Inside the Moss Landing Farm: A Year on the Pajaro River Bluff
Located in northern Monterey County in the coastal town of Moss Landing, our twenty-acre facility sits on a bluff above the Pajaro River, overlooking the Pacific. The fog arrives before dawn most mornings, rolling in low off the water, settling into the growing rooms before the day heats up. It has been doing this for decades
The Bluff
Moss Landing is not a dramatic place in the way that Napa or Big Sur are dramatic. There is no postcard version of it. What it has is specificity, the smell of salt and kelp off Monterey Bay, the way the marine layer holds temperature in a band that barely moves between seasons, the Pajaro River moving quietly below the bluff before it meets the sea.
This is exactly the place you would choose to grow specialty mushrooms if you wanted nature to takes it course and reducing energy consumption was your goal.
Oyster mushrooms fruit best when temperature swings are moderate and humidity is reliable. Shiitake wants cool nights and steady airflow. Lion's Mane is particular about CO₂ levels and indirect light. The central California coast, at this specific latitude, provides conditions that an inland farm has to engineer.. Here, the coast does most of the work.
Far West Fungi was built around that fact.
How the Garrones Came to Moss Landing
The Garrone family started managing the Moss Landing operation decades ago, when specialty mushrooms were not yet a category in American cooking, they were a curiosity. Cremini and button mushrooms were what the grocery stores stocked. Everything else was the province of foragers, immigrant kitchens, and a small number of farmers who had learned cultivation techniques from Asian growers and were beginning to adapt them to California conditions.
The Garrones were among the first in the state to cultivate exotics at commercial scale. The operation began modestly, a handful of growing rooms, a small range of species, and a regional customer base built farm-stand by farm-stand. The San Francisco Ferry Building Farmers Market became an early anchor. Bay Area chefs, then beginning their own sourcing revolution, found the farm and started coming back.
Over the years, the Moss Landing facility expanded to its current 20 acres. The species range grew. The wholesale relationships deepened. The storefronts in San Francisco and Santa Cruz opened as direct extensions of the farm, places where the distance between cultivation and table could be measured in hours.
What did not change was the address on the Pajaro River bluff, or the family's approach to growing.
A Year on the Farm: The Cultivation Calendar
Specialty mushroom cultivation does not follow the rhythms of row crops. There is no single planting season and no harvest window to race against. At Moss Landing, every variety we grow fruits across the full calendar year. Shiitake, King Oyster, Blue and Golden Oyster, Lion's Mane, Maitake, Trumpet Royale, Pioppini: all of them are in production in January and in July alike. What changes from season to season is not which mushrooms are growing, but how quickly they grow.
Temperature sets the pace. Mushrooms slow in the cold and quicken in the warmth, and every species on the farm responds to that same rhythm in much the same way. The advantage of our position on the bluff is that the coastal climate holds us in a moderate band all year. It rarely gets cold enough to stall production and rarely gets hot enough to stress it. That is what makes continuous, year-round growing not just possible here but practical.
Winter (December through February)
The coldest months on the bluff are the farm's most deliberate. Growth slows across the board. Fruiting takes longer, flushes come in more measured, and the mushrooms tend to develop with a little more density for the extra time on the block. Nothing stops. The pace simply eases, and the growing rooms do the steady work of holding conditions while the outside air runs cool.
Spring (March through May)
As the marine layer shifts and the humidity climbs, the pace picks up. The Pajaro River typically runs high through early spring, and the moisture that comes with it moves across the bluff into the facility's passive ventilation. Warmer, wetter air quickens fruiting across the full catalog, and the farm moves out of winter's measured rhythm into steadier, faster turns.
Summer (June through August)
Summer on the central coast is cooler than most people expect, and cooler than most of California. Fog holds through midmorning on many days and keeps the growing rooms in an easy range without aggressive climate control. Where inland heat would slow or stress a farm through these months, our coastal position keeps production moving at a comfortable, consistent clip. Species like Pioppini and Trumpet Royale that struggle in the heat of inland California keep growing steadily here, the same as they do the rest of the year.
Fall (September through November)
Fall is the farm's most productive season by volume. The fog begins to retreat, early fall brings some of the warmest, clearest days of the year, and the humidity stays high. Warm and humid is exactly the combination mushrooms grow fastest in, so the full catalog comes into peak pace at once. This is when the wholesale program runs at capacity and when the widest, freshest range of Far West Fungi mushrooms reaches the Ferry Building and the Bay Area restaurant kitchens that depend on consistent supply.
Year-round production is not a marketing claim. It is a function of where the farm sits, and of growing every variety, every month, at whatever pace the season allows.
The Species at Moss Landing
The farm cultivates a full range of fresh specialty mushrooms, with growing conditions at Moss Landing influencing the character of each.
Shiitake (Lentinula edodes) grown on the Pajaro River bluff develop the dense cap texture that makes them useful to chefs who need a mushroom that holds up to high heat.
Lion's Mane (Hericium erinaceus) is temperature-sensitive and benefits directly from the coastal climate stability, the bluff's narrow temperature band produces consistent fruiting bodies without the cracking that warmer conditions cause.
King Trumpet (Pleurotus eryngii), also called Trumpet Royale, grows slowly and rewards the farm's patient approach to production.
Blue Oyster (Pleurotus ostreatus) thrives in the farm's naturally humid conditions and is among the fastest-cycling crops on the property.
Maitake (Grifola frondosa) is one of the more technically demanding species in the portfolio. The Moss Landing team has spent years dialing in the substrate and environmental conditions it requires.
Pioppini, Pink Oyster, and Black Pearl, Cinnamon Cap, Wood Ear, Reishi & Turkey Tail round out the current production mix, a species range that reflects both culinary demand and what the coastal California climate makes practical.
Tasting Moss Landing
The Santa Cruz Mushroom Store & Café is the closest retail expression of the Moss Landing farm, located roughly twenty miles up the coast, it carries the freshest harvest from the bluff and stocks the full dried and specialty product range. If you want to taste what the Pajaro River fog produces, that is the most direct path.
Far West Fungi also sells at the San Francisco Ferry Building Farmers Market, where the farm has been a presence since the market's early years. The growers are there. The mushrooms were harvested days before.
For home cooks who want farm-direct delivery, the full fresh and dried range ships nationwide from farwestfungi.com, Lion's Mane, Shiitake, and King Trumpet among them.
The Moss Landing farm does not offer regular public tours, but the Our Farms page carries the full history of the facility, and store locations has current hours for both the Santa Cruz and San Francisco shops.
Far West Fungi has grown specialty mushrooms on the Pajaro River bluff for decades. The farm, the family, and the fog are all still there.
