Mushroom Growing for Small-Scale Food Enterprises (0.5 day)

About This Event

Mushrooms can offer a high-value, relatively low-space addition to a food-growing enterprise. This half-day session introduces the principles and practicalities of small-scale mushroom production.

You’ll cover:

Common edible mushroom types suitable for small producers
Basic growing requirements and environments
Substrates and sourcing materials
How mushrooms can fit into existing market garden systems
Labour, yield and realistic expectations

This session is ideal for growers exploring diversification, or anyone curious about whether mushroom production could work alongside other crops. This morning forms part of a 6-day FARMstart course, but can be booked as a standalone.

Refreshments and lunch included, using as much produce as possible from the market garden.

Course Facilitator
Rachel Hammond is an experienced grower and educator specialising in regenerative, perennial-led and agroforestry market garden systems. She has developed and demonstrated a 75% perennial, climate-resilient and commercially viable market garden model, designed to balance productivity, biodiversity and profitability.

Rachel’s teaching is practical, honest and grounded in lived experience. She is particularly skilled at helping people understand what works in reality – including labour, margins, and long-term sustainability – rather than idealised growing models.

Her approach combines ecological thinking with commercial clarity, making FARMStart especially valuable for those serious about turning growing into a livelihood.

Course Setting
You’ll be learning within:
A working market garden, designed around permaculture principles
The Grange Hub, a purpose-built education and community space
Wide, open views across the rewilding site

The setting supports learning that is grounded, practical and unhurried, with time to ask questions, share experiences and connect skills to a wider ecological context.