“I wake up in the morning knowing I’m doing a good thing.” A conversation with Dominik Śmigała from Moonshrooms

Kamila Knap, Shroom: What is Moonshrooms?

Dominik Śmigała: The Moonshrooms farm was born out of a pure fascination with mushrooms. It all started with a simple desire — I wanted access to fresh, exotic functional mushrooms. That wish grew into a deep passion for mycology.

Today Moonshrooms is the result of hundreds of hours spent exploring the secrets of the mushroom kingdom, both in theory and in practice. The range of what I do is wide and will probably keep growing — but the core is cultivating and delivering high-quality functional mushrooms to the world. Along with my products, I share knowledge: from how to store mushrooms properly, through culinary recipes, to instructions for doing a simple extraction. Eating them the traditional way isn’t the only route, because the right heat treatment releases valuable compounds that would otherwise stay unavailable to the body if you simply fried or baked them.

I also encourage growing them at home — some mushrooms are relatively easy for beginners, while others take a bit more dedication.

I got into cultivation during lockdown. Like for a lot of people, that time woke a new passion in me and brought old ideas to the surface.

Who were you before you became a mushroom grower?

A mushroom person pretty much always. I grew up in the countryside near a forest that was my playground, so mushrooms were always around me. Before this I worked at one of the bigger culture-and-food venues in Kraków. Nicely enough, that place later became one of my first customers.

I got into cultivation during lockdown. Like for a lot of people, that time woke a new passion in me and brought old ideas to the surface. Thoughts of having my own farm had been circling in my head for a long time, so I started acting on them despite having no know-how. At first I didn’t think about monetising my harvest at all, and the vision of becoming a farmer felt abstract. Everything changed when I ended up with several kilos of mushrooms and a week-long oyster-mushroom diet. I offered part of the harvest to friends, and word of mouth did the rest. And that’s how it took off.

Today I produce hundreds of kilos a month, and my clients include restaurateurs — from small, intimate bistros to Michelin-starred kitchens — naturopaths, private buyers and my beloved fan club. For me, this cultivation is also vegan activism. Not plant-based but mushroom-based; it’s about showing a real alternative to meat.

You say “high quality.” What does that mean specifically?

High quality starts long before harvest. I grow mainly wood-loving mushrooms, using pellets from deciduous trees with PEFC certification. Although in Poland pellets are made with biofuel in mind rather than agriculture, that certificate guarantees me sustainable forest management. I know the raw material comes from clean areas, far from industry and cities, and that logging is strictly controlled. As a result, the risk of heavy metals or of carcinogenic benzo(a)pyrene is practically zero. And because mushrooms soak up everything from the substrate like a sponge — a clean substrate is the foundation.

I avoid half-measures like straw or coffee grounds, which are often loaded with pesticides, or random sawmill waste. Even the grains I use to inoculate the mycelium are chosen to rule out glyphosate. I bet on the purity of the raw material, investing in my own health and my customers’.

To keep things clean, I ventilate the grow through HEPA filters — so my mushrooms breathe clean air. Most importantly, though, at every stage of growth they’re accompanied by music we listen to together. We work through a full cross-section of genres: from ambient and soul, through rap and punk rock, all the way to black metal. I think that, like me, mushrooms enjoy that variety. Besides, research on how sound affects mycelium growth confirms that the right acoustic waves act on it like a stimulating massage.

Every grow has its moment of crisis. Was there one where you thought it would get the better of you, that you couldn’t undo it?

Plenty. Every week is a new challenge, but I try to keep my finger on the pulse and put out fires quickly. I especially remember one event. It was about four years ago, when I was planning a big lion’s mane harvest and around three hundred blocks were waiting for beautiful, firm mushrooms to grow on them. Preparing and incubating that much substrate was long weeks of work. Unfortunately, that summer brought a scorching, almost tropical weekend. The temperature barely dropped at night either. Nearly thirty degrees Celsius in the grow rooms, and the high humidity the mushrooms need pushed that temperature even higher. The air conditioners couldn’t cope and the whole grow died within a day. Everything that was already growing sadly had to go to compost. I lost substrate that could have yielded this crop and another one after it. My knees buckled at such a huge loss, but I started again from scratch.

Today I know you have to work with different genotypes. My lion’s mane library alone is more than a dozen strains. Some yield brilliantly in winter, others laugh at very high temperatures and grow like a textbook. That lets me sleep more soundly all year round, and we get summers of forty degrees and winters of minus twenty-five. I’m prepared for different weather scenarios.

 

How would you rate consumer awareness? Will functional mushrooms go mainstream, or are they still a niche?

Aren’t they already there? Awareness is definitely growing. Customers come back with deeper and deeper questions. People reach out from all kinds of backgrounds. Some came across these mushrooms on a trip to Asia, where lion’s mane or shiitake grow endemically, and want to add them to their diet. Others learned about cordyceps or lion’s mane through products like Shroom, did their research and discovered you can buy such a mushroom or even grow it yourself from substrate. Close your own whole supply chain, instead of shipping mushrooms from the other side of the world.

And tradition? Mushrooms do have a long history, after all.

A huge one. There’s a beautiful story, worth looking up, about Japanese woodblock prints showing samurai expeditions into the mountains for reishi. Even then people knew it had protective properties; they called it the mushroom of longevity and carried it like a talisman. Right now I’m intrigued by tremella. I have its cultures and a culture of the host mushroom, because tremella grows on another fungus. First you inoculate the substrate with the host, and only then with the tremella. A fungus parasitising a fungus — fascinating stuff. It’s hard to grow, it needs very high humidity, so I keep a separate tent for it.

 

Do you have a favourite use for mushrooms outside the kitchen?

Organic matter, a by-product of production, instead of yet more plastic — that’s a great idea. Mycelium is so filamentous that you can shape it, and afterwards it becomes very hard. I’ve tried making bonsai, enclosing reishi mycelium in various vessels. There’s a guy, Fungi Florist, who literally trains mushrooms with carbon-dioxide levels and light to give them a shape. Reishi of the multipileum strain reacts brilliantly to light; he can grow even a right angle into a mushroom. Incredible inspiration.

Can you grow mushrooms like these yourself, at home?

You can, and that’s the best part. From me you can buy substrate for home growing. And then the spent substrate goes onto the compost heap, composts for a year and turns into great black soil full of earthworms. Later it ends up in raised beds and everything grows in it. Those leftovers are loads of minerals that return to nature. The cycle closes. By producing functional food, I’m not adding to the destruction of the planet — if anything, I help stop erosion, because I’m building new soil.

After all these years, tell me why you keep doing this.

After all these years, I feel it lights my inner fire. I wake up in the morning and I know I’m doing a good thing. There’s no better reward for me than messages from customers saying that, thanks to what I do, they’ve cut down on meat or given it up. It’s heartening; it gives me the strength to keep asking what to change so the world doesn’t burn even more. And there are still plenty of mushrooms ahead of me, because this subject is far from closed. New treats keep coming up all the time.

A message to readers

Eat more mushrooms. Choose only trusted suppliers who watch over the whole process, from production to delivery. Be happy and travel a lot. I wish everyone health and plenty of smiles.

I think this will be a really great conversation. And, well, you’ve shared so much knowledge, so many teasers — thank you so much for that.

Dominik Śmigała – digs deep into the world of functional and medicinal mushrooms. What draws him in is their biology, their history, their potential, and how much is still left to discover. Beyond his own farm, which is the foundation of his everyday life, he shares what he knows, takes the mystery out of mycology and shows that growing mushrooms at home can be simple, fascinating and within anyone’s reach. Outside of mushrooms he runs on street art, tattoo culture, litres of good coffee and hours spent listening to music. His dream is a world free from animal suffering.