SPARTA, Georgia — Agriculture is woven into the fabric of Central Georgia, and those parcels of land turn out all kinds of things. Over the next few weeks, Suzanne Lawler has taken you to different farms in Central Georgia for a series called 'Farms from the Heart.'
When you think of Georgia crops peaches, blueberries and even chicken may come to mind. For the final week of the series, she takes you inside the old warehouse with deep roots nestled away in downtown Sparta.
"This building was built in the 1890s; it was a cotton warehouse," said Kevin Frasier, who runs Sparta Imperial Mushrooms.
PHOTOS: Sparta Imperial Mushrooms
Now, it's something quite unusual for the South. "Here we grow lion's mane oyster and shiitake mushroom."
Imperial Mushrooms sprouts three to 400 pounds of the fragile fungi every week, and it is quite a process.
"So this is what mushrooms require to grow in an indoor setting it's a high temperature plastic and it's got a filter patch here that allows a gas exchange so the mushrooms can breathe in oxygen," Frasier said.
From there, he has to go into somewhat of a mad scientist role. "So these are mushroom cultures here, so I start off with introducing a tiny piece of tissue from the petri dish.It grows out, which is the Mycelium, which is the white stuff growing inside.That's what carries the organism to grain."
The sterilized grain is like food for the shrooms. and everything is sterilized since this crop is a fungus.
Outdoors you can do a more passive system of drilling holes in a log and introducing mushroom Mycelium into those logs and you can wax over it and they can hold their own out there. But in a controlled setting we need full sterilization for a substrate so any competitor bacteria or fungi that may try to consume this sawdust won't be able to out compete our mushrooms.
Depending on the variety, the mushroom takes five to 13 weeks to grow in these sawdust pods. "These are about as large as the lion's heads will get indoors for me. A little bigger than softball size I'd say, and then they're ready to pick."
Then, they just snip them off to harvest. You won't find imperial mushrooms in grocery stores. They mostly go to farmers markets and a few other restaurants in Athens and Atlanta.
Click here to learn more about Sparta Imperial Mushrooms.