Stockport Fungi - A Feature, by Katie Hourigan
Alex William, founder of Stockport Fungi.
I am told to wait ‘round the back’. Hovering in the thin alley behind hyper-seasonal restaurant Where the Light Gets In, I peer down the steep row of steps leading to Stockport’s cobbled Underbanks and feel somewhat shifty, waiting there alone. The steeple of St Mary’s Parish church rises behind me, yellowing, nicotine-stained.
Alex William, my guide, and founder of Stockport’s first mushroom farm, Stockport Fungi, bounds around the corner and any unease vanishes. She brings an immediate warmth, with kohl-lined eyes and the soft, subtle twang of a west-country accent. We head to the basement.
The rolling garage door yawns and stretches open, to about waist height. We duck under the corrugated sheet and enter a new kind of subterranean world. It’s as though we are underwater, the light sunk, thick with the kind of dust that has had time to settle. Alex picks her way through the rusting bikes and dusting cabinets, guiding our path with the narrow light of her phone torch.
Gradually, the light shifts again. A shed appears, blooming out of the darkness. It’s an almost exact copy of the scene laid out by Derek Mahon and his disused shed:
'Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,Among the bathtubs and the washbasinsA thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole’There really is a bathtub, stacked with a pressure cooker and felted insulating blankets to form a makeshift pasteurisation chamber. Alex skips between modesty, and a defiant assertion, a protective pride over her project - ‘It’s a little DIY… but it works’.
The entire build was condensed into 12 weeks, helped along by donations of chequered laundry bags, plastic sheeting, and discarded wood. The shed serves as an incubation room, where grow bags of organic rye are inoculated with spores, and left to spawn. It is a cramped affair, hand-built by Alex who gathered wood from nearby dumps and borrowed a handsaw off of a friend. It is a dark, sterile environment. There are lots of debates over light, and how it is to be used, Alex tells me - whether certain varieties will take to blue or pink light. For now, she is keeping it simple.
To the right, is a taller structure - the fruiting room. Plastic sheeting previously used on film sets make up the walls, filtering the minimal light from the frosted window. A humidifier hums, set to maintain the humidity at 90%. Thick sheeted plastic bags of rye line the walls inside. For each bag or ‘block’, I am told, ‘imagine it’s a dead log’. The process of pinning is a kind of ‘tricking’ the mushroom - cutting off its oxygen supply, indicating that it has used up all of its food supply, the imaginary log, and helping it move into its next stage of life, fruiting, to spread its spore.
Spurting miraculously out of crumpled plastic bags of rye, are the first of her crop - pink oyster mushrooms that, once harvested, will flush and fruit again, two, three times perhaps. They are a fast, aggressive growing mushroom, a test run to check that the conditions are working. So far, it seems so.
Alex credits the dizzying success of Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life, the Netflix documentary Fantastic Fungi, and the extra time freed up to many growers over lockdown with having combined to create a surge of interest in mushroom growing, with ‘reddit threads and Facebook groups popping up all over the place’.
Yet at the same time, Alex notes, ‘people are scared of mushrooms.’ Perhaps it’s distorted memories of Alice in Wonderland or Phantasia, cherry-red toadstools not to be touched. Yet the act of growing them, of witnessing something pale and alien growing out of the cramped darkness, is life-affirming. Alex intends to grow 14 more varieties in the coming months. She hopes to open up the farm to school visits, to run workshops for people who are getting back on their feet. The industrial sized mayonnaise buckets dotted about the place have been scavenged from the takeaways in Rusholme. The idea is to drill holes in the bucket and use these as the blocks, illusory logs. As Alex says ‘you can fit a bucket anywhere - and in four weeks, you’ve got mushrooms.’
For Alex it’s not about claiming ownership of the mushrooms she produces, lording as a figure of fertility. She simply creates the conditions that are needed to grow: ‘‘That’s all I’m trying to do - emulate the earth. Mycelium just want to grow. They kind of do what they want.’
Katie Hourigan is originally from South Devon. She is in her final year studying English Literature with Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. You can read more of her writing over on her website.