Dragon Gourmet Mushrooms

Hands down the best dressed sellers at the Sacramento Farmer’s Market are the Dragon Mushroom ladies. Not to emphasize their couture over their chanterelles, but the embroidered dragon emblem emblazoned on their starched chef’s jackets, conveys just the right chic to sell these gorgeously sophisticated mushrooms. The varieties will knock your socks off! Orange, blue, pink, and golden oyster, beech, shitake, king mushrooms are among only a few of the varieties Roxana has created. Starting out in her backyard, Roxana decided to try growing mushrooms, and with a lot of TLC, they thrived! She now has several bunkers outside of the city, where she grows a variety of mushrooms throughout the year. These bunkers house tens of thousands of small sacks of health promoting fungi which cultivate the mushroom fruit. That’s where Holly and I visited her, at her mushroom farm, on the outskirts of town. Inside the bunkers, it’s dark, damp, and muddy, a perfect living situation for mushroom spores. As Holly and I walked along the tidy rows of mushrooms, sprouting their caps out of their growing sacs, they looked like they were reaching out to us. With stems stretching horizontally in the air, nearly defying gravity, and large shimmering caps, this is the way fresh mushrooms should look. The different varieties of mushrooms have a slightly differed hue, and a unique pattern of growth caps, that spread wide and long like the petals of a blooming flower. We followed Roxana into the depths of the bunker. The sprinklers sprayed a mist from the ceiling, and mud clotted the floor boards, and our shoes, but the mushrooms were blooming and looked mighty happy. Next to the bunkers in another large building also built from the ground up by Roxana and her crew was the processing station. That’s where the recycled sawdust is bagged and heated to create the nutrient rich soil for the mushroom spores. The sawdust is dropped into each bag on a rotating dispenser which looks like a mega sized espresso machine. The original version of the dragon emblem, a mural painted onto the sidewall of the processing machine, was emblazoned on its wall. As we ended our tour, Roxana revealed to us, she had studied herbology extensively, and through her research, realized how amazing mushrooms are in their nutrient content, and their healing substances. She started out as a hobbyist, and grew her passion for passing on mushrooms to the community into a full time career. Her mushrooms are sought after at the finest restaurants in the Sacramento and Bay Area, as well as the local community farmers markets where she has a regular following of customers. If you want to get a hold of some of these exotic species Roxana grows find her at your local farmers market, just look for the dragon. OR find them on their Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Dragon-Gourmet-Mushrooms/117488208316276?ref=br_tf