Nakanwagi reaps big from mushrooms

FARMING

When you meet Maria Nakanwagi at her office at Uganda Bureau of statistics, you might not believe that she is mushrooming money back to her home.

She started slowly but she has surely got there. She is benefiting from mushrooms both health-wise and financially.

Her journey to growing mushrooms.

When Nakanwagi noticed that she was spending a lot of money on food, she decided to cut her expenditure on food and the only way she could achieve this was to practice back yard farming.

She had seen people hawk mushrooms and many spoke well about growing mushrooms, so she decided to venture into mushroom growing.

"I knew it would be easy for me to do this from home, "says Nakanwagi.

She went to professionals in mushroom growing and these trained her in how to grow mushrooms. In three weeks she was skilled in mushroom growing and today she is reaping big from them.

How she does it 

"I grow Oyester mushrooms and these grow well if one has enough water for watering them and a dark room where they grow from," says Nakanwagi.

"However, before taking them to the darkroom, I get cotton and coffee husks plus polythene bags both white and black, to help me prepare my mushroom gardens before I take them to the darkroom, "says Nakanwagi.

It's in the cotton and the husks that I plant the mushroom seeds and then wrap them together in a polythene bag, but I create outlets where the mushrooms will spurt from.

After preparing the gardens, I then transfer them to the darkroom, where I keep watering them for three weeks as I start preparing to harvest my mushrooms.

She notes that proper harvesting is done when the mushrooms are four weeks old and this is done very early in the morning before watering.

She notes that it's important to limit who goes in the mushroom dark house, else the mushrooms can get infected and this affects your yields.

Value addition

Nakanwagi says that to meet the demands of her customers, she doesn't only sell fresh mushrooms but also dry ones and also adds value to them where she makes porridge and mushroom spices among other things. This has greatly increased her earnings.

Achievements

Nakanwagi's biggest achievement is that she has used mushrooms to create a women's group in Kazo Kawempe called Women in action for community empowerment and these work together to empower themselves financially.

These women grow mushrooms; make charcoal briquettes and also skill each other with hands-on skills.