Photograph courtesy bluff city fungi
Patti Young holds a Lion’s Mane mushroom, one of the species available from Bluff City Fungi.
Editor's Note: The spring and summer of 2020 have presented days when many learned new-to-us skills, the kind that aren’t so new at all: growing vegetable gardens from seed, tending to sourdough starters, relying more on what we can create than on what we can procure. But long before the coronavirus pandemic, plenty of people in Memphis were growing and making both tangible and intangible goods. In this homebound season, we have chosen to present several local organizations who are bringing new meaning to what ‘homegrown’ signifies. — Anna Traverse Fogle
When I was 20 or 21, I started to get really interested in farming and growing my own food,” says Scott Lisendy. “To be completely honest, I wasn’t even a huge fan of mushrooms.” Now at 28, he is the owner of Bluff City Fungi, supplying mushrooms to hungry people all over the Mid-South.
Linsendy started his first farming operation with the help of a local agricultural incubator. “I had a produce and flower farm for a couple years,” he says, “and worked and managed for a lot of other local farms in the area.”
What fascinated him the most about growing was the “interwoven relationship between plants and soil and fungi … We always kind of played around with it on the side, but then we saw there was this huge need for them here that nobody was really filling at the time. I was just so fascinated by the science of it, and the process.”
With their varied tastes and textures and high protein content, mushrooms can make a great substitute for meat. They’re also high in fiber, cholesterol, and gluten, and are fat-free. Lindsey grows the type of mushrooms known in the industry as “exotics”: spindly shiitakes, terraced oysters, tightly clustered maitakes, furry lion’s manes, golden chestnuts, and stout pioppinos.
His operation is located in a warehouse in an industrial section of Memphis. “Mushrooms are perfectly suited to farming in a more urban setting, because they can be grown vertically in environmentally controlled systems,” he says. “The whole process is mimicking something that’s so rare. You’re trying to capture this moment in spring, that’s, like, 50 degrees, when it’s the perfect humidity and the mushrooms just gotta pop a rain. You’re trying to capture that every day of the week.”
Photograph courtesy bluff city fungi
The fungi begin life on a petri plate before moving onto carefully controlled growing environments. “They all grow on a wood-based substrate,” says Lisendy.
Bluff City Fungi is a regular presence at Mid-South farmers markets and supplies dozens of restaurants with mushrooms for their kitchens. When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the dining rooms, it was a big blow to the company. “I’ve always tried to make sure that we have a little bit of diversity in a lot of different directions,” he says, “which, after all this, has paid off very well, because we lost about 90 percent of our restaurant business overnight.”
Lisendy says he’s seen sales come back since the first shock, and he’s focused on making sure his products remain available. Bluff City Fungi ships to all 50 states. They offer curbside pickup, fresh from their indoor farm, and once-a-week deliveries. “We have a lot of different options for local Memphis people.”
Recently, he signed on to provide mushrooms for Whole Foods stores in East Memphis and Germantown. Despite the current challenges, Lisendy is optimistic about the future: “The core business has always been just my mom and me. She handles sales and I handle production. We’re really grateful that local people have stepped up to support us, and to make sure that businesses like ours can make it through this. It’s directly because of their support.”
For more information, visit bluffcityfungi.com
