It started in the garden…
Our story
Before there was a Classic City Gourmet Mushrooms, there was a garden. Before there was a gardener, there was a soldier yearning for life in all its complexity.
I am Sara Skinner and I am a mushroom farmer. Once upon a time I wore a uniform and spent years traveling to places nice and not so nice. After returning home from the desert for the last time all I wanted was to sink my feet and hands into rich brown dirt and be surrounded by living and growing things. I nurtured one unruly garden after another over the years and learned to find joy in all the forms of life that move in when you make space. Frogs, toads, snakes, dragonflies, bees, wasps, spiders, birds, bats, worms, ladybugs, fruit, flowers, weeds, and of course the mushrooms.
Mushrooms are wonderous things. Not plants, not animals, but a wholly separate thing. They arrive after a rain and are gone almost as fast as you notice their presence. They come in strange and delicious varieties. My farm is very small and I am very much a mushroom student. But I hope to share what I learn as well as what I grow.
Grown with care
At Classic City Gourmet Mushrooms our mushrooms are grown and occasionally foraged. We are certified to identify and sell foraged mushrooms. We use a combination of indoor and outdoor mushroom growing. Some varieties such as shiitake, winecaps, turkey tail, maitake, and blewits are grown in outdoor mushroom beds. The majority of our mushrooms, however, are grown in climate controlled indoor grow rooms.
We are certified naturally grown which means you can trust that our mushrooms are non-GMO, we do not use chemicals in any of our growing processes and we are committed to sustainable farming practices.
Hello!
I am Sara Skinner. I started growing mushrooms on logs as a way to maximize the shady spaces in my garden, but I fell in love and decided to learn more and grow more. I am certified in Wild Mushroom Food Safety and I have completed the Indoor Specialty Mushroom Production Course through Cornell University.
When I’m not working with fungi, I am teaching social work at our local land-grant university. I care deeply about community, economic, environmental, and social justice.
You will often see me accompanied at the market by my best friend and husband, Bruce Skinner, or one of our boys, Tim and Frank.