00:00My name is Niall Johnston. I'm from Yorkshire Mushroom Emporium, and I'm one of the two directors here, along with myself and Ed.
00:08We started this business in 2021, kind of ended 2020, start of 2021.
00:14It was the height of COVID, and we were friends from school, but we'd found ourselves back in Leeds and having lots of these conversations.
00:22We'd seen things that were happening with the food system around how not much food was being grown in the UK.
00:31I think it's something around 50 or 60 percent, and we wanted to start some kind of project, and we came across mushrooms.
00:37One of the reasons was we realized it was quite hard to get land.
00:40We saw that you could do mushroom growing indoors, quite a small space, and with not too much equipment to start off with.
00:46So we started doing a growing mushrooms in a garage, and we kind of went from there, really.
00:52The response that we got from the local communities, a couple of restaurants and just people when we did some local markets was just absolutely phenomenal.
01:01I think some of the mushrooms that we were growing, some of the brightly colored oyster mushrooms, people hadn't seen before and they're very interested in.
01:08We do the whole process from start to finish within these four walls.
01:11It first starts off with the substrate or the food source that we're growing the mushrooms on, and so we buy the substrate in.
01:19We then start the batches off in the inoculation room, which is when we build these bags.
01:25We fill them with a mixture of the mushroom culture and the food source.
01:29After that, we wheel them around into the incubation room, where the bags, they live for about two weeks,
01:34and that's when something called mycelium grows, which is the kind of non-mushroom part of the fungus.
01:40And that's basically, it lives on the blocks, digests the food source, and that's what gives the organism the energy to then produce the mushroom.
01:49After the incubation room, they move into the fruiting room, which is kind of the most interesting part.
01:52It's quite bright.
01:53There is lots of fresh air, and there is also really high humidity, and they're all the conditions which trigger mushrooms to grow.
02:03And then about a week, 10 days later, we'll be harvesting off the first set of mushrooms, and then we'll go around again for a second time.
02:09The main thing we do day-to-day is growing the fresh mushrooms, which are going to green grocers and restaurants and local veg box schemes, all in and around Leeds.
02:17But we do a few other things as well. We do grow your own mushroom kits, and we also do a little bit of outreach and educational work.
02:28And that kind of goes back to why we started this project about connecting people with food and doing more food growing.
02:35So we do some workshops about growing your own mushrooms and also about foraging.
02:39It feels like there's a really good community within the kind of Leeds food and Leeds growing scene, community gardens and local farms.
02:47Urban farmers, which are in Leeds, and there's quite a lot of people doing really good work around that kind of these goals of trying to produce more food locally and involve more people in food growing.
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