Stanford

We recently moved to Stanford in the Western Cape. We met up with Luke Boshier, local inventor and entrepreneur. His goal is supplying food at the cheapest cost to the community to feed themselves. Well, that’s our vision as well. We started a joint venture with Francois du Preez, (friend/founding member of WildAbout Co), Luke, and Makarios Communities (consisting of Johan van Rensburg, Jaco Barkhuizen (Francois’ brother-in-law) and myself.) Francois has a passion for fresh new ideas/businesses; Jaco is a connector/entrepreneur and Johan is an amazing Project Manager.

Our Goal: Grow oyster mushrooms from alien plants and trees. Everything we do, we do natural, simplistic and cost effective. Get the community involved.

In January we started cutting down alien branches to make our own mushroom shelving. We employed locals to cut and trim these branches to the correct measurements. We started assembling these shelves with the help of Francois, David (friend and board member of Makarios), Johan, Alfonso (a local), and myself.

 

 

 

 

Each shelve can stack about 20 bags of mushrooms. Our first 12 shelves, wow!!!

 

 

 

 

We connected an old spa pool/Turkish bath with electricity to sterilize the substrate before spawning it.

 

 

 

 

 

We rented this factory from a friend where we will keep the bags to fruit.

 

 

 

 

 

Each bag’s substrate weighs approx. 3 kg. and will fruit approx. 1 kg of oyster mushrooms.

 

 

 

 

 

Our first 21 bags of mushroom substrate was delivered 12 Feb 2014. These bags are double the size as planned.

 

 

 

 

 

We envisage to supply locals with these bags to fruit a greater number of mushrooms for the commercial market.

Watch this space. :)

Andre