Are you Hungry for Fungi? Would you like to grow your own edible
gourmet or medicinal mushrooms?

EXPRESS YOUR INTEREST BY THURS 30TH MAY****TO QUALIFY FOR A 20% DISCOUNT
ON YOUR FIRST ORDER* later this year (subject to telling us why you love
mushrooms so much. Oh, and a quick questionnaire. Sorry, you don’t get
owt for nowt 🙂 or if you miss that we’ll be giving a smaller discount
for people who respond before end of July.

**Please go here ****http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TC3VZ56****& answer a
couple of questions to **express your support for the Hungry Fungi
project. That’s it. We’ll keep you informed of what’s going down here as
we grow with regular newsletters and we even tweet if you fancy that
(see below).**

*So, who are we?*

*Hungry Fungi* is a newly establishing workers’ co-op based in Leeds who
will be providing mushroom spawn, easy mushroom grow-bags and workshops
on how to grow your own edible gourmet or medicinal mushrooms*. *We’ve
been building our own lab using scrap wood & reused stuff, and we’re
into community, good food and a sustainable future (what other kind is
there?).

By sending your expression of interest you will be helping to support
our project and also help with our market research and funding
applications, which is vital for small community projects,

We promote the benefits of growing your own mushrooms as a sustainable
and nutritional food source and also of benefit to ecosystem health.
Our remit is to provide all the materials and know how necessary to
empower ordinary people to grow their own mushrooms.

We will be supplying the following products and services:

* *Workshops on easy ways to grow your own gourmet edible and
medicinal mushrooms*. For this you need a substrate (or food for
the mushrooms) this can be logs, woodchip, used coffee grounds,
cardboard or straw. Includes all materials and equipment provided
for the workshop and follow up support.
* *Mushroom spawn* *and all equipment you need for growing your own
edible and medicinal mushrooms: *Mushroom spawn is the raw material
you need in order to grow mushrooms (a bit like seedlings, but for
mushrooms). This spawn will be produced by ourselves in our own
dedicated small-scale hand-built laboratory located just outside Leeds.
* *Easy grow, mushroom growing kits*: for busy people, one of our
grow-bags will simply need watering regularly & will start to fruit
within a couple of weeks and will carry on fruiting for repeated
harvests (subject to the amount of TLC you give it).

*Pricing: *We haven’t finalized our prices yet, but our prices will be
as reasonable as possible and our workshops will include a sliding scale
to accommodate people on low incomes. Our aim is to make growing your
own mushrooms accessible to all.

*What inspires us?*
Mushrooms (or fungi) have been shown to be vital to soil and ecosystem
health. By cultivating mushrooms we can support the health of our soil
and the ecosystems we live in whilst also growing our own high value,
highly nutritional (protein rich – same as dairy!) and delicious food
source. We are inspired by the work of Paul Stamets, author of
‘Mycelium Running – how mushrooms can help save the world’ and ‘Growing
Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms’. We exist to promote Stamets’ idea of
permaculture with a ‘mycological (fungi related) twist’ as well as
supporting local livelihoods & trading.

Initially we will be supplying a small range of mushroom spawn for sale
by mail order or collection from our base in Leeds. The varieties we
will be selling will include:

Oyster – a delicious and easy to grow gourmet mushroom
Shiitake – a classic gourmet mushroom suitable for growing on logs
Reishi – a wonderful medicinal mushroom, can be taken as a tea as a
powerful health tonic with a whole host of medicinal properties
King Stropharia – Garden Giant mushroom, suitable for cultivation on
woodchip mulch beds amongst herbaceous plants.

Our first spawn runs will be limited quantities so email us asap for
first refusal on orders later this year.

*Our website (soon to be updated): *www.fungi.coop

*Facebook:*Follow us and ‘Like’ us on Facebook to keep in touch and find
out more: www.facebook.com/hungryfungi

*
Twitter:*Follow us on Twitter to see pictures of the lab currently being
built, and for all things fungi! www.twitter.com/hungryfungi


*More ways to support us:*

*Offer to pre-order now and pay in advance:* we’ll send you our
pricelist as soon as we have it. It will greatly help us if you
pre-order and especially if you can pay in advance. This will enable us
to plan our production and help with cashflow. It will also mean you
get your order first.

*Donate to the project:* Any donations welcome, please email us if you
are able to donate to Hungry Fungi to help us get up and running. We’ve
got a bit more equipment to buy and we are working on a shoestring; any
donation whatever size will help.

Many thanks and may you have lots of future fun with fungi!

Ali, Behla, Fred & Joanna
The Hungry Fungi clan

p.s. feel free to forward this email to anyone you might think would
like what we’re doing. Thanks.