And so we begin (again).
What a long strange trip it's been... If I can steal that line from the Greatful Dead.
I recall way back in the early nineties when I was running around the country doing lighting for a rock band, reading how much income could be made off of a ten by ten grow space of gourmet mushrooms in your basement. Not the generic Button, Cremini or Portabella's you find in the grocery store(which are all the same mushroom, more on that in a later post) but the harder to find, shorter shelf life varieties that you normally only see on the cooking channels and at higher end and farm to table restaurants.
That article I read had bounced around in the back of my mind for years. When the lighting/electrial sales company in Lenexa, Ks which I had spent the past 14 years started on the decline and I obviously wasn't going to get rich writing sci-fi/fantasy short stories, I decided to start growing those Mushrooms in my mind as a secondary source of income. So wouldn't you know, after toying with the idea of starting a mushroom business for years I finally get it off the ground just in time for Covid to shutdown everything. Fortunately starting a business like this in the basement did not saddle us with a ton of overhead so we were able to wait out the shutdowns and start it up again this year.
We kicked off at the Merriam Kansas Farmers Market the summer of 2022. The Market itself was just back to full operations after Covid and despite the slow start we built a decent following of regular customers (if any of you are reading this, Thanks again!!!) Over the summer quite a few of our regulars asked about us selling Microgreens, to which I usually responded, What are Microgreens?
And that brings us up to today. I started selling mushrooms on Marketwagon when the summer farmers market season ended and since I had some extra room in the basement I figured "lets see what these Microgreen things are". A couple months later here we are, kicking off the website for Allen Family Gourmet Mushrooms and Microgreens.
If you are visiting for the first time, Welcome and if you are one of our summer customers or a first time customer, Thank you!
Feel free to shoot any questions over and I'll do my best to get back to you ASAP!
Until next time,
Bob