Down Home Mushrooms LLC cultivating mushrooms on the Coast

A local mushroom farm has been making waves across South Mississippi and invited our cameras in for a behind the scenes look.

You might have seen them at your nearby farmers market or you might have come across them on Facebook, but Down Home Mushrooms LLC is becoming one of the fastest growing fungi farms on the Coast. Owner Nicholas Gipson said, “It’s been crazy because I went from cooking in kitchens full time since I was about 15, 16 years old, to about 8 or 9 years ago, I went through an apprenticeship with the electrical union, and towards the end of that I started growing mushrooms on my own and it blew up and turned into the business.”

It was the lack of oyster mushrooms that lead to Gipson starting his own farm. “I started because when I cooked, and I ran all over the United States and stuff, I could find oyster mushrooms and different kind of mushrooms other places. When I decided to start trying to do that back home here in Mississippi, I couldn’t find any of those same mushrooms down here. So, I started growing my own, and that gradually grew into me growing everything that we have today.”

The grow room is a room where humidity and temperature are controlled because mushrooms are made up of 60 percent water. “These right here, these are some of the golden oyster mushrooms that are ready to be picked. These have like a nutty mushroom flavor to them. These are some of our pioppino mushrooms. They’re a black poplar mushroom, they have kind of a silky texture to them when you sauté them down. Everything back here is our lions mane mushrooms, back here and on this wall and then some of our shitake mushrooms grow in here.”

Son Nico Gipson said, “Well the pink oysters, they tend to have a meaty flavor, but they also tend to have a sea foody flavor while they’re being cooked down.”

Mushrooms also offer amazing health benefits such as lowering the risk of cancer and protecting brain health while improving your immune system.