I spoke to Haroom and Ash, founders of Billington Mushrooms, who provide Babble’s restaurant with the lion’s mane mushrooms that become our fan favourite lion’s mane steak. They’re a local business with a farm-laboratory based in Newhaven that has been operating for nearly two years.

 

 

How did Billington Mushrooms start, and when was the first time you felt the spores of mushroom love take root in you?

H: We started almost two years ago. Ash has a background in landscaping, and my background is in investment and kitchens, and we were looking for a way that we could combine forces. We started by looking into different types of indoor vertical farming and attended an exhibition in Amsterdam, and while there, we took our research to the next stage by seeing in person all the different setups and different crops we could grow. Ash has always been interested in mushrooms, and so we thought, let’s give mushrooms a go!

 

What problems did you come up against in the early days?

H: I had a building in London with about 3000 square feet of vacant space on the first floor. That space became our first mushroom farm and lab. It was all working excellently in the winter, but then summer hit, and unfortunately, the temperature got the better of us. With the hotter weather and the heat from the kitchens on the ground floor below, the mushrooms were very unhappy and stopped growing. We had to reassess and decided that this wasn’t going to work because it would cost thousands in ventilation. So we moved. That’s when we left London and found a new building near Newhaven where we’re currently based.

 

Ash, as the mushroom guy, when did your love of mushrooms first take root?

A: As a landscaper, I’ve always been interested in nature. But there was one day in particular when I was walking my dog near Uckfield, and I saw something that looked like an octopus had been dunked upside down into the mud. It was a rare mushroom called devil’s finger. That led me down a path of trying to grow my own mushrooms at home with grow kits. I found something clicked in me with mushrooms that didn’t with regular landscaping.

 

What is one fantastic fungi fact that everyone should know?

A: Oyster mushrooms in the wild are actually omnivorous. They eat decaying matter like other mushrooms, but they also eat nematodes, microscopic roundworms, by making a lasso with their spores. So your vegetarian mushrooms are actually meat eaters.

 

What are the biggest challenges when growing mushrooms?

H: Mushrooms are fussy. The ideal temperature is between 16 and 18 degrees. Ventilation and air moisture are also key, the goal being clean air and just shy of humid. They’re also clean freaks, and even the smallest dirt or bacteria can infect the growing and cause a bad batch. So we spend most of our time cleaning and sterilising everything: we’re glorified mushroom janitors!

 

What’s one aspect of your business you’re especially proud of?

H: Our sustainability. We get all our oak wood shavings from our next-door neighbour, who’s a woodturner, and the mushrooms love it. All his waste product is gold dust to us, and it travels zero miles to us next door. Once we’ve used it to grow the mushrooms, what’s left over becomes incredible compost, and we work with a charity called Jamie’s Farm that happily takes our compost off our hands. It’s a wonderful closed loop that we’re very grateful for.

 

What is the mushroom growing process from start to finish, so we can all appreciate how much work goes into a few mouthfuls?

A: You start by acquiring spores of the mushroom you want to grow. Spores are the seeds, like the seeds in an apple. Those spores go into a petri dish, and you watch the mycelium grow out. Once it’s grown out and it looks like a white web, you transfer that to a jar of grain, and watch as the mycelium eats up the grain. Then this inoculated grain is transplanted into a sterile substrate bag, the oak wood shavings we mentioned before. This then goes into incubation for three weeks, where the mycelium eats all the wood and turns into a bag of overflowing white webbed mycelium ready to burst. The most exciting step is taking this full substrate bag to the fruiting room, where you cut a slit into it and introduce the mycelium to oxygen, light and humidity. When the outside environment interacts with the previously sealed up mushrooms, they begin growing the ‘fruit’ that will allow them to spread and reproduce via the spores, their seeds. This fruiting part is the mushroom part we recognise. Some mushrooms fruit for 10 days and some for 6 weeks, but by the en,d the mushrooms grow so densely you often can’t even see the bag they’re growing from. We can get two harvests from each bag, and once the bag is done, it becomes compost, like we mentioned before. We harvest about once a week and deliver to restaurants on Wednesdays.

 

What’s one thing growing mushrooms has taught you about life?

H&A: Patience. And resilience. And constant learning.

 

How many varieties of mushrooms do you grow?

A: Four currently, soon to be six. Grey oyster, pink oyster, king oyster and lion’s mane. We’re currently experimenting with chestnut and hen of the woods. All but one of these varieties grow natively in the UK – the pink oyster is native to South Asia. Eventually, we want to start using mushroom cultures from local wild Brighton mushrooms, meaning our operation will be even more local and low-impact.

 

What would you like to see for Billington Mushrooms at Babble in the future?

H: Other than a mushroom-only menu? Joking aside, we’d love to do seasonal mushrooms and give the talented chefs here more flavours and textures to play around with. The lion’s mane steak is just the start!