We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Chris Swinson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Chris, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

We produce around a dozen species of edible mushrooms for distribution to farmers markets, grocery stores, restaurants, etc

Mushrooms, both wild and cultivated, have a tendency to elicit reactions in people that other produce and vegetables might not.

An innate disgust for fungus is known as mycophobia, where is a natural attraction to, or appreciation for, fungus is known as mycophilia.

We sometimes see these reactions in customers at stores and farmers markets and really enjoy connecting with our customers over shared appreciation for mushrooms, hence the name Mycophile’s Garden.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I first grew edible mushrooms from a mushroom growing kit that I purchased from a Farmers Market in Detroit years ago. It was a fascinating process and though it required a lot of research I managed to learn how to grow a wide variety of mushrooms on my own.

I started selling them at farmers markets about 8 years ago and have steadily added commercial accounts in addition to other farmers markets. Now there are four of us that do this full time, in addition to a number of people that help us part-time particularly during the summer Farmers Market season.

In addition to growing around a dozen species of edible mushrooms the also sell wild foraged mushrooms, mushroom growing kits, vegan mushroom jerky, and dried medicinal (legal) mushrooms.

I am a Michigan State certified wild mushroom expert and teach classes on mushroom identification at our facility, as well as at schools, garden clubs, libraries, botanical gardens, etc.

We also teach classes on mushroom cultivation, as well as nutrition, edibility, and medicinal usage of different mushrooms.

Because many of the mushrooms that we grow are visually stunning and uniquely nutritious, as well as medicinally active and their ability to treat and provent various diseases we have been fortunate to develop a pretty strong local following on social media. It’s been exciting to be able to share a lot of what we do a lot of the interesting things that we have learned with our followers.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

A friend encouraged me to turn my mushroom growing hobby into a business and help provide a lot of the funds that we used to get off the ground.

Unfortunately, mushroom growing is not an easy thing to scale up as most mushroom farms work on a multi-million dollar scale producing literal tons of mushrooms every week.

However, many of the specialty mushrooms that we grow do not travel well and thus can only be produced locally. A lot of the money that we spent in the first year or two was more or less wasted on learning experiences as well as lots of mistakes.

The neat thing about mushroom cultivation is that it does not require a huge amount of financial input and I was able to quickly increase our sales and production over a number of years with a lot of help from friends and relatives.

I’m at a point now we’re we are getting ready to go a major expansion and will be taking out an agricultural loan to do so. But once completed it will allow us to produce armor mushrooms end of a higher quality than we do currently. It will also allow us to expand to a point of being able to provide comfortable income for all of our core staff.

How did you build your audience on social media?

We have a pretty healthy following for a small farm. I think we have around 3,000 followers on Instagram and 8,000 on facebook.

Which is not a lot by some standards but for a small local Farm is pretty unusual.

A lot of our social media presence is simply due to the fact that we produce visually interesting and produce.

But we also spent a lot of time making sure to craft posts that are engaging and specifically informative. People who are interested in mushroom cultivation and the health effects of different mushrooms are often the types that are more inclined to read a little bit about the science behind what we do and what they are eating.

I also make use of mushroom growing and mushroom appreciation groups on different social media platforms and post things about our business there.

Lastly, through different Facebook groups I’ve been fortunate enough to share a lot of what we do with other mushroom cultivators and help them along the way in their own process, those conversations haven’t turned introduced us to other followers in the same groups.

Contact Info:

• Website: Mycophile.org
• Instagram: instagram.com/mycophiles_garden
• Facebook: Facebook.com/mycogarden