried mushrooms in a mason jar and fills it with 40-proof Vodka. Then he boils down the solution with water and eventually extracts an intense mushroom liquid.He pours it into small bottles with screw tops the size of bottles of eyedrops. Foster takes a dropper full of the tincture in tea or food every day, morning and afternoon. He gives small bottles of the tincture to friends.
Does it prevent cancer?
“I can’t really say. I’m not selling it like snake oil,” Foster says. But there is a thriving market for such potions on the Internet.
He gave me a bottle that I have tried but I don’t know if it is keeping me from getting sick. I do know that the shitake are a special delicacy. At Molasses Grill the night after he received the mushrooms from Foster, chef Schopen concocted a dish of scallops and mushroom that was amazing in its suggestion of ocean and forest combined. The slivers of mushrooms added a note of the white oak and the rushing stream at Foster’s farm. And knowing where and how the shitake had grown made the meal especially wonderful.
.