Gone 'Shroomin'

BEFORE HAVING entered the nature-free covenant of urban life, you may have memories of coming across mushrooms sprouting up from patches of decomposing leaves, blooming out from rotted logs, growing directly on mossy tree trunks. Unless you make regular jaunts to the woods, chances are you haven't seen such haphazard growth of mushrooms in quite some time.

Now is the beginning of wild mushroom season, but for urban farmer Judy Shen, the owner of the small-scale farm All Season Mushroom, it is also the beginning of cultivated mushroom season. Though they may not share the bucolic traits of their naturally occurring cousins-Shen grows her mushrooms year-round in a warehouse in College Point, Queens-apparently this strain is just as sensitive to weather. Although the controlled environment that she keeps protects her crops from the capriciousness of the seasons, the summer months remain tough, and Shen is relieved that fall is here.

"Summer is worst because they're scared of the high temperature," says Shen, a native of Tai Pei. "Now I have a lot of mushrooms I can show you. In the winter?I grow more mushrooms, three times more. For mushrooms in the summer, the life is very short; after fall, winter, spring, their lifespan [is longer]."

Shen meets me at the end of the 7 line in Flushing, the closest subway stop to College Point. Amidst the hustle and bustle of Queens' Chinatown and beneath shockingly low-flying planes, Shen looks especially petite as she waits for me in front of a Burger King on Main St. Wearing jeans, tennis shoes and a v-neck t-shirt, the taut-skinned Shen could be as young as 18 or as old as 38. Though she couldn't possibly clear five-foot-two, her springy walk and bouncy chin-length black hair give her a few extra inches, as does her vivacious personality.

"Did you know that mushrooms are good for the immune system? Guess how old I am!" says Shen.

Without betraying my subject's confidence, I'll just say that Shen is older than she looks, and partially credits mushrooms with keeping her young. She drives an old burgundy minivan the seven minutes from the subway to a squat, unmarked warehouse painted a flat brown the color of dirt: the place where she grows her mushrooms. Inside, the space is even more raw.

Shen's modest operation, established in 2002, takes up half of the warehouse, an unfinished loft-like space that she had built up into two floors: one room upstairs for shiitake, and one room on the ground floor for assorted mushrooms. As per the needs of the mushrooms, which prefer cool, dark, humid spaces, there is almost no natural light.

We walk through a narrow corridor, past stacks of empty boxes marked "exotic mushrooms" and a refrigerator case where Shen keeps the mushrooms after they have been picked, into one room where Shen grows them. Built up of bare planks, the space vaguely resembles a sauna. A few fluorescent bulbs supply minimal light, and the ceiling is covered in tarp to keep in humidity. Water collects in small puddles on the cement floor and in tiny beads on rows of small black garbage bags, clear plastic bags and the odd styrofoam box that are all neatly lined up on simple wooden shelves. In a relationship that seems incongruous to the uninformed eye, mushrooms grow from holes that are punched into these bags.

"See, they look like flowers," Shen says, plucking a flourishing stalk of oyster mushrooms, which grow in milky, petal-like layers, off of one bag.

Shen also grows shiitake mushrooms, one of her best-sellers; enoki, long, pale sprout-like 'shrooms; white globular mushrooms called pom poms; king oyster mushrooms; large mushrooms with thick stalks and chubby caps; and maitake, or hen of the woods, which resemble small bare-branched shrubs.

"Enoki now take a break," says Shen, pointing to a group of small styrofoam boxes as she makes her way through the room.

"These are hen of the woods," says Shen, singling out another group of bags studded with tiny stumps. "This Sunday, I think they'll grow big."

Shen and her helpers pick about 200 pounds of mushrooms daily, the bulk of which is made up mostly of shiitake and oyster. When I ask Shen how the stuff in the bags turns into mushrooms, she gives me a variety of vague explanations: "It's dirt, humidity, nothing" or "Put some stuff, make a hole, just come in."

When asked about the contents of the bags, Shen is equally elusive: "We don't really talk about details, but mostly it's sawdust and cotton seed." Shen is more forthcoming with her technique: The rooms are controlled at a 60-degree temperature at all times; humidifiers that mist each room operate four times a day. Every 12 hours, Shen changes the position of the mushrooms, and cleaning must take place almost constantly.

"I work very hard," says Shen. "You know how early I wake up every day? Five o'clock. Farming is very hard work, and the money is nothing."

I consulted Andy Cavanagh, an agricultural research technician at the University of Massachusetts who has foraged, studied and grown his own mushrooms. He informed me that most likely what is inside the bags is a starter mixture of spawn, which is like mushroom seed, mixed with sawdust, water and cotton-seed hulls, plus an additional other food source like fertilizer, powdered milk or white flour.

The fungus that develops in this environment, called mycilium, is the vegetative stage of a mushroom. In the right conditions, it breathes carbon dioxide and eats the sawdust and cottonseed, colonizing the materials along the way. When nearly the entire contents of the bag are colonized by the fungae, the mycilia develop a reproductive urge, of which the mushroom is the result. Much in the way that flowers spread pollen, mushrooms were created as part of the need for genetic diversity, and mushrooms caps disseminate billions of microscopic spores that allow the mycilia to perpetuate elsewhere.

To put it even less appetizingly, mushrooms are the reproductive stage of fungus.

Three years after immigrating to the U.S., Shen started her business based on an existing set of skills. Her mother grew mushrooms in Taiwan (and still does); Shen learned the trade growing up.

"As a child I saw my mom every day doing things. After I came to America I didn't really ask my mom [but] I know how to do it," says Shen. "If I ever have a problem, I call her."

All Season Mushroom is a presence at the New York City greenmarkets on Wednesdays and Fridays in Union Square, Saturdays in Fort Greene and Sundays in Tompkins Square. Prices vary, but mushrooms are generally $3 per quarter pound for shiitake and king oyster, $2 per quarter pound for oyster mushrooms, $5 per quarter pound for maitake and pom pom, $3 for a bag of enoki. Shen admits that it's a struggle. The demand for mushrooms on the East Coast, she says, is not very high.

"I know on the West Coast they eat a lot of mushrooms [which are] are delicious and very healthy," says Shen, in a wistful tone. "I have heard that in California, they line up at the mushrooms stalls." o