Pushing buttons

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/08/2010 (5511 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Did you hear the one about the mushroom who walked into a bar and ordered a drink? The bartender looked at him and said, "Sorry, we don’t serve mushrooms here."

To which the mushroom replied, "But I’m a fungi." (Rimshot.)

"You’d be surprised how many people don’t get the pun," says Laura Freeman, the co-owner of FunGuy Mushroom Grow Supply, located at 564 Osborne St. "They step inside, thinking it’s going to be a Gags Unlimited-type business. Or they spot me behind the counter, and say, ‘But you’re a girl. Shouldn’t the name be ‘FunGirl?’"

No joke, Laura and her husband, Jordon, opened their 545-square-foot locale on April 1 of this year. The shroomates’ way of thinking: Although this planet is home to over 14,000 species of mushrooms, the young entrepreneurs couldn’t find one retail outlet devoted solely to the hobby of cultivating them.

"There are a few mushroom-only sites online, and lots of hydroponic stores where you can get incubators and dehydrators, but until we came along, you had to go to 10 different places to get everything you needed if you were only interested in growing mushrooms," says Jordon.

Jordon and Laura are quick to point out that they’re not licensed mycologists. "No, no," says Jordon, a home renovator by trade. "People go to university for that. Basically we just watched a lot of documentaries about the environmental and medicinal benefits of mushrooms, and decided there was a need for this type of store."

In the beginning, business was — how shall we put it? — spore-adic. "Our first sale was actually to my Oma; she came in during the first week and bought some sandwich baggies, just to support us," says Laura, who sacrificed her 2008 Honda Civic in favour of an eight-year-old Cavalier in order to help finance the business.

"Yeah, I think it took a couple of weeks until we had our first real customer," Jordon pipes in. "I remember the first Saturday I worked by myself, I sold something like $140 worth of stuff. Laura was at home and I called her after every sale, to tease her."

Home kits capable of producing fresh batches of button, oyster or lion’s mane mushrooms year-round are top sellers. So, too, is an outdoor package geared towards shiitake mushrooms. "The outdoor shiitake comes in inoculated plugs, which are placed into a series of holes drilled in, preferably oak logs," Laura explains. "After inoculation, you will get mushrooms appearing intermittently the following summer, and for about three to five years thereafter, depending on factors like humidity, temperature and rainfall."

Besides fertilizer, scales and pressure cookers, FunGuy also carries DVDs (Mark R. Keith’s Let’s Grow Mushrooms), books (The Mushroom Cultivator by Paul Stamets and J.S. Chilton) and mushroom-shaped air fresheners. There is also a wide variety of themed apparel and no, Laura wouldn’t charge heartthrob Johnny Depp if he happened by, wanting to purchase one of her Alice in Wonderland T-shirts.

Million-dollar question: Do people ever inquire whether FunGuy is in the, uh, "magic" business?

"Well, we have come in some mornings, and heard some pretty weird voice mails that were left in the middle of the night, by kids who were obviously partying," Laura says. "But no, we do not support the use of illegal mushrooms."

For more information, visit www.FunGuymushroom.com.

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca