An Anchorage couple first fell for mushrooms. Then they fell for each other.

When Allison Dunbar and Gabriel DeGange first started telling friends they were getting into the mushroom business, they got a few weird looks.

Growing mushrooms, an uncommon practice in Alaska that uses cultures and strains and is more akin to working in a lab than a garden, was not something people thought possible. It's done in heated indoor spaces, and DeGange had friends tell him that if they were growing something illegally they were doing a bad job at hiding it.

"It got more of a chuckle at first. But now that we have business cards, it's more official," Dunbar joked last week.

Talk to the two of them and it's clear their passions for mushrooms run deep. Over the last three years, the couple — she's 25, he's 27 — have built up their business, Far North Fungi, in their Airport Heights backyard. In February, they started selling mushrooms at The Mall at Sears' Center Market.

Their fungi farm is one of the first in Anchorage and makes them one of the few locally grown mushroom producers in the state. Each week they produce about 15 pounds of blue oyster mushrooms. Lately, the fungi have been popular. Even at $25 a pound, they're usually sold out before lunchtime.

Indoor hydroponic farming for fresh produce has gained traction in Alaska, but mushroom farming hasn't quite taken off in the same way, despite similarities in production.

[Hydroponic farm in a box offers portable, year-round crop growing]

Kate Mohatt, an ecologist with the Chugach National Forest and organizer of the popular Girdwood Fungus Fair, said investing in mushroom cultivation can be expensive up front. Growing mushrooms involves many different variables, she said, and contamination can be a problem.

But it has potential to fill a niche market. The selection of mushrooms available in grocery stores is often limited to white buttons and portobellos, since the species have long shelf lives and can withstand being shipped to Alaska. Oyster mushrooms and shiitakes are more delicate and have a harder time handling the long trip from the Lower 48.

Mohatt said that in other parts of the country, mushroom farming has become more popular, with grocery stores filled with an array of wild mushroom species.

"White button are OK," Mohatt said. "But it gets better. There are hundreds of different species you can cultivate; it's just matter of doing it."

Mushroom meet-cute 

In 2011, both Dunbar and DeGange were watching a Bioneers conference talk from mycologist Paul Stamets. Stamets, an expert in the field of mushrooms, gave a presentation titled "How Mushrooms Can Change the World."

It inspired both of them to delve deeply into the world of mushroom cultivation.

Dunbar has been obsessed with fungi since her mother gave her Stamets' book, "Mycellium Running," when she was 15. Growing up in Southern Appalachia, she'd read stories about using mushrooms to filter toxins left behind from mountaintop mining in the region. She also saw the mushrooms as a potential food crop after watching her father work as an organic farmer.

"It was melting together farming and agriculture and engineering with one species — with mushrooms," she said.

DeGange, then a commercial fisherman working outside of Homer, wanted to shift from catching to producing food. Before the talk, he admitted his biggest interest in mushrooms was smooshing puffballs underfoot each fall.

But the talk served as a lightbulb moment, when DeGange saw the potential of mushrooms both as a business and as a way to impact the environment.

The two met in 2013 at a Stamets-led mushroom cultivation workshop in Washington state. DeGange came back to Alaska ready to start a mushroom business. Dunbar went back to Atlanta to continue working at a mushroom farm.

They left the workshop as friends but kept talking, with Dunbar helping DeGange sort through technical issues related to starting up the farm. Dunbar said she knew immediately that DeGange was going to be someone she wanted in her life.

"I had gone the past few years with no one in my age group really understanding why I cared about mushrooms, kind of thinking of it as more of a joke," she said. "Seeing someone who was just as gung-ho as me was very exciting."

She left Georgia in the summer of 2014 to come to Alaska and help DeGange get the operation going. He had nothing more than the shell of what would later become the insulated greenhouse. By the end of the summer, the two had fallen in love and made plans to get the business going. Dunbar flew back to Atlanta, packed her car and drove up to Alaska two weeks later, just in time to start her first fall semester studying civil engineering at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

There were plans to get the mushroom operation started right away, but between work and school, getting the farm off the ground took longer than expected.

Mushroom labs and 'synthetic logs'

Dunbar and DeGange have invested about $5,000 in the whole operation. They've cordoned off a small portion of their house behind the laundry room as the "lab," where mushroom strains are mixed with oat, barley and millet.

In their backyard is a small, 165-square-foot blue shed. The two finished building it last fall using reclaimed wood from when DeGange's parents redid their deck. Inside are seven rows, each filled with what they call "synthetic logs" — plastic bags hanging in columns, each filled with pasteurized straw and a mixture of the grains, each of which has been inundated with mushroom's root-like mycelium.

Small holes punched into the plastic allow the fruiting body of the mushroom to expand, first emerging as tightly clustered bunches before reaching outward and growing into stacks of white bodies with silvery gray tops. Dunbar and DeGange harvest the fist-sized bunches about every five days.

They finally finished everything in January, slowly cultivating mushrooms to sell to family and friends before branching out to the market. The proof of concept is working, they said, and they plan to expand to a larger location in just a couple of weeks. They hope that will be in time to expand to other farmers markets this summer and maybe even to restaurants.

DeGange said Dunbar's experience working on a mushroom farm was helpful for avoiding pitfalls in getting the operation off the ground. Being a couple has also helped with the business. Dunbar said things like being able to sense when the other is stressed have made for smoother operations.

They hope to one day expand their operation beyond just food applications. DeGange, using his fishing background, would like eventually to produce a compostable fish cooler that could take the place of Styrofoam. That's at least five or 10 years down the road, he said. For now, the focus is on fungi as food.

"We're right at the edge of the pool, ready to jump in," Dunbar said.