Some look like coral, delicate pastel pinks and yellows, others like loosely furled flowers, or
speckled like butterfly wings, the whole arrangement, at the farmers’ market stall, like a
still-life. And yet all these glorious specimens are edible as well as glamorous and exotic,
artfully displayed in wooden boxes, sprigged with rosemary.
BGM, as owner Skye Johnson refers to her business as, has been at the Mullum Markets
since the outset of Covid. ‘Covid’, she tells me, ‘forced us to shape-shift BGM and change up
and rethink everything from packaging to value-added products…’ She says that it was a
brush with cancer which impelled her move to the 120 acres at Windaboo, near Rosebank,
about seven years ago. Up until then her ‘farm life experience…was a worm farm from
Bunnings.’ It started in a garage but once four staff members had attended a mushroom
cultivation course in Sydney with the crew from Milkwood the business was up and running.
‘I have for a long time’, Skye tells me, ‘had an interest in soil and plant health as well as the
medicinal/functional mushrooms and health and wellbeing benefits to both people and
critters.’
Mushrooms have long been prized for their nutritional benefits – no sugars, little
carbohydrate, many vitamins and minerals and especially loads of protein – but apart from
selling her fully certified organic fungi, Skye has developed a powdered mushroom and an
elixir. Her partner Kris, who mans the stall, tells me the latter is ‘a brain drug’, assisting with
clarity and brain function; Skye tells me her mother claims it kept Covid at bay in her
system.
The powdered mushrooms, using dried oyster, shiitake, king and mixed, can be added, she
says, ‘to soups, stews. pastas…for an umani flavour…We put our mushroom seasonings on
practically everything!’
Byron Gourmet Mushrooms are at Mullumbimby every Friday from 7 – 11am
Victoria Cosford
