In January 2024, the words “gourmet mushrooms” hadn’t left the noisy confines of my brain. By 2025, Surf Side Fungus Farm had spread over our property like spores.
Our story isn’t unusual: a young(ish) city couple dreaming of space to breathe and raise our kids. Except by “kids,” I mean goats.
From the first step inside, we adored the little blue house by the ocean, just south of Campbell River. We were lucky to have work-from-home jobs and live wherever our hearts desired.
When life gives you setbacks, grow mushrooms
We were unlucky to lose said jobs within a month of each other, the spring after moving in.
Working for startups is always a gamble, and 2024 was an economically challenging year. The math does itself.
Software is a prolific job market, but trying to stand out in a sea of applicants was a strain for me. So, for some self-care, I began a new hobby, one I’d always wanted to try but had never had the time or space to do.
I knew the basics of growing mushrooms, and YouTube filled in the rest. Some of you may wonder how I could binge-watch hours of fungi biology videos. To which I say: “You’re missing out, friend!”
From supermarket fungi to gourmet varieties
My first successful harvest came from a culture I cloned from a mushroom I got at the supermarket. We still have this culture in our regular rotation today, but we needed to try the harder-to-grow varieties coveted by chefs and foodies. Time for more YouTube.
Watching these fun-guys (c’mon, I had to put that somewhere in here) show off their production spaces made me envious, but optimistic I could reproduce a similar setup. And it’d be a blast to build.
Engineering is my ultimate passion—the preciseness soothes my overactive mind. And, unexpectedly, mushroom farming matches that perfectly. To make gourmet mushrooms, one has to bag dry substrate with water in near-exact amounts, sterilize it, inoculate it in conditions of lab-like cleanliness, and then let the mycelium colonize and fruit in a challengingly small optimal range of temperature and humidity.
Turning passion into profession
The thought trickled in early on: I could make a living off of this. We had the space—our dream home came with multiple outbuildings that were, at the time, filled with junk we didn’t need.
The idea of using growing tents came from my new neighbour, a for-fun mushroom grower. I built everything else to ensure our mushrooms had exactly what they wanted. For weeks, I scoured the internet for high-quality (yet affordable) materials, tinkered with ideas, failed and succeeded and failed again, and, yes, watched more YouTube videos. Our lives changed around us so quickly that we can’t tell you exactly when it happened.
Our thriving farm today
Now, we have a dedicated grow house, with tents kept at a consistent temperature and humidity. A shipping container with the space and setup for sterile inoculation and shelving for colonization. A custom bagger I designed that deposits the exact weights of substrate and water for a ten-pound bag in less than a second. A sterilizer that can handle dozens of bags at once. A network of mushroom lovers who have provided essential feedback and encouragement. And a fluffy, white, tail-wagging cheerleader that most definitely will be a lion’s mane mushroom next Halloween.
We now grow oyster (blue, pink, elm, and king), lion’s mane, chestnut, maitake, enoki, brown beech, and pioppino mushrooms, guaranteed high-quality thanks to the ideal conditions we’ve engineered for them. But we’ve also cultivated something even greater: the kind of beautiful life we always dreamed of.
