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The farm

A cold store on the edge of the Barje.

Three grow rooms, two pairs of hands and a lot of steam, a ten-minute drive from the city centre. This is where the mushrooms in your crates come from, and how they get to you.

Since 2021

Forty blocks and a bicycle

Rok started Myxaris in 2021 with forty shiitake blocks in one corner of a rented former cold store on the edge of the Barje, the flat marshland on the south side of Ljubljana. The building already did the hard part. Thick insulated walls hold a temperature whether the fog is down over the marsh or the summer is up.

The first crop went to two kitchens he could reach by bicycle, crates strapped to the back. That was the whole delivery round.

The farm now runs three grow rooms in the same building, growing four varieties and a dried shiitake. The deliveries go out by van on Tuesday and Friday mornings, and the round reaches 35 km out, from Kranj to Litija. It is still small enough that the person who picked your mushrooms is usually the one who answers when you write.

How it grows

How a block becomes a mushroom

Every crop starts as a bag of steamed straw or wood. It is also why a big jump in a standing order needs a few weeks of notice: the blocks have to grow first. The ordering page has the lead times.

01

Mix

Chopped straw for the oysters, beech sawdust for the shiitake and lion's mane. Wetted, packed into bags and steamed, so nothing else in the air gets a head start.

Day one

02

Inoculate

Once the mix has cooled, the spawn is worked in by hand and every bag is tied off at the neck.

Same day

03

Incubate

14 to 21 days in the dark at 22 °C. The mycelium runs white through the whole block until it holds together like one solid piece.

Nobody opens the door much. Nothing to see yet, and everything to lose.

14-21 days

04

Fruit

Into the cool, humid, lit rooms. The bag is cut, the block feels the change of air, and the crop comes in 5 to 10 days.

Lion's mane takes its time, five weeks overall from mix to pick, which is one reason it has its own long section on the mushrooms page.

5-10 days · lion's mane 5 weeks

Plate II · A block in fruit
A straw block fruiting grey oyster A fine line drawing of a tied grow bag packed with chopped straw, with two fan-shaped grey oyster shelves growing out of a cut in its side and a few small pins starting above them. Pl. II Pleurotus ostreatus 5 cm Chopped straw block
Grey oyster on chopped straw, first flush
Who picks

Rok and Eva, four evenings a week

Picking happens in the evening, so the crop spends the night cold and arrives in your kitchen the next morning, before half ten.

The picking evenings

Rok picks with Eva, who works with him part-time. The two big picks are Monday and Thursday, the evenings before the Tuesday and Friday drops, when the crates for each kitchen are made up. The evenings before those, Sunday and Wednesday, are for walking the rooms and cutting whatever won't wait. That goes to the drier for the dried shiitake bags or onto the compost, never into a crate.

Lion's mane is cut by eye, before the spines start to yellow, usually at 300 to 600 g a head. Everything goes straight into waxed paper bags, into returnable crates, and into the cold overnight.

Picked
The evening before delivery
Packed
Waxed paper bags, returnable crates
Arrives
Tuesday and Friday, before 10:30
Spent blocks

When a block is finished, it goes to the compost heap and to the neighbours' vegetable beds.

We don't sell spent blocks, spawn or grow kits, and we only supply kitchens. The ordering page keeps the short list of what we turn down.

A note for August

Closed Two Weeks Every August

We shut the grow rooms for the first two weeks of every August. Everything comes out. The rooms get scrubbed and steamed, and I go and sit by a lake that isn't the Ljubljanica.

Last orders by the Thursday before, please. We're back on the road the Tuesday after, with the first lion's mane of the autumn not far behind.

Rok

Visits

Come and see the rooms

Chefs are welcome on a Saturday morning between 08:00 and 11:00, if you write first. It is the quiet end of the week, the rooms are full, and you can see the lion's mane at every stage from a white knot to a head ready to cut.

Write to us at hello@myxaris.com with the Saturday that suits, and we'll reply with directions.

Arrange a visit