From their forest to your plate

If you have any doubt this is a fungi fanatic’s paradise, the acres of silver birch, pine and oak forest, the mushroom insignia adorning signage, and a small cabin crammed with ‘shroom paraphernalia will set you straight. There’s even a white electric car with the number plate ‘UMAMI’ parked near Theres and Hannes Krummenacher’s stunning home.  

At 190 metres above sea level, their property lies in the heart of a small micro-climate that fungi love. But it took 20 tonnes of lime to prepare the soil for truffles and years of planting trees to create the right environment for what is today a thriving business.  

It all started when they acquired some pine seedlings, accompanied by hitchhiking saffron milk caps, from Ian Hall. They harvested their first crop of the mushroom, which flowers below radiata pine trees, in 2004 and went on to become the first to grow this variety commercially in New Zealand. 

Around the same time, they began planting several other varieties of pine, silver birch, and larch trees, which when inoculated with spores result in several varieties of mycorrhiza mushrooms growing in a symbiotic relationship with the trees, including birch bolete, larch bolete, slippery jack, and pine bolete.  

From 2005, and for the next 16 years, the Krummenachers woke up early every Wednesday morning to head into the city to sell their fresh saffron milk caps, their ready-mix dehydrated mushroom mix, and their legendary fresh mushroom soup at the Nelson Farmers’ Market (which was then held at Founders Heritage Park, before moving to Morrison Square, then Kirby Lane). 

Then the pandemic arrived in Aotearoa at the beginning of the 2020 mushroom season, and they pivoted to selling online. They not only enjoyed the quieter lifestyle, without the need to travel, but discovered they could make a decent income on the internet. Today, they sell about 30 per cent of their dehydrated mushrooms direct to the public online, with the remaining 70 per cent sold wholesale to restaurants, and organic and artisan food stores. 

Neudorf Mushrooms also supply local restaurants with saffron milk caps, which sell for about $30 a kilogram. 

In the afternoons, they head out into their forests to pick mushrooms, collecting between 30 and 50 kilograms a day in peak season (which they store in a walk-in chiller before dehydrating). About 95 per cent of the harvest is dehydrated. 

Generally, they sell only saffron milk caps, apart from a few special restaurant orders for fresh boletes. Saffron milk caps are a bit rubbery and dehydrated, Theres says, although they can be pickled. 

But it was an exercise in patience when it came to truffles, the rare and highly prized fruiting body of a subterranean fungus (that is, it grows completely underground). 

“We had to wait 14 years for our first truffle,” Hannes says. Ringo, their 10-year-old sheepdog, used to be chief truffle finder, although being a sheepdog, he often got distracted by the neighbour’s stock. 

“He wasn’t the best, but he was for free – that’s the first thing – and we just trained him ourselves,” says Theres.  

Nevertheless, in a good season, Ringo used to help them find five to six kilograms of white truffles and about one kilogram of black truffles. Sadly, Ringo passed away a few years ago. 

But mushrooms are not resistant to the vicissitudes of climate change. The last few years haven’t been great seasons; too wet one year, warm, and dry the next. Mushrooms are like sponges, says Theres: too much rain and they lose their texture and subtle flavours; too little and they shrivel up. 

There aren’t many Neudorf Mushroom trade secrets apart from plenty of passion-powered hard work. Over the past 23 years, they’ve planted about 6,500 trees for mushrooms. 

“We try to inoculate our trees ourselves now, taking from spores or mycelium from other trees, and replanting it,” says Hannes. “We try to plant a ratio of one to four or five; one inoculated, four not.” 

Once you understand the world of trees and what is going on underneath the ground – Hannes explains that mycelium forms in and around the roots of the trees, which are the brain, while the trunk and branches are their mouths – you’ll never look at a forest again in the same way after touring their property.  

“It is for us quite satisfying doing things like that,” says Hannes. “That’s how we learned it. If you leave with a smile, we’ve done a good job.” 

But they’re also sharing the love in other ways; the wind has carried spores from their saffron milk caps further afield to their neighbours along Neudorf Road and as far as Tasman on the coast, 15 kilometres away. 

“All the saffron milk caps growing in the region have come from our trees.” 

However, a small plot of ring-barked pines is evidence of the trial and error involved in growing mushrooms on a commercial scale. They were to be the hosts of porcini mushrooms, but that plan never came to fruition. The 100 chestnut trees growing amongst them ended up being far more productive, so they abandoned the porcini plan and instead sold the chestnuts for seeding to nurseries and made chestnut flour, which is gluten-free. 

Meanwhile, there’s a thriving tropical plant collection in their lounge room, which includes banana tree fronds that tickle the soaring ceiling, several pineapple plants, papayas and a coffee plant that produces succulent, sweet fruit. 

Yet, the connective tissue for everything they do is still their belief in the power of nature, the benefits of what the Japanese call shinrin-yoku (forest bathing).

“When you’re walking into the forest, your heartbeat and blood pressure go down, and you’re getting more relaxed, except when you’re a forester,” Hannes says, laughing.  

“The problem is you see work everywhere,” adds Theres. 

But it’s clearly work they not only enjoy but also helps them thrive. Hannes attributes their good health to mushrooms, which are full of vitamin D. “We spend four or five hours a day in the drying room inhaling the aromas.” 

They also attribute their wellbeing to the balance they have found, with both each other and the land. “We love each other and the nature here. Sometimes we just go and lay on the ground in our forest. It’s just really relaxing, looking up and listening to all the birds. It’s sometime mind-blowing how we drift away a bit.”  

While their four adult children had left home pre-pandemic, two of their daughters returned during lockdown to live on the property and have stayed. The growing extended family share the land with about 15 or 16 wood pigeons and the occasional kea.