US(RI): Specialty Mushrooms on the rise
“I started growing them at Sweet Berry Farm, almost as an experiment,” said Bob DiPietro, a food service veteran. “We wanted to see if you could grow them along with other things in a greenhouse. Now we knew we could grow them and we knew could sell them. In fact, at one point we had so many fresh mushrooms we were afraid they wouldn’t be fresh before we could sell them. Then we saw some jars of pasta sauce a friend was selling at farmer’s markets and we said, ‘Let’s make sauce.’ Now we have a variety of sauces to sell as well.”
The business is still all so new to DiPietro that he can’t conceal his amazement at how well their venture has gone. With the problem of using surplus growth solved, the problem of meeting demand arose. In the few short years they have been producing, they’ve seen their mushrooms spread, so to speak, through restaurants and gourmet specialty shops in Rhode Island, southern New England and up into shops in Cambridge and Boston suburbs.
“We’ve started selling them to Whole Foods, who sell them by weight in their stores,” said DiPietro. “We don’t pack them under our own name yet.”
DiPietro’s mushrooms are grown differently from the supermarket variety. The plain, white buttons grow in compost beds. DiPietro grows mushrooms on compressed cakes of hardwood sawdust, similar to the way mushrooms grow on downed trees in the forest. Unlike the forest, DiPietro and his partner, Mike Hallett, have to maintain an atmosphere that controls the amount of carbon dioxide in the air and a high humidity of at least 95 percent. Not as easy as you would think in the “grow rooms” contained in an industrial building in West Kingston. The sheds look much like the plastic-side greenhouses of other farms but being contained in the larger space allows them to keep desired levels of moisture and air on the mushrooms and keep contaminants and foreign organisms at bay.
“This atmosphere is extremely controlled,” said DiPietro. “We actually create positive pressure inside the greenhouse, we force air out so things that are outside of the cracks and seams of the greenhouse are pushed away and do not drift into the greenhouse.”
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