The Rhyze founders met through climate justice activism. We spent a year working together on everything from press and logistics to demos and protests trying to raise awareness of the climate crisis, and get our government to take meaningful action to tackle it.

As the Covid Pandemic hit and the world ground to a halt, many of us found ourselves unemployed or furloughed. We could no longer be out in the streets taking direct action and began reflecting on how we might work together to bring about change in more prefigurative ways, building the world we want to see rather than asking our governments to intervene on our behalf.

We quickly turned to community food growing as an avenue to mitigate carbon emissions and ecological destruction, strengthen resilience in the face of an increasingly uncertain climate and help organise communities to build a fairer society.

After investigating a few different models of community food growing, we decided mushroom cultivation would best suit our urban context, limited resources and vision. Their ability to grow year round regardless of climate, to thrive on abundant urban waste streams and to be grown in indoors or outdoors at a variety of scales compelled us to commit. As we researched further we quickly developed a strong affinity with the fungal queendom and its ability to inspire and communicate radical social ideas.

Throughout autumn we refined our vision and model for the project working on governing documents, and getting to grips with mushroom cultivation. 
On 21st December 2020, we incorporated Rhyze Mushrooms as a non-profit company limited by guarantee.

In early 2021 we decided we would try build our mushroom farm in a shipping container. This would enable us to make use of marginal land and own our farm outright despite our tight budget.

We quickly identified the Forge in Fountainbridge as an ideal site and wrote a proposal asking if we could share their space. When we got the green light we pooled some money and borrowed from friends and family to buy a second hand shipping container and the materials we’d need to retrofit into a mushroom growing space.

With the help of close friends we began to design and build a mushroom farm in our 40 foot shipping container. It took some figuring out, as we grappled with the quandries of mushroom grow space design and taught ourselves most of the DIY skills needed along the way.

We painted and rust-proofed the outside, built a rain-water harvesting system on the roof and then began the timber framing to separate the three distinct rooms the farm would contain. We designed our ventilation and climate control systems and slowly began to transform an empty shell into a farm.

In September of 2021 we brought on our first volunteers. These lovely folk have helped us with everything from the build, to our crowdfunder, to marketing. Some of them have since gone on to become members of our board. We now have a pool of over 70 volunteers and love how many people are involved in the Rhyze community.

In the same month we also received our first grant -the Start It award from First Port. The grant was for £5000 and allowed us to buy rewards for our crowdfunder, and to eventually refurbish our double decker portacabin into a nice cozy office space where we could work together.

COP came to Glasgow and we all took a month off (some of us took longer) to dive head first back into full time climate justice activism with the Cop26 Coalition. Between us we organised actions, translated for Indigenous delegates in the Cop26 Blue Zone, made short films, helped deliver the People’s Summit, and coordinated press coverage and digital communications.

With the farm build well underway, we knew we would also need a mycology lab and office space to be able to run our farm - so we launched a crowdfunder. Over 187 people donated and we were able to raise over £8000.

Having piloted our indoor mushroom cultivation workshop at WHALE Arts in Wester Hailes, we applied for and received £10K in funding from The National Lottery Community fund to deliver what would become our Mushroom Alchemy workshop in community centers across Edinburgh. This grant also allowed us to collaborate with community groups to help them incorporate mushrooms into their green spaces.

We found an old double decker portacabin on Gumtree. We used the money donated by the crowdfunder to get it delivered to The Forge and begin work on making it habitable. With funding from Firstport and Edinburgh City Council we were able to build our community mycology lab, office, and workshop space.

Almost a year after our shipping container was delivered we finally finished building our farm, and we now had a lovely office space and lab. We hosted our first event which was attended by almost 300 people to thank our community for their support.

In June 2022 we brought on our board of directors. We have 6 people on our board with backgrounds ranging from the arts to disability advocacy to botany. We have monthly meetings with them where we troubleshoot challenges and discuss all of our major decisions.

Now that our farm was finished it was time to put our growing space into action. Growing mushrooms at scale purely on urban waste streams required some trial and error, so we most of the summer was filled with making adjustments to our farm and substrate recipes until we got things right. We are now producing a steady supply of oyster mushrooms and are focusing on increasing our yields as well as perfecting methods for growing different species.

Now that we have regular harvests we are supplying local green grocers with a steady(ish!) supply of our mushrooms. We might be biased, but we think our mushrooms are the freshest, tastiest and prettiest mushrooms in Edinburgh. FACT.

After much deliberation about what structure was most inline with our values and vision, we decided to become a workers’ cooperative. After lockdown ended many of the founding members of Rhyze were pulled back into jobs or went looking for new adventures, and by autumn of 2022 Mim, Marco, and Lauren remained as dedicated staff and members of the co-op.

Mushroom grow boxes are a great way for people to get interested in growing mushrooms. With that in mind and with the potential to generate revenue for the project with Christmas sales, we asked Naomi to design grow boxes that were beautiful and political.

In 2023 we were voted by the people of Edinburgh as winners in the Edinburgh Community Climate Fund. The project involved building mini mushroom farms that could be operated by volunteers to grow oyster mushrooms all year round for the menus of the cafes, using their own coffee waste.

After experimenting with cultivating Lion’s Mane and Turkey Tail, we decided to start processing them into tinctures to increase their potency and shelf life. We use a double extraction process with organic ethanol and pressure cooker to break down the mushrooms’ tough cellular walls and make their beneficial compounds more bioavailable to people’s bodies.

We received funding from the Scottish government to take on two interns for 6 months. Joe joined our team to help with cultivation and Jo stepped into the community coordinator role.

In preparation for scaling up, Marco and Lauren went to Brussels to visit Permafungi, a large scale urban mushroom farm. We toured their facilities, peppered them with questions and took a peek at their infrastructure to help inform our future farm.

After receiving confirmation that we could make Lauriston Farm our new home we began the long process of moving which began with levelling the ground and laying hardcore.

With funding from the Edinburgh Community Climate Fund we began work on an online version of our indoor mushroom cultivation workshop for people from different disabled communities across Edinburgh. 

We gave graffiti artist Hungry Window free range to paint a mural for Palestine on the back of our office to protest the UK government’s support for ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palistinian people. Though we lost the mural when we had to demolish our portacabins, we continue to oppose acts of state sanctioned settler colonialism in all of their forms.

We needed lots of beans to move our farm and build new infrastructure at Laurestion Farm, so we wrote lots and lots of funding applications. We didn’t land all of them, but thankfully enough of them came through that we were able to afford the move.

We purchased two new portacabins and spent the next few months retrofitting them before moving the mushroom farm. We built a new lab and our very own cold storage area.

With our other two portacabins in place and ready to go, we were finally ready to move the mushroom farm to Lauriston and base all of our operations in our new home.

We hit the ground running and began supplying oyster mushrooms as part of Lauriston Farm’s community supported agriculture veg box scheme.

In the summer and autumn of 2024. the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh hosted the Fungi Forms exhibition at Inverleith House. We were tasked with inoculating a major piece on display at the exhibition: Simon Faithfull’s biotopes - three sculptures, 3D printed from moulds of his face, with mushrooms growing out of his mouth and nose.

After a few months spent traveling and studying abroad, Naomi landed in Edinburgh in time to help us with a few urgent to-dos. She was only supposed to be here for a month but we liked having her around so much that we asked her to stay.

Though we had been based at Lauriston since June, we still had some infrastructure left at the Forge,including our double decker portacabins. After getting some pretty steep quotes, we decided to do the demolition ourselves with the help of a few handy friends.

With the funding we received from the Co-op Carbon Innovation Fund, we were able to lure Roxy up from London to be our worm wrangler and brand new co-op member. 

After over a year of writing, filming, editing, and formatting we finally launched our e-course: Mushroom Alchemy, a foundation in mushroom cultivation using waste based substrates.

As part of scaling up, we built our first two polytunnels. One to house the worms and one to be our brand new mushroom farm. Growing mushrooms in a polytunnel will be much more energy efficient as we won’t need to run fans, and the mushrooms will be exposed to UV light meaning that they will have a higher vitamin D content. Exciting things ahead!

In collaboration with Johana from Myceliart and Foraging Gardener, we started running Queer Foraging Club to teach people about fungal and plant id, connect to our local environment and build community.

Once we finished skinning the polytunnels, we started moving all of our Oyster mushroom blocks out of the shipping container and into their new home. The polytunnel harnesses Scotland’s unique climate to dramatically reduce the impact of our mushroom cultivation. Exposure to UV light means that our Oysters are higher vitamin D.

We brought Hamish and Morag on board to help us with pest control. We thought they would be working cats and that they wouldn’t be interested in us. It turns out that they are as excellent at cuddling as they are at killing, and also that they are the best cats in the world.

After finishing construction a on the biggest polytunnel at Lauriston Farm as well as some continuous flow throughs, Roxy took her first delivery of worms. In a years time the entire polytunnel should be lined with worm bins that contain 1 million worms!