“My parents divorced, and I moved to Kansas City with my dad and visited my mom here every summer. I got in trouble for poor grades and was the angsty teenager who hated the world. In 2012, before my junior year in high school, they sent me back down here to live with my mom to get me away from my friends. I was angry about giving up my life, but I met Sara soon after I moved here. We married a year ago.

Cooking turned me around. I needed a car to get to school, so my mom made me get a job to pay for it. She knew Doug, the owner of Dragonfly, and I got a job washing dishes there. I hated it at first, but then I started cooking and loved it. Doug was my mentor, and I trained under him. I’ve been cooking at Dragonfly for 10 years and became a manager.

My interest in mushrooms started when I was smoking meat and tried to get into hunting. I was in the Delta and didn’t see any deer, but I started taking pictures of mushrooms everywhere. I found the Alabama Mushroom Society on Facebook and joined that group two years ago. I went to the forages and mushroom meetings in Mobile. Someone gave me a bag to grow mushrooms at home. I was hooked.

I was growing mushrooms for fun, and my mom told me I should grow them for restaurants. I didn’t have the money to do it. She said spend $150, and if I didn’t get my money back she would pay me for it. It worked and turned into a business.

Doug liked the mushrooms and said, ‘dude if you grow these we’ll buy them.’ I started in a room in my house in Daphne with plastic garage shelves with saran wrap around them. It grew to two sets of shelves. For my birthday, I bought an indoor greenhouse. I just moved into a shed in the backyard and have much more room.

When I was a kid, my dad did remodeling. He let us pick themes for our bedrooms, and I picked science because I wanted to be a mad scientist. Now I feel like that’s what I am doing growing and selling mushrooms. When I started at Dragonfly, I wore a bandana and everyone called me Tan Tan the Bandana Man. Then they called me Mushroom Man. I named the business Mushroom Man Tan until I came up with something better later, but it stuck.

Dragonfly buys the mushrooms and uses them in shiitake mushroom tacos, short rib plates with brown butter mushrooms, shiitake soup, and steak with a mushroom sauce on top. It’s fun to think of new ways to use them in dishes. I also sell them to Southwood and Locals restaurants.

I buy mushroom bags from a farmer in Dadeville. I grow ten different kinds with a variety of flavors. They grow fast. I can work a double shift at work, and the mushrooms have doubled in size by the time I get home.

I research mushrooms and am always learning something new. Each mushroom has a long list of health benefits and they don’t all taste like dirt. I grow Shiitake mushrooms out of the holes I drill into treated logs. I plan to sell these logs for people to grow their own.

I sell mushrooms at the Mobile Bay Maker’s Market on Sundays in Fairhope and that is going well. If I can do two or three markets a week, I can do this full-time. I like interacting one-on-one with people at markets because most people buying mushrooms want to talk about them. I would love to have a store in Fairhope.

My dad was upset he wasn’t here to help build this shed for my mushrooms, but he wants to open a Mushroom Man Tan in Kansas. I am about to ship a few to him so we can test out shipping them in insulated boxes. If that works, I’ll start selling them online.

I taught the environmental ed class at Daphne High School a few weeks ago about mushrooms’ roles in the environment and how to grow them. I love teaching and getting people excited about this. I want to teach healthy cooking classes. There are so many mushrooms that taste like meat and they are healthier to use. I’ve even started making mushroom jerky out of shiitakes.

I learned that when something bad happens, it doesn’t mean everything is bad. So you have a bad day, wake up the next day looking for the positive. What’s the point of living if you’re looking for negative stuff all the time?

Growing mushrooms as a hobby has made me happier than I’ve ever been. I wasn’t the most religious person when I moved here. But I’m so thankful for everything that has happened to me. I know there’s a higher power now and this is a part of that plan. I’m where I need to be.”

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Here is the link: https://oursouthernssouls.company.site