"He's a Fun Guy"
A rascally grin spreads across Janina Styzinksi’s face as she asks us, “Why do you always have a good time with the mushroom?” We couldn’t anticipate the answer in the moment, but in retrospect we should have known. Indeed, there must be something truly remarkable about mushrooms that the Styzinski’s have devoted some 43 years to growing them for the Chicagoland area, the last twelve with Goodness Greeness.
Sometime in 1963 Roman, Nina’s husband, found an ad in the newspaper for a mushroom farm, for sale in Naperville. At the time he was employed at a spring factory in Chicago and did not like getting up early in the morning to be at work on time. He loved the outdoors. And, reading and re-reading the ad, he became more confident that it was about time he was his own boss.
Nina met him eleven years later and thought his occupation was very “cool”. Soon after being married, she remembers how, “When I first started working with him, I thought it hardest to learn how to separate the mushrooms by size. There was small. There was medium and then there was large. But now we send the mushrooms bulk and I like that.” Eventually though, Nina became a pro at sizing, picking up other skills along the way. She knows the tools necessary when changing a tractor tire, the recipe for flawlessly rich compost, and when the broiler is full enough with water so it doesn’t spill over (she learned that the hard way).
After a new housing development moved in next door and complaints rose about the farm’s composting odors, Roman and Nina decided to move to the wide open spaces surrounding a 6.6 acre farm in New Lenox. Initially bought because it was a horse farm whose composting possibilities seemed endless, they ended up making contacts with neighbors who tended horses. All they had left to do at their new farm was build their mushroom houses from scratch.
Easier said than done. Mushrooms thrive in moist, rich soil. That’s why the large mushroom farms in Pennsylvania are found inside caves. So Roman and Nina, with the help of their three sons, did their best to construct their own cave. They built a cement mushroom barn into the side of a slight hill to leech moisture. But because mushrooms also need warmth ranging from 65 to 68¢ª F, the Styzinski’s needed a heater. So Roman found an 18-ton WWII broiler that was miraculously hauled and then lowered with a crane. “I would stay up late at night worrying how we were going to bring in this huge broiler,” Nina remembers as we stand before its looming height and its large opening that she swings open. Staring into its depth, we hear her playfully remark how family-friends know where they can bring their enemies.
Having admired the awesome broiler, we migrate to the mushroom “houses” where Nina shows us three stages of mushroom growth. We start in a dark room where pasteurized compost stands in two-tiered cedar beds sprinkled with spore. Darkness and moisture mix with the cedar of the beds and the cocoa bean of the compost, fragrant and comforting, like inside a cocoon. A blue light from the fly trap hums as Nina shines the light atop her head onto the spores’ fuzzy growth.
We then move to the next stage were thoroughly dampened peat moss has been place on top the spores to encourage the mushroom to “fruit”. After three weeks, their white caps bud through the moss, as she shows us in the third house.
Two long rows of beds line a dark hall lit by a tiny window at the end. Tiny sprouts of white and crimini mushrooms peak their heads, still a few days shy of their full sizes. Nina had just finished harvesting the most recent batch the weekend before our arrival, but saved a couple groups to demonstrate how they are pulled. She bends to the lower tier where some crimini have hatched into full Portobello mushrooms, or “Hawaiian mushrooms” as they were called thirty years ago when Roman couldn’t get anyone to buy them. She twists and pulls them. She brushes them free of loose moss and the thin veil that became too small to cover their dark gills. Then they’re placed in a five pound box modestly and honestly marked, “Organic”. One find she holds up and smiles, as pictured above, “They’re Siamese.”
A new housing development threatens to budge the Styzinski’s another time, for the last time. Though embittering to foresee how the amazing Styzinski mushroom legacy will soon be no more, while snacking on grilled Portobello and Sheephead, we pleasantly talk mushrooms: How truffles are sniffed out by pigs and the secret of morels (“Don’t tell.”); on taking chances eating foraged mushroom varieties, Nina says, “You can eat all of the mushrooms you find, but some of them only once.”
When finished with the business of touring and eating, late into the afternoon Nina pauses and offers a shot, homemade vodka. This author won’t say—on the company’s hour—whether libation was served, whether it was smooth going down and a bitter cough coming up. But it will be said: The congeniality of the mushroom is catching.
Mercedee Renz, Goodness Greeness
Roman’s Organic Mushroom Farm is not open to public. If you have further inquiries, please contact Goodness Greeness.
