Mile High Fungi: a Conifer-based, home-grown mushroom farm business

Liz Nail has a confession: When she went to college, she sorta, kinda, didn’t like mushrooms. But one night at a potluck dinner with friends, she saw her peers eating chanterelles and thought maybe they were worth trying again. That bite altered her life’s trajectory. “I realized I totally loved mushrooms,” she laughs. “I was just hanging onto a five-year-old mentality.”

Fast-forward 18 years and now Nail and her husband, Michael, bring a wide range of gourmet mushrooms to tables across the Front Range through their seasonal farm, Mile High Fungi. They offer both cultivated varieties like shitake, oyster, king trumpet, and pioppini, as well as wild-foraged options like morel, porcini, and lobster. “Looking back, it’s a healthy reminder to keep an open mind because you never know where trying something new might take you,” Nail says.

Mushrooms from Mile High Fungi. Photo courtesy of Liz and Michael Nail

...Selling the property in July 2016 provided a significant chunk of the seed money necessary to buy the 35 acres of “raw land with nothing on it” in Conifer that Mile High Fungi now sits on—land upon which Nail and Michael have since built a 2,400-square-foot, agricultural barn to house their mushroom-growing operation (not to mention a house). They did more than 95 percent of the work themselves.