our history: A timeline

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.

The site that we share with The Forge is located on a meanwhile site that will soon be developed by the council, so we need to move. We have a beautiful new location in mind, and plenty of dreams for building new, improved, and accessible infrastructure using all of the knowledge that we’ve gained over the last two and a half years. We want to vastly expand our growing capacity, strengthen our community and continue to organise for food sovereignty in Scotland. We have a lot of money to raise to make that happen, so if you can we would be deeply grateful if you would support us by donating (find a link in the menu) or by making a purchase from our shop. Thank you!