Pre-launch · Est. 2026
White oyster, pink oyster, lion's mane and king oyster — grown indoors on sterilised hardwood, cut the morning they go out. The shop isn't open yet. This is what we're building and how it works.
PL-001 · P. ostreatus var. florida
MEA agar · 24 °C · day 6
What we're growing
We'd rather run four strains properly than twelve badly. Each one gets its own fruiting conditions, its own harvest window, and its own reason to be on a plate.
Main crop
The one we grow most of. Clean and mild with a soft savoury depth — it takes seasoning rather than fighting it. Dry-sear it hard in a wide pan, no oil until the edges colour; crowd the pan and it steams into rubber.
Bright coral raw, fades to tan in the pan. Sharper and more acidic than the white — it takes chilli and lime well. Fast-growing and short-lived; it wants eating within three days.
Pulls apart in strands and browns like a scallop. Slice it thick, press it in a dry pan until the water leaves, then finish with butter. Mild and slightly sweet — it takes on whatever you cook it in.
The stem is the point. Cut into coins, score them, and treat them like a scallop — hot pan, high heat, don't move them. Holds its shape in a braise better than anything else we grow.
The lab · 01–07
Not seeds, not soil. A mushroom is the fruiting body of a fungus that has already spent weeks eating a block of sterilised wood in the dark. Seven steps, roughly six weeks, and most of the work happens before anything is visible.
It starts with tissue on agar — a wedge cut from a healthy mushroom, or a spore print germinated on a plate. We keep our own library and transfer each strain forward on a schedule, so we're growing something we know rather than whatever a supplier sent this month.
A colonised agar wedge goes into a jar of sterilised rye. The grain is the bridge: it carries a lot of energy and thousands of separate inoculation points, so when it later meets the bulk substrate the fungus starts from everywhere at once instead of one corner.
Hardwood sawdust and wheat bran, hydrated to about 60% and pressure-sterilised in filter-patch bags. Too wet and it goes anaerobic and sours; too dry and the mycelium stalls halfway through the block. This is the step most people get wrong, and you don't find out for two weeks.
Spawn meets substrate and the block goes into the dark. Over two to three weeks the mycelium eats outward from every grain until the whole block turns white and firm. Nothing to look at, nothing to do — this is where patience is the entire skill, and where contamination shows itself if it's there.
We cut the bag, drop the temperature, raise humidity and let fresh air in. The shock tells the fungus its food is running out and it's time to reproduce. Within three or four days the first primordia appear — grey bumps the size of a pinhead, hence the name.
Pins double in size roughly every day. Caps chase fresh air, so if the CO₂ creeps up you get long stems and small caps — the shape tells you exactly what the room was doing while you weren't looking. Good air, even light, no direct airflow on the cluster.
Cut at the base, whole cluster, just before the cap edges flatten out and start to turn up. A day late and the texture goes soft and the shelf life halves. Everything is cut the morning it leaves — no cold store, no gas flush, no week in a van.
Why the room matters
Outdoors you get what the weather gives you. Indoors, every variable that decides thickness, colour, stem length and shelf life is a number we set and hold. That's the whole argument for growing this way — not that it's better for you, but that it's repeatable.
Caps are mostly water and they crack if the air pulls it out too fast. Ultrasonic foggers on a humidistat, not a hose and a hope.
Mushrooms exhale CO₂ and then grow towards the exit. Let it climb and you get leggy stems and undersized caps. Monitored, not guessed.
Filtered air in on a timer, stale air out. Enough movement to clear CO₂, never so much that it dries the caps to leather.
Every transfer happens in filtered laminar flow. A block that catches trichoderma in week one looks fine until week three, then it's a bin.
Not a virtue claim — a consequence. The crop cycles in weeks inside a sealed sterilised room, so there's nothing to spray for. Clean input, clean room.
Grow log
We post every flush, including the failed ones. It's the only proof we can offer before there's anything to buy.
Waitlist
Launch news goes out on Instagram first — every flush, including the ones we bin. Leave your address and we'll open the feed for you so you can follow; once the list is running we'll email you when the first boxes go out and roughly monthly after that. No offers, no forwarding your address to anyone, one click to leave.
