If you’re looking for some premium mushrooms in South Jersey, you needn’t look any further than the Wood Song mushroom farm in Cape May County.
Operated by Lin Conover out of her garage in Rio Grande, Middle Township, Wood Song Mushrooms specializes in growing a rotating selection of gourmet mushrooms for eating and for use in health products.
When asked what’s the most common reason for her customers’ interest in her products, Conover said it’s a broad spectrum.
“It’s the gamut,” Conover said. “Obviously eating them, they’re just so nutritious and great fiber and protein. They’re not plants. They’re not animals. They’re their own kingdom and they have their own qualities that make them very unique.
“They have so many compounds and components that we are just starting to learn about. There’s so much potential for how they can help humans.”
Conover said she grows a couple different types of oyster mushroom, lion’s mane, pioppinos, chestnut mushrooms, beech mushrooms, and black pearl kings.
“I kind of have my staples that are easier for my small-scale grow,” she said.
The varieties she experiments will occasionally rotate and she’ll sometimes grow enokis and king trumpet mushrooms.
Conover said she started learning to grow mushrooms around 2017, just by reading a lot about it and watching Youtube videos. By 2020, she was ready to give it a go as a business.
She needed a new name for the new venture, and while she said she’s not a religious person, a spiritual experience she felt during a concert in Ocean City helped her make that decision.
“One of my favorite songs is a song by Indigo Girls called ‘The Wood Song,’” she said.
“It’s just really about navigating through life. I went to an Indigo Girls concert, and I told myself, when I was trying to decide about this business, that if they played it, it meant that I should name my business that. So they did, and I did.”
Since that beginning five years ago, Conover’s operation has expanded to the point where it is her full time gig, and she’s still able to do it all out of her garage.
“You can grow a lot of mushrooms in a small space,” she said. “You just have to really pay attention to what the mushrooms are telling you as far as what their conditions are. Beyond learning what they favor and what they need, you have to pay attention to them and respond to how they’re growing.”
Because it’s all done indoors where she can control the temperature, humidity and airflow, Conover said she’s able to pretty much produce all year, though she does tend to slow down in the winter since she lives down the shore where things slow down during the off-season anyway.
The life-long area resident said her involvement in small scale farming has entered her into a community of similarly-minded producers.
“I have a great little network of other mushroom growers,” Conover said. “We help each other out and support each other.”
Being part of that community, she said, partially steers her choices on what she grows and where she sells.
“There’s other small growers and I definitely want all of us to succeed, so I kind of go where somebody isn’t already,” she said.
When it comes to how she gets her products to buyers, she said she doesn’t like to put all her eggs, or mushrooms, in one basket. Mostly she operates through direct order and deliveries along with appearances at farmer’s markets around Cape May and Atlantic counties, and her mushrooms can be found in some restaurants, including Port, in Lower Township and Maison Bleue of Cape May.
Along with fresh mushrooms, Conover sells other products including a line of dried and powdered mushrooms, her own mushroom “coffee” blend, teas and tinctures.
She said she recently received a USDA grant for beginner farmers, which she’s using to help launch a new product – the Salty Shroom line of powdered mushroom-based seasoning salt blends. The new venture is a collaboration with Salty Acres, a Cape May County farm that harvests salt from sea water.
Along with selling all of her products, Conover is something of the local Johnny Appleseed of mushrooms, or maybe the Jane Mushroom Spore, as she enjoys spreading her knowledge of mushroom growing to others.
She sells mushroom grow kits on her website, and gives talks about the process to teach people all about it.
“I do a lot of classes at the county library,” she said. “I can’t talk enough about them. They have such great educational offerings for the public.”
Conover said she’s also been leading immersive walks in local forests to help others get in touch with nature.
“The new direction I’m really feeling pulled to is the idea of nature-centered mindfulness,” she said. “It’s just the healing properties that nature offers to us, and being present and using your senses, and being immersive in any kind of forest setting.”
She said she’ll be attending a retreat this summer in Cherry Valley, N.Y. to learn more about leading others in such programs, so that she can come back and serve as a therapy guide in our area.
But when it comes to her main business of growing mushrooms, Conover attributes any success she’s had to the support she’s found in her local community.
She said she wanted to specifically thank Ostara’s Coffee House and Rea’s Farm Market, both in West Cape May, for being there for her since she started.
“They really helped me and supported me in my early days of figuring this out and deciding that I wanted to do this,” she said.
She also thanked her passionate regular customers, many of whom have been buying her mushrooms from the beginning, for helping her to live out her dreams.
“I really am trying to be able to support myself with this,” she said. “It’s a growing process and I appreciate the supporters I have – my customers that have supported my journey from the very beginning.”
This story is the first in what we hope to be an ongoing series featured in our print issues. Uncommon Garden will profile small-scale farmers and backyard growers who are growing or raising more unusual agricultural items for sale. If you know someone who would fit that category, reach out to us at [email protected].
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