Mushroom Farm

By Elise and Zac.

Elise.

After our arduous encounter at the bottom of the mountain we drive up a very bumpy, and windy road. Like seriously bumpy, with eighteen corners to get to the top (the turns are numbered like a countdown). As we climb to the top of the plateau the views are breathtaking. We chat to the young English guy who is working as a teacher at a local boarding school. He has a puppy with him who spends the journey biting my hand and just being all round adorable.

When we arrive we are greeted by three big village dogs (local mutts). My first though is 'oh for f*** sake, this day has been hard enough, don't throw in being attached by dogs'. Turns out they are three of the loveliest, albeit laziest, dogs I've met. The puppy was the real problem, barking its tiny adorable head off and starting a fight it had no hope of winning, and scaring the poor big fellas. After descending into the reception/bar/restaurant space we are greeted by some very lovely staff at Mushroom Farm named Joshua and Daniel. I explain to Joshua that one of our best friends from home is named Josh, he gets confused and thinks I just proposed to be best friends. He then calls me his best friend for the duration of our stay. We are too late to order dinner, but they make an exception and put us in the dorm with a big deck that looks out to the lake. What started as a rough day ended with glasses of wine, a delicious peanut curry (this coming from someone who despises peanut butter) and a comfy bed. 

Like many hostels in Malawi, the Mushroom Farm is located on a slope, yet instead of sloping into Lake Malawi, Mushroom sits on the edge of a cliff. This makes for incredible panoramic views of the surrounding mountain ridge and down to the lakeside, even across the lake to mountainous Tanzania. However, there are some sharp drops without fences. Safety isn't really a thing in Africa. But the views, oh the views. 

Our stay at the Mushroom Farm is in fact another farm stay for Zach and I. The hostel has a permaculture farm that grows about 50% of the vegetables of the hostel kitchen. The farm manager is a man named Alec, who bloody loves permaculture. One day while making compost, he takes a deep breath and turns to Zach, 'Zachy, you know that smell? That’s permaculture'. We spend our days in the garden planting lettuce seedlings, pruning tomatoes, making compost and learning the local language, Tumbuka, from the other two farm hands Abel and Isiah. There are three young pigs on the farm. Every morning when we walk from the lodge to the farm we pass their sty and when I call to them they run out of the stalls with their little trotters up to the fence to say good morning. They are very friendly and love pats. One in particular loves pats and scratches behind the ear so much, he falls over in bliss with a big smile on his piggy face and lays there like a dog waiting for you to pat his belly.

Technically Mushroom farm is located just outside of the small town of Manchewe, with about an hours walk up the road to get to historic Livingstonia. The climate is still tropical, though thankfully a bit cooler than the rest of Malawi. The cooler yet tropical microclimate, as well as elevation of the plateau, makes for good coffee growing. After bananas, coffee is the next most grown fruit at Mushroom. We had the privilege of being able to pick, depulp, clean, ferment, and clean again coffee beans from start to finish. The coffee then rests for some time before roasting. We are hoping to roast this coffee when return to Mushroom over the next few weeks/ months, and enjoy the fruits (beans) of our labour.

Our first week at Mushroom farm was an absolute delight, with many friends from Butterfly Lodge in Nkhata Bay joining us up north, as well as making a few fresh ones. Malawi is the kind of country where backpackers keep running into each other, and that was certainly the case for us. After the first weekend we woke up melancholy on a Monday as our friends departed, only to be joined by other people we had meet at Butterfly the next weekend. However, it would get quiet at Mushroom during the week. Luckily we made friends with the owner of the lodge, an American named Cameron, along with his possessive, neurotic Blue Healer named Billy. If he even mentioned the name of one of the other dogs, especially Lola, she would bark and eventually start biting Lola. There was also a South African named Janik, working as a physio therapist with a local NGO. So we spent many a week curled up on the couches with Mumma cat purring on our laps, drinking wine or hot chocolate, and enjoying the company.

As we only worked mornings until lunch time our afternoons were spent at leisure. We would read, enjoy the views, cook over the fire, watch the vervets steal the dogs food, make baskets from the local tree fibres, go swimming at the local waterfall, play bao and so on. It was pretty easy living for those few weeks. 

Saturday nights were my favourite. Not only did we have the Sunday off (in Malawi most people only get one day off a week, usually the day of rest), but a local band would play live music  before dinner. The band was named 'The Waterfalls' and it consisted of local boys and men, playing guitar, drums, and instruments make from scrap metal. The tunes were happy and dancy, and after three weeks we got to know some of the songs, despite being in another language. Someone translated one song for us in which the lyrics equate different stages of a relationship to fried chicken, very clever and funny. For instance a typical insult in the village would be 'your girlfriends is a quarter chicken but my wife is a full chicken', or 'nah that girls a wing at best'. Those songs are still in my head now, months on.

Mushroom farm is well known for two things; its incredible vegetarian food, and helping the local community. Its actually listed as one of the top four places to get food in Malawi. However, the part of Mushroom that should be best known is the amazing job Cam does to give back to the Manchewe community. All of the profits from the lodge are funnelled into projects such as a local pre-school and primary school along with feeding programs for all the students, personal business loans, a community owned coffee processing station, and many, many more. Whilst we were at Mushroom Cam invited us to witness the turning on the new hydro plant that they built. Basically a local man named John approached Mushroom farm about five years ago saying he had an idea to build a small hydro electric power station at the local Manchewe waterfalls, using the energy of the waterfall to power the surrounding village as well as a local maize mill. At this point the women have to climb up the hill to Livingstonia with their huge bags of maize to be milled. This project has been in the works for many years, using local craftsman to build the necessary machines, training John in hydro electricity and employing local men to abseil down the waterfall to install the pipes. We were invited to come watch when they turned it on for the first test run a couple of days before we left. The excitement from the community and the joy on John's face as his dream was realised was amazing to share in. Mushroom is an incredible and special place that uses its position to empower Africans to solve African issues.

Zac.

Mushroom is one of those places that you never want to leave. If it was a little closer to the lake we probably wouldn't have. The problem with Malawi is there are at least three places that you never want to leave and it's impossible to choose between them. At this point we were on the look out for somewhere to stay a bit more long term. Mushroom would have been ideal. Beautiful scenery, amazing food, cool people. The only problem was there was no need for us to be there. Volunteering was a fantastic experience but we were, in a sense, superfluous. Alec has the garden so well organised that there is hardly a half a days work for the three gardeners most of the time. Or at rather there is enough work for them if they take it nice and slow, an art form they have perfected. Our second day there Alec pulled me up, "You need to slow down, Zachy. Too much work is poisonous."

Coming from our last farm stay in Zambia this was completely backwards. The work there was full-on, starting at 8 and working until just before the sun dipped below the hills when we would stop to catch a hot (read: lukewarm) shower at around 4:30 before the "solar water heater" (some pipes on the roof) cooled down. The Zambian workers would poke fun at us for this as they continued working until sunset proper. When I compare the two approaches and look at input:output there is no question that Alec's approach is more effective by far. The amount of food they produce at Mushroom in a relatively small space and comparatively far less effort is incredible. Over both farm stays I was reading Manasobu Fukuoka's One Straw Revolution, which advocates "do nothing" farming. "Do nothing" is somewhat misleading, there is a lot of work involved but it is focussed around letting nature take it's course. No plowing, no weeding, no (chemical) fertiliser. Fukuoka speaks of farming in a way that leaves time for leisure, for community, for poetry. He speaks of the farmers around him who have switched to modern practices, become reliant on fertilisers and pesticides, and who have to work harder and longer every year to struggle to produce that same amount as their soil degrades and the market demands more for less. At Mushroom we saw a highly organised system producing both high quantity and quality of food, using nothing but the natural resources in the area (beyond the initial set up of equipment and seed), and requiring maybe a third of the energy from the workers. Mushroom was the kind of Permaculture system we had been hoping to find and we would have loved to stay there longer, there was just simply not enough work for 5 people. 

Our afternoons were spent hiking into Manchewe or Livingstonia, swimming in the rock pools at the top of the waterfall, relaxing and taking in the view out over the lake. That is until we woke one morning to see a gigantic red globe rising through a thick orange fog. A heavy haze had settled over the lake, obscuring the view of the far side and making the water more like a sea than ever (this mental illusion was constant, even after 4 months in Malawi I would walk down to a beach and watch the waves rolling in and be certain I was looking at an ocean only to have to remind myself that this was fresh water). This haze, it turns out, would be with us until late October/early November. Towards the end of our time in Malawi we would get shadowy hints of the far side of the lake but the stunning clear views of Tanzanian mountains were gone for the time being. Life settled into a comfortable rhythm of early mornings, lazy afternoons, and peaceful evenings. At first we self catered many of our meals but the food at Mushroom was so good we didn't bother replenishing supplies once we'd eaten through them. If you are ever in Malawi (ever in Africa, for that matter) make your way to Mushroom and stay for as many days as it takes to eat your way through their menu. You may never leave. I wish we hadn't.