We offer a variety of culinary and medicinal mushrooms including:

• Oyster (Grey, Italian, Black Pearl, Gold, Pink)

• Pioppino

• Shiitake

• Lion’s mane

• Chestnut

• Beech

• Selection of seasonally foraged species

We also sell 2 oz. tinctures of Lion’s Mane, Chaga, Reishi, Maitake, and Turkey Tail.

Our mushrooms are certified USDA Organic by CCOF, Appalachian Grown, and Certified Naturally Grown.

Our mission is to promote community food security by providing delicious, affordable, and nutrient-dense mushrooms.

Mushroom Varieties

INSTRUCTIONS

Ready-to-Grow Kits

Research & Collaborations

At Black Trumpet, mushrooms have always done more than fill our grow rooms. They build soil. Through a SARE-funded research grant, we're testing whether that same fungal power can accelerate soil recovery after disaster and give small farms a low-cost path back to healthy ground.

Following Hurricane Helene, many Western North Carolina farms lost their topsoil entirely, stripped down to rock, sand, and sediment by flooding and landslides. Rebuilding that soil the traditional way, with truckloads of compost, is slow and expensive. So we're trying something different: inoculating wood chips and debris from downed trees with wine cap mushroom spawn, then letting the mycelium do the work of breaking down lignin and cellulose into rich, living organic matter, much the way fungi rebuild the forest floor after a storm.

We're running this trial across four cooperating farms in Fairview and Weaverville, comparing mushroom-inoculated mulch against straw and fabric covers, then planting butternut squash directly into it. We're tracking everything from soil fertility and microbial activity to how the squash themselves perform, with leaf tissue sampling and visual crop scoring as our key measures. If it works, it offers farmers hit by disaster, or anyone rebuilding depleted ground, a faster, cheaper way to bring soil back to life using materials most farms already have on hand: fallen trees and mushroom spawn.

Gwen Englebach completed a Master's in Horticultural Science at NC State studying how colored plastic mulches affect soil microbial communities and plant health in organic hemp production, under the direction of Dr. Jeanine Davis.

Organic hemp growers in the humid Southeast face a real challenge: heavy rainfall and aggressive weeds, with no approved organic herbicides to fall back on. Many turn to plastic mulches for weed and moisture control, but different mulch colors change how much heat and light reach the soil, with ripple effects on soil temperature, carbon cycling, and the microbial life underground.

Working across seven on-farm sites over two years, the research found that darker mulches (black, red, and green) ran noticeably warmer than white or silver, especially in summer, but that mulch color had surprisingly little effect on cannabinoid content or on the makeup of soil microbial communities themselves. What did shift soil microbial diversity was a more complex mix of season, sampling depth, and site conditions. It's the kind of research that helps growers make smarter, more soil-conscious choices about plasticulture, balancing short-term productivity against the long-term health of the ground they depend on.

Black Trumpet was proud to be one of several Western North Carolina farms participating in the Heirloom Collard Microbiome Project, led by soil microbiome researcher Dr. Mallory Choudoir at NC State, in partnership with the Utopian Seed Project.

Collard greens are a cornerstone of Southern food culture, and it turns out the soil beneath them holds just as much richness as the pot on the stove. The project set out to answer a simple but important question: do different collard varieties recruit different communities of soil microbes, and does that change from farm to farm? We grew two varieties side by side, Champion, a widely used commercial standard, and Moses Smith, a heirloom variety stewarded for generations, and sent soil and root samples off for DNA sequencing.

The early results are fascinating: while the broad types of microbes were similar across all the farms, the specific communities living in each farm's soil were distinctly different, and cultivating collards seemed to draw in more rare, unique microbes than bare soil alone. It's a small but meaningful reminder that every farm's soil has its own microbial fingerprint, and that the crops we grow help protect that hidden biodiversity. We're glad to have played a part in this research and look forward to seeing what it uncovers about the connection between heirloom seed-saving and the invisible life underground that makes it all possible.

Check out our Instagram for the latest happenings at Black Trumpet:

Contact Us

Please contact us for pricing and seasonal product availability at blacktrumpetnc@gmail.com or use the form below.