Gourmet farming in Columbus: mushrooms

Fred and Linda Vereen

By RAY WYCHE
Staff writer

Linda and Fred Vereen own 160 acres of rolling land in the Iron Hill community, the envy of developers and farmers who see a high profit potential in the green expanse.

But the present and future income from this highly desirable land comes not from pastures or fields but from a small shaded area that contains six stacks of small logs, arranged in “pen” fashion and moistened by a single irrigation-system nozzle.

The Vereens are in the mushroom business “just as a hobby,” Linda Vereen says. She is temporarily employed in Conway, S. C., and Fred Vereen is retired. The mushroom venture is just beginning on a small scale but with a bright, broad future.
Like all agriculture enterprises, it’s a business filled with uncertainties; the Vereens don’t know exactly when their mushrooms will grow large enough to sell and there’s no guarantee that the spores they “planted” will turn into mushrooms.

The 5-foot long logs, up to eight inches in diameter, contain numerous 7/16-inch diameter holes into which a sawdust solution inoculated with mushroom spores is inserted and sealed with hot wax.

It’s from these small holes that countless shiittake mushrooms, ranging in diameter up to three inches, sprout forth, ready to be sold to upscale restaurants and gourmet grocery stores.

Mushroom production nationwide is expanding as people are becoming more interested in haute cuisine cooking, a type of food preparation that leans heavily on mushrooms as an ingredient. Shiitakes are not a major U. S. farm commodity.
“More than 80 percent of our mushrooms are imported,” Fred Vereen says.

The Vereens got interested in their unusual farm crop after talking to Dewey Farmer, a Columbus Countian who began producing mushrooms at his home north of Chadbourn several years ago.

Farmer headed a consortium of Columbus County growers who obtained a grant from the Golden LEAF Foundation, funded by tobacco companies as part of an effort to replace the long-standing tobacco as a cash crop with new products such as mushrooms.

“Dewey Farmer helped us,” Fred Vereen says. “We cut our trees and inoculated them,” and their land was set to produce a new crop.

The Vereens began by using cherry logs as hosts for the spores.

“They told us wild cherry gave mushrooms a more intense flavor, and now they tell us oak is best because it lasts longer,” Fred Vereen says.

Mushroom spores – the seed – grow only in damp wood.

Most of the pens of logs are now oak but there is one pen of cherry and one of sweet gum logs. Vereen says gum is not a good host for mushroom spores.

Not only does the gum decay more quickly than oak but woodpeckers, seeing perfectly round holes in the logs, assume a beetle of some sort is hidden in the wood. The birds quickly tear away the soft gum wood in search of a meal which, they soon learn, is not there.

The Vereens use a special drill and spore implanter to place their spore-laden sawdust in the logs. After tamping the mixture, a coating of hot wax is applied over the hole to keep out wild mushroom (or toadstool) spores.

“We’ve never had a problem with wild spores,” Linda Vereen says.

The Vereens began their hobby about three years ago, inoculating their first cherry log on April 21, 2004; on Aug. 20 of the same year, they picked their first edible shiitake.

“I didn’t think they would do anything that year, but we had some,” Linda Vereen says. “We were pretty excited about it.”

Fred Vereen likes the simplicity of mushroom farming, once the inoculated logs are in place and the holes sealed.

“You inoculate them and cover the holes with wax. You don’t mess with it any more,” he says, except to ensure that the logs remain adequately moistened. The initial inoculation with spores will produce edible shiitakes for several years.

Linda Vereen sells her entire harvest to four “upscale restaurants” in Conway, and has had an inquiry from a man in Myrtle Beach about buying mushrooms. She says the growth schedule of the mushrooms is uncertain, presenting a marketing problem.

“You don’t know what you’re going to have,” she says, in the way of volume and ripening time. “If you had a better handle on when they are going to produce, it would be easier to market them.”

Most mushrooms in this country are used in sauces and salads, Linda Vereen says, although some chefs sautee them. For sauteeing, size is important.

“People want them the size of a silver dollar or smaller,” Fred Vereen says of those bought for sauteeing. Most of the shiitakes the Vereens sell end up in sauces or chopped for salads.

“Some people don’t care (about the size); the majority are chopped up anyway. They take any size,” Linda says.
She adds that for her own use, she puts them in stir-fry dishes and sautees them in virgin olive oil. She makes a mushroom-asparagus salad also.

Linda Vereen is quick to extol the health qualities of mushrooms.

They have a large amount of vitamin B and are among the few garden products that do not lose vitamins or other good qualities when frozen.

“They are a healthy food,” she says.

Even if her marketing is done only when the mushrooms are ready, she rarely fails to sell all that she harvests when she goes to her job in Conway. She freezes all she needs and as for the rest, she says she has no trouble getting rid of them.

“I find that the people I work with are glad to receive them,” she says, adding that some of her co-workers are gourmet cooks.