Martina and Gary Coleman’s Manx Gourmet Mushrooms Farm stand attracted a lot of attention at the recent Isle of Man Food and Drink Festival.

Food and Farming talks to Martina about how they started their nursery, why it’s important to them to make it environmentally friendly and sustainable, and how she once ended up with her pockets full of ducklings.

Martina, who is German-born, came to the Isle of Man in 2007, on her motorbike, for the TT Centenary. It was her first visit here and she says: ‘I was smitten. I don’t think I saw a single race I was too busy out and about, looking at everything.

‘I had never seen so many shades of green. It was my personal end of the rainbow.’

Martina was not only smitten by the island but also by a certain islander, Gary Coleman, and after a whirlwind romance she turned her back on her life in Germany and returned to the island with little more than a bag of clothes.

She and Gary are now happily married and she says of her life changing decision: ‘I don’t regret it at all.’

The couple have been running a small nursery in Sulby since 2010 and Martina explains: ‘It began as a necessity because I design gardens in my spare time and I could never get the plants I wanted.’

She and Gary bought a piece of land and started growing their own plants. They were told by the planners that they couldn’t grow plants on what was designated agricultural land, unless it was as a business. So they called it Y Gharey Nursery, which is Manx for ‘The Garden’ and put a small sign outside saying: ‘Plants for sale’. Within a few weeks, they were sold out and the nursery was up and running.

Martina says: ‘We grow about 85% of the plants we sell ourselves. The only things we import are the bedding plants. That is the biggest part of what we do: taking cuttings and growing from seed.

In the raised beds dotted across the nursery, Martina grows seasonal fruit and veg which she offers to customers and sells on her regular stall at Ramsey Farmers’ Market on Saturday mornings

‘We don’t use chemicals, ever. We are as green as it gets. When we came here the site was just a bog with willows, nettles and brambles growing. Over time we have tamed it, but and we have left a 10-metre wildlife corridor winding through it. It was so important to me to leave wild spaces for the wildlife that had been living there before.’

Along the way, Martina also became ‘mother’ to four Runner ducks: ‘I was the first thing they saw when they hatched and they followed me absolutely everywhere.’

She even took them shopping and often had ducklings in her jeans pockets and in her bra. She says it made shopping a slow process as the ducklings would frequently pop their heads out and people would want to stop her and take a photo.

The idea of The Manx Gourmet Mushroom Farm was raised when the much-missed Greeba Mushroom Farm closed its doors. She and Gary were sorry they could no longer buy the spent mushroom growing medium as soil conditioner and compost for their plants.

Several years on and after a lot of reading and experimenting, they have added mushrooms to their portfolio. Their plan is to initially focus on the gourmet ranges such as oyster and shitake, and then introduce the familiar chesnut and Portobello varieties. They cultivated and harvested their first batch of oyster mushrooms – which yielded an impressive 20kg– to coincide with this year’s Royal Show where the nursery had a stand.

Mushrooms should be refrigerated within 30 tp 40 minutes of picking, which gives them a shelf life of seven to 10 days.

The extreme heat at this year’s Royal Show was doing the mushrooms on their stand no good at all and, luckily, butcher Lee Mayers, who was on the Isle of Man Meats stand, saw their plight and offered to put them in their fridge.

They then got used in some of the recipes chef Maciej Majewski was cooking for visitors to the Isle of Man Meats stand for people to try and they proved so popular they were soon sold out.

‘We were blown away by the reaction,’ says Martina.

So, although she says that they are still very much at the early stages of their mushroom growing journey, they have set up another business, Manx Gourmet Mushroom Farm, selling their produce through the Ramsey Farmers’ Market every Saturday as well as selected outlets, including Lee Mayers butchers in Kirk Michael and Kermelly’s fishmongers, and from the nursery itself.

This year they took a stand at the Isle of Man Food and Drink Festival for the first time and had a similarly positive reaction as visitors to the show sampled them in demonstration dishes and picked up recipe cards from their stand: ‘We were a bit overwhelmed,’ says Martina.

She was also thrilled when they were awarded third prize in the Best Stand competition at the Festival.

She and Gary are now planning to erect another polytunnel, one which is suited to growing button and Portobello mushrooms. In the meantime they will continue to grow a number of varieties of oyster mushrooms: pink, yellow, summer, blue and grey.

Which is also good news for the many Manx foodies who love mushrooms and have very much missed being able to buy them fresh and locally grown.