A ‘passion to share’ health recovery path leads to Laurens-based mushroom farm
MUSHROOM MARKET – Greenville’s Frosty Farmer Winter Market at McAlister Square has been the Saturday morning market home for Laurens-based mushroom farmer Alicia Connolly of Southern Mushroom Company. She’s soon to return to the Fountain Inn Farmer’s Market.
Laurens, South Carolina – There are numerous reasons why families operate farms and in rural communities it’s often an effort to continue the traditions of a long-lasting family enterprise.
For Alicia and Brendan Connolly, however, their decision to develop Southern Mushroom Company stems directly from a health crisis suffered by Alicia during and immediately after the birth of their son.
“During my son’s birth I had a rare brain hemorrhage, and soon after that I had a stroke,” Connolly said. “There was severe brain trauma and I spent a week in the hospital. By the grace of God, I was able to physically walk out, but my recall of words was very poor.”
Among other impacts was the loss of sight in one eye, which has remained, but during her recuperation, it was the loss of speech that was hardest.
“I come from a family of talkers and I couldn’t live without speech,” Connolly said.
The couple had lived in Great Britain for many years, and there they had learned a little about foraging mushrooms for culinary purposes and for medicinal benefits.
“We had used tinctures before,” she said, “but I started taking heavy doses of Lion’s Mane tincture and within a month I had my speech back.”
At the time of her medical crisis, Alicia was the owner of an online marketing company, but their experience prompted the Laurens couple to consider growing mushrooms that could benefit the local community and the Upstate, both for culinary and medicinal purposes.
LANDLOCKED OYSTER — Named for the vivid blue color when they first sprout, Blue (top) and Gold Oyster mushrooms grow in “logs” of pasteurized hardwood chips, protein and water sealed in plastic.
She paid to mentor under a mushroom farmer to learn everything first hand, and they built a 1,200 square foot lab and growing facility on their property just a few miles outside of Laurens.
“We are ‘spore to fruit’ growers, so we can control every aspect of the growth and everything that goes into the tinctures,” she said. “We have a spore library of about 70 different varieties and we grow 13 varieties in any given season and most of them are culinary. We use all organic medium because we want to know the end product is grown the right way.”
In the grocery stores customers can buy portobellos and button mushrooms and occasionally other varieties but most people don’t really know what to do with these other types, Alicia said.
“At every market I’m doing a lot of education,” she said, “and we provide recipes for each type we sell because they are delicious.”
Now in their third year, one day a week Alicia is delivering dried or fresh mushrooms to restaurants and stores, and the rest of the time she’s in the lab.
CHESTNUTS – Chestnut mushrooms are one of Connolly’s favorite culinary mushroom.
“I joke that I’m a janitor and a cook because we have to cook the substrate and everything has to constantly be cleaned and sterilized,” she said. “Contamination is the biggest cause of failure in mushroom farms.”
As to their unusual path to becoming mushroom farmers, Alicia said she and her husband would do it all again.
“We have our son, and we had waited a long time for that blessing, and this mushroom farm is another blessing,” she said. “My path is different. I have a passion because of what happened to me and I had a mission to share this with as many people as possible.
Their company is on Instagram and Facebook, online at www.southernmushroomcompany.com, or email her for local purchases or information at [email protected].
This story originally ran on Page 1B of the Home, Farm and Garden special issue in The Laurens County Advertiser, March 25, 2026.
