Forests are not only made of trees! RS member Liz Murdoch reports from a day with the Edinburgh Agroecology Co-operative, learning about, working with and celebrating some more ‘lowly’ members of the forest community.
It’s 18th May 2025 and a group of about twenty people mill around a broad agricultural site in north Edinburgh that overlooks the Forth. A brisk wind lends a spring chill, although there has been no rain for weeks and the land is dry as a bone. Although it feels like a million miles away from the city, this site is a 100 acre historic estate surrounded by urban sprawl. It belongs to the City of Edinburgh Council and was managed with traditional grazing and arable practices by a tenant farmer, until the lease was acquired by the Edinburgh Agroecology Co-operative in 2024.
We introduce ourselves and are given a short background to Rhyze’s new mushroom farm, a guest enterprise on EAC land. It has been four years since the Rhyze Co-operative first established its base at The Forge, a collection of brightly painted shipping containers on a small piece of wasteland in the city centre. I had been intrigued and attracted by the street art and re-greening that had transformed the abandoned site as it waited for the developers to move in. I hadn’t been to any events but had bought a “Decompose Your Homework” kit for my nephew.
The Rhyze team are big on hospitality, having grown their network through a variety of free social events, including reading groups, potlucks, music and BYOB parties. The original site was well-placed for this, but they knew The Forge wouldn’t be available for ever, and so developed their mushroom farm exclusively inside a shipping container. Inevitably the surrounding space took on a guerilla gardening character and became an oasis of anarchy and creativity. Hyphae flourished and networks grew. The aim wasn’t so much to farm different types of mushrooms on a grand scale, but to teach people to do this themselves, building mycelium-like networks of mutual aid and solidarity. Rhyze term this “ethical hedonism”.
After coffee and biscuits we are taken around the facilities by Co-op members Marco Tenconi and Roxy Minter. One-time beginners in mushroom cultivation, they are modest about their achievements. The creation of a conducive environment for different mycelium to flourish and then bring them on to fruiting, at scale and within a shipping container, was reached through trial and error. This container, sitting at its new site, now houses the Lab, a walk-in fridge unit, where we see different fungal strains being stored. Re-purposed plastic tubs through clear plastic coverings, being colonised by a bewitching fuzziness in varied hues. It feels joyfully subversive to be in an environment where mould is a thing of beauty – and it is clear that my fellow attendees are equally inspired. An effervescent, utopian chat suffuses the day about the potential to harness this lifeform – or collaborate with it – for mutual benefit.
We visit the “sawdust palace” where woodchips and sawdust are soaked and bagged, and then the newly-built polytunnel fruiting chamber, steel shelves stacked with plastic bags of growing medium and seeded with oyster spawn. These are starting to produce healthy fronds of sweetly perfumed pink oysters. The team are trialling new low tech methodologies as they scale up production. The Forge’s indoor fruiting chamber had been an insulated ‘wet room’ with a high capacity humidifier (automatically ventilated through a complexity of timers and sensors to ensure the cool, damp and humid conditions necessary for fruiting). Whereas the polytunnel benefits from natural air currents where its polythene membrane has been substituted with mesh. It’s a work in progress. Blinds are added when the sun is fierce and the area is misted with piped (not pumped) water.
The second polytunnel is dedicated to vermiculture, and Roxy demonstrates a community of worms in a biowaste medium which looks much like healthy soil, eating, digesting their food and laying egg cocoons. There is one large worm bin, half the size of a car and made of wood and salvaged materials, and the polytunnel has capacity for twenty-three more. The wormery will repurpose waste from the farm as well as other sources, produce a high quality soil amendment in the form of worm castings and help to educate about soil health. Roxy’s enthusiasm for worms is infectious and we imagine the safe and wholesome organic environment for busy worms in the dark warm moist substrate beneath each blanket.
After a lunch of mushroom paella with chaga mushroom tea, known for its immune-boosting properties, we share our visions of a future where “waste” is no longer a concept, and by-products are absorbed into an continuous cycle of creative transformation. Much of mycology is political, because fungi are overlooked and marginalised like “lower” plants – and to my mind the Rhyze team embody this with their values of inclusivity, diversity and equality. Fungi could indeed offer an aspirational model to humankind.
In the afternoon we are invited to help fulfil some volunteer tasks. Some attendees elect to weed and mulch a young a hedgerow along the boundary fence, to “naturalise” the site and restore biodiversity. Others mix oyster spawn into a growing medium, following one of Rhyze’s established recipes, and fill long plastic sausages with small piercings. These will start to crop within weeks. Some choose to drill holes into hardwood logs, and knock in dowels made from spores and a growing medium. I am guessing that these will produce shiitake or other wood-decomposing mushrooms. I choose to revisit the wormery and find my rhythm helping to make burlap “blankets” for each worm bed, to ensure the necessary moisture, insulation and darkness for their community to thrive. Jute sacks from imported coffee beans are unpicked and sewn onto plastic sheeting and bubble wrap with darning needles and a thick nylon thread. We discuss mushroom politics, how fungi can help us build more resilient food systems, make jokes and settle comfortably into repetitive and relaxing manual tasks sown with rich conversation.
The Rhyze team’s reach has been extraordinary, working with local community groups in the central belt of Scotland and as far away as Skye and Knoydart. Their travelling Mushroom Alchemy workshop offers a theoretical grounding in radical mycology and its political context, calling for greater food sovereignty, decolonisation, democracy and environmental sustainability.
I have the sense that, apart from a microbiologist and a forester, most of the Rhyze team are visionary and anarchist defectors from a tech-savvy generation who are looking for a less “sterile” existence. They celebrate dirt under the nails and their ethos of collaboration, self-sufficiency, non-profit, low-tech and open-source methodology. Volunteering with Rhyze is a two-way process, with rewards including skills sharing in building and woodworking with salvaged materials, basic tool competency, educational and craft events and opportunities to celebrate milestones in the project with a welcoming and inclusive community. “We believe building something together from scratch is an empowering and transformational act.”
References:
MycoRenewal in Theory and Practice by Maya Elson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fu2FzZc_TPU
On Fungal Dreams of Liberation by Maymana Arefin: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15BrS5fN-Pzw9xiK7iNZ-XYPB-5DhALVA/view?usp=sharing
Re-enchanting the World: Technology, the Body, and the Construction of the Commons by Silvia Federici (in Re-enchanting The World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons): https://library.stationofcommons.org/Silvia%20Federici/Re-Enchanting%20the%20World_%20Feminism%20and%20the%20Politics%20of%20the%20Commons%20(9)/Re-Enchanting%20the%20World_%20Feminism%20and%20the%20-%20Silvia%20Federici.pdf
Marco Tenconi adds a bit more about Rhyze…
Rhyze was formed in 2020 by a group of burnt out and traumatised climate activists looking for a way to make a difference in the world that didn’t require confrontation with the police and criminal justice system. We were particularly interested in urban food production as a nexus for community building and climate change mitigation and adaptation.
It was a project very much born of the pandemic, a group of friends with lots of time and energy and little to focus on began meeting, scheming and dreaming to keep busy. After establishing our broad goals we quickly realised that the land-based food growing project we had envisioned was beyond our means – we had no money and no secure access to green space. We turned to mushrooms because we realised we could start growing them in a matter of weeks with very limited funds, in the middle of winter, in our own houses, during a pandemic lockdown, using our own domestic or local business waste (coffee grounds from the cafe down the street).
We were instantly hooked by the possibilities, the narratives, the mystery and the beauty of fungi. Having never grown mushrooms before, we quickly agreed we should try start a community mushroom farm.
Five years later we’re still here and still dreaming and scheming. As Liz references above we recently moved to Lauriston Farm, and built a new growing space in a 100 sq m polytunnel. We’re harvesting 250kg of oyster mushrooms a month grown exclusively on local business byproducts. We hope to be growing closer to 500 kg a month by the end of the year.
Extending our vision of using decomposing organisms to recycle abundant waste into socially useful things, we’ve recently branched out into vermiculture and hope to have approximately two million worms under our care by 2027, processing about three cubic metres of organic waste a week into 1.5 cubic metres of worm poo, a powerful soil amendment packed full of microbes and plant hormones.
We’re also thinking more and more about how mushroom cultivation could play an important role in our rural food systems and communities. We’ve begun trials and conversations to experiment with growing mushrooms on invasive and problematic species like Rhodendron ponticum and bracken. We’re carrying out research into how the cultivation of the chaga fungus could support small woodland owners and afforestation projects, and we’re hoping to to help set up mushroom growing operations with four community farms in remote or island communities that are at the sharp end of increasingly fragile supply chains.
We certainly know how to keep busy, but running an organisation that is both a third sector funded community project and a small food growing business is not without its challenges. The days are long, the margins are tight and both the funding world and selling food to market are very precarious. If you would like to support us and what we do, have a look at our website, see if you can attend one of our workshops, buy one of our tinctures or simply keep in touch and spread the word.