A market trader has started an underground mushroom farm beneath an old railway station – fuelled by used coffee beans from local cafés.
The Western Daily Press reported that Hugh Prentice, 56, started growing the fungi in vaults underneath Green Park Station market in Bath, Somerset, when he retired last year.
The accounts manager collects 30kg of used coffee beans from a dozen willing cafés around Bath every day.
He mixes the beans with spawn, which feed off the decomposing coffee to create oyster mushrooms ready to be sold at market.
The farm is currently a pilot project making a few kilogrammes of fungi a week, but Prentice hopes to have enough crops to start trading fully next month.
And, by December, the paper reported that he hopes to be using 100kg of beans a day, which is half of the total used by the entire town's cafés, to produce ten tonnes of mushrooms every year.
The coffee beans are mixed with sawdust covered mushroom spawn and hung in bags in his underground controlled-temperature vault, where they hang for several weeks.
Then the material is moved to fruiting bays which produce a flush of mushrooms in a couple of weeks.
Prentice has turned to a crowdfunding website to raise £11,000, and has already attracted £5,000 in pledges, with investors promised 3 per cent interest – or 4 per cent interest if they are paid in mushrooms.
To pledge funding, visit www.buzzbnk.org/fungifruits.
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