Like most farmers, Jared Scherger starts his day at the crack of dawn, checking his crops and carefully noting what’s ready to be harvested.

Yet his is not the typical farm – there’s nary a tractor, horse nor cornfield in sight. No seeds, shovels or plows either. Instead, Jared’s got all the petri dishes, glass jars and plastic bags he needs for his crops, making him more like a scientist in a lab than a farmer in the field.

Jared and his wife, Lucinda Womack, cultivate gourmet mushrooms on a 10-acre farm near Fort Collins, right off Interstate 25 between a subdivision and Fossil Creek Reservoir. These crops grow year-round in repurposed shipping containers that aren’t affected by summer’s blistering heat or winter’s frigid cold. It’s downright cozy in there, with a temperature that’s carefully controlled to maintain the ideal 70 to 75 degrees.

Folks who see the phrase “Hazel Dell mushrooms” in a menu description might assume it’s a type of mushroom, like shiitake, crimini or lion’s mane, but it’s not. Hazel Dell is the name of Jared and Lucinda’s company, the longest-running gourmet mushroom farm in Colorado.

And, for those who think the name “Hazel Dell” sounds like a person – named for someone’s sweet grandma, perhaps – they’re mistaken, too: It’s the name of the street where the company’s founder and Jared’s mentor, Jim Hammond, was living when he first started growing oyster and shiitake mushrooms in his garage more than 40 years ago.

 

A story on npr first piqued Jared’s interest in mushrooms, almost 20 years ago now. He was listening to a program featuring Paul Stamets, a famous mycologist (fungus expert) discussing his book Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Save the World.

Save the world? Yes, believes Stamets, and that’s the part that really captured Jared’s attention. Mycelium (the thread-like stage of growth before the “fruiting” body appears) can recycle elements like carbon and nitrogen as they break down plant and animal debris. As Stamets theorizes, we should be able to use them in other scientific applications, like helping to decompose toxic waste, reducing pathogens from streambeds and controlling insect populations.

“When I heard him say that mushrooms can save the world, I wanted to know more,” Jared said. He did a little research on mushrooms, but they didn’t really cross his mind again – except, of course, to eat – until a few years later, when he scored a part-time job at Hazel Dell, monitoring the temperatures in the grow rooms. Not content to just watch the thermometer, though, Jared paid careful attention to every aspect of the process.

“Jim was a pioneer in growing specialty mushrooms,” Jared said. “He’d been doing it since the ’80s. He always liked growing things, experimenting with things, and I wanted to do that, too.”

Recognizing that Jared had a knack for the mushroom biz, Jim taught Jared everything he knew, and Jared quickly worked his way up through the ranks, eventually becoming the full-time farm manager.

“We were always bouncing ideas off each other, and over the years, I took over more and more.”

Then the mentoring relationship took on a new sense of urgency – Jim was diagnosed with terminal cancer. “We had already started planning for Lucinda and me to take over someday,” said Jared, “but when he was diagnosed, it became our reality.”

Jim arranged for Jared and Lucinda to visit Jim’s original mushroom farm in California, now called Far West Fungi. “That was in the spring of 2020, right before COVID hit,” Jared said. “When we got back, I visited Jim, and he was so excited to hear about the trip and see the photos.” Jim succumbed to his cancer in May, after having beaten it twice before, and Jared and Lucinda signed the ownership papers for Hazel Dell Mushrooms in September.

“I dream about mushrooms a lot, like a lot of people dream about work,” Jared said. “Jim will pop into those dreams now and then. I believe he’s still speaking to me somehow.”

 

The mushroom “magic” (or science, as it were) begins in a humble little petri dish. It’s always been incredibly intimate, meticulous work. “You cannot mechanize it,” Jim was once quoted as saying. “Our mushrooms are grown and harvested with a lot of handwork.”

The petri-dish process is basically like cloning, according to Jared: “We’re doing tissue cultures, like in a lab.” The sterile spore cultures become the thread-like mycelium, which is eventually transferred into clear plastic sacks about the size of a bag of flour that are filled with sterilized sawdust. Jared also adds additional nourishing ingredients like wheat bran, soybean hull pellets, limestone and gypsum, depending on the requirements of each mushroom variety.

“Royal trumpet and lion’s mane need the additional protein from the soybeans,” explained Jared, “while oyster mushrooms could easily grow on just coffee grounds.”

When steam is used to sterilize the wheat bran, the aroma of hot grains smells remarkably like a brewery. As the mushrooms grow, each variety develops its own unique scent. True to their name, oyster mushrooms smell a bit fishy, while Jared describes shiitakes simply as “pungent.”

Over a period of three to 13 weeks, depending on the mushroom variety, the mycelium reproduce, building up inside the bags that are lined up like soldiers on shelves. The bags start out in the earthy-scented shipping containers, then move to the high-humidity grow rooms in one of the farm’s larger buildings. The fungi grow inside the bags, sometimes until the bag bursts open. When they’re ready, the bags are plucked from the shelves and marched to the harvesting room. The mushrooms are carefully hand-cut off the top of the now-hardened block of sawdust, then weighed and loaded into boxes.

The process involves an almost dizzying amount of other intermediary steps, with scientific terms like inoculation, sterilization and colonization; it can take up to six months from the time Jared first touches the petri dish until the mushrooms are ready to eat. Yet with a staff of about 20 employees, Hazel Dell is able to produce and harvest 1,600 bags of mushrooms each weekday, yielding 3,000 to 5,000 pounds per week – that can easily add up to more than 250,000 pounds each year.

However, Jared and Lucinda don’t want to stop there; they’ve recently expanded their space and are poised to increase production from 1,600 bags to 2,500 bags per day by spring 2022. That will allow them to meet the demand for delivery to restaurants (the 5-pound mixed-variety box is the most popular), food distributors and natural-foods stores like Whole Foods, Vitamin Cottage and Sprouts.

Hazel Dell mushrooms are mainstays in dozens of Fort Collins and Boulder restaurants, and a few in Denver. Jared is especially grateful for longtime customers like The Regional in Fort Collins.

“They’ve always been focused on using locally sourced ingredients, and they’ve been ordering our mushrooms since they opened,” Jared said. “Their fried oyster mushroom sandwich is a customer favorite.” On the appetizer side, they also use Hazel Dell oyster mushrooms in their Truffle Mushroom Cheese & Pretzel.

 

“People used to just wander around the farm, looking for someone to buy their mushrooms from,” Jared said. So he and Lucinda remedied that by opening a small retail area at the front of the new production building.

It’s where Lucinda can be found most weekdays, greeting visitors who stop by to purchase fresh or dried mushrooms for their culinary creations. If they need cooking inspiration, they can snag free recipe sheets, too.

Still fascinated with all things ’shroomy, and content with being a scientist-type farmer, Jared likes to experiment with cultivating additional mushroom varieties when he has the time. If those are successful, they might become seasonal specials or maybe even get added to the permanent lineup that now stands at eight varieties. “Jared’s always messing with something new,” Lucinda said. That’s because Jared knows the simple truth: “Mushrooms are having a moment.”

Hazel Dell may not be saving the world with earth-shattering, scientific fungi applications, but they’re making mushroom fans happy, and that might be close enough.