GrowYourOwn showcase
Most of the content on this blog is likely going to be about GrowYourOwn, atleast for now...
In early 2021, my dear friend Nino came to me with a business proposal.
At the time, I was working at Blackman and White, (A CNC Machining and manufacturing warehouse based in Maldon.) and he — along with Andrey Lopstanev — were exploring a project that sounded both ambitious and a little bit wild: at-home mushroom farming hardware.
The idea was simple in concept, but ambitious in execution: build a compact grow-box with its own heating, cooling, and humidity control. The water came from an upside-down bottle that fed a humidifier, while sensors and actuators kept the environment stable for mushroom cultivation.
What started as a hobbyist project quickly became more serious. Our first prototype was a small micro-farm for the home. Then we began thinking bigger: custom soldered extension leads controlled by a central board, sockets that could be switched individually, and proper PID control to fine-tune the growing environment.
On the software side, we built a full web app. Users could sign in, monitor their farm remotely, and even store “atmospheres” — pre-set configurations of temperature, humidity and CO2 — to apply to their farms at a moment’s notice. Behind the scenes, AWS and MQTT handled the communication between farms and the backend. It felt like science fiction, but the most rewarding part was that it produced something tangible and wholesome: fresh, edible mushrooms we could actually eat.
Over time the project grew beyond the little countertop boxes. What began as an at-home micro-farm for curious hobbyists quickly matured into remotely managed, networked units that could be monitored and controlled from anywhere. That remote-control capability opened new doors: we started deploying multi-socket racks and larger footprint units for community spaces and small-scale commercial kitchens. From there the natural next step was to design containerised farms — self-contained shipping-container units with industrial-grade climate control, automated watering, and builtin telemetry — which let us scale the same control software to larger production settings and brought GrowYourOwn into the realm of commercial and industrial deployments.
The team
We were four people trying to make this vision real:
- Me (Boris) — technical lead, responsible for software architecture and system design.
- Nino (CTO) — originally focused on hardware, but quickly became deeply involved in the software too.
- Andrey (CEO) — marketing, outreach, and finances; the one who made sure our story reached the outside world.
- Norton (Mycologist) — our fungi expert, running workshops with Manchester University students and teaching about food security through mushroom growing.
Together, we tried to bridge disciplines: engineering, biology, design, and marketing.
Looking back, GrowYourOwn was more than just a startup idea. It was an experiment in sustainable food, decentralised production, and what happens when a group of friends fresh out of uni decide to take a crazy idea seriously.
This blog is where I’ll be sharing more of that journey — the designs, the tech we built, and the lessons we learned along the way.