Hyphae and High-wire

Available for over a year

It’s not often you meet a farmer who’s also a circus performer, but that’s the reality for Emma who’s also running a small-scale mushroom farm in north Pembrokeshire with her partner cee-cee. The love of growing fungi all started for them in a wardrobe, but for the last few years, the pair have had access to two acres on a larger mixed farm where they produce a year-round supply of oyster and shitake mushrooms using both indoor and outdoor systems. Verity Sharp visits on a day they’re out in the sunshine, drilling holes into logs and filling them with mycelium plugs that hold the promise of a mushroom bounty further down the line. cee-cee manrique has British and Colombian heritage and still considers their dad’s coffee farm in San Juan de Rioseco ‘the best place on earth’. The pair share tales of a formative two-year hitchhiking trip from north Colombia to Patagonia working on small farms along the way, and cee-cee describes how that compares to their current experience as a brown farmer working the land in the UK. With laughter and immense mycelial knowledge, Emma and cee-cee share their aversion to bucket washing and great passion for slacklining. Presented and produced by Verity Sharp.