How we raise our fungal family...

Hello there fungal friends and family, We are delighted to have you part of our journey at Tibetan Flag Trail and appreciate every bit of your patronage and we would like to share more about how we grow our mushrooms. We believe every intention matters and that when cared for with love and passion the feeling carries onto the medicine and can be felt by all those who come in contact with our products, hence, we take great care and go a long way to keep our home grown mushrooms happy. We often talk to the growing mushrooms, whisper words of affirmation and sometimes even play them little DJ sets and serenade them with flutes...

It all starts from the spores and then to mycelium

First the Spore prints from wild mushrooms are collected during our little foraging walks, we adventure out with a little bottle of keffir by our side and some nibbles, after scouring and finding our little treasures,

we head back to the lab where the we allow the mushroom to drop their spores in a sterile environment, these spores are collected onto sterile sheets of paper or foil and then transferred onto agar which a nutrient dense 2D media which allow for our spores to germinate.

After the spores germinate and start to form hyphal growth into beautiful branches of white fuzzyness which resemble the roots of a tree or the branching out of rivers indeed a beautiful and happy sight - the start of the mushrooms growth cycle!!

Healthy mycorrhiza is sliced out using a scalpel and transferred onto sterilized grains such as rye berries, popcorn, millets and other such nutrient rich medium for the mycelium to feed on and spread - this is known as spawn which will be used at a later stage to spawn to a larger surface.

Only a little while longer until we get fruiting.....

Different mushrooms enjoy different food some like to grow on hardwood tree's some like the softer browns and some even enjoy the poo, well we shouldn't forget that our fungal friends here are the master decomposers cleaning our environment and allowing for new life to flourish.

When we grow mushrooms indoors, we are trying to replicate what nature is

doing out there, so we collect the right kind

of substrate for our mushrooms, in our case most of our mushrooms are hard wood lovers. This wood is made smaller into chips or shreds, this shredded wood is put into smaller grow bags and then taken to our autoclave where it is pressure sterilized at 15PSI for 3 hours.

Remember our faithful grain spawn from above? This is where the spawn plays its role, in a still air environment the grain spawn is spread across these bags of sterile substrate and then is left in a semi warm room for incubation where they work hard colonising in the dark (no pun intended)

These grow bags are then placed in our martha tent which is humidity and temperature controlled, yesss these mushies like it moist.

Yess we fruiting babyy!!

Once the fruits appear and have reached optimal growth not too young and not too old where the alkaloid contents are at peak, we harvest them with great reverence and a whole lotta love. We give thanks to these magical creatures for blessing us with their presence, gifting us with good health and to be able to share these wonders with the world.

Growing mushrooms makes us extremely joyous, there is so much to learn from these mystical little beings from the thought of new growth from death symbolizing creation comes from change and to embrace that change. Fungi has also imparted a great deal of patience within us and a deeper bond with nature.

Then onto processing these gifts of nature.....

After harvest the work doesn't stop there these fruiting bodies are made into smaller chunks and then transferred to our dehydrator where they are dried up and then grinded down to powder which is then Double Extracted using steam and water to create a 1:2 extract of the active alkaloids present in these mushrooms making it more bioavailable to our systems where all their goodness can be soaked in.

This extract is slowly dried down to a powder state and then sent to a lab outside of our facility to test, after which we use the extracts to make our capsules, chocolates, honey and hot sauce.

Each part of the process is done in house and by hand while taking great care in lowering our impact on nature by using glass where possible, reusable packaging and waste management.

If you would like to get healthy with our Medicinal Mushrooms grown with the utmost love head over to our Web-Shop where we have loads of treats for you and don't forget to checkout the Holy Trinity section.

Everything home made everything TFT

Here is a picture of us enjoying some korean style home grown Lions Mane stir fry

along with home brewed apple cider!

On this note we leave you with a little saying,

"All mushrooms are magical✨, Are you? "

-Tibetan Flag Trail