It all started years ago when we moved to Anderson Valley with a vision: to raise our daughter in a conscious community and give back to that community by doing what we love – growing mushrooms.
We, Matthew and Lama, met and married in Boise, Idaho where we cultivated our love on the shared ideals of regenerative farming and earth stewardship. We built our first mushroom house in our backyard which, in hindsight, served as a way to refine our building and growing techniques. When our daughter was born we felt pulled to the redwoods of Northern California to take up a land-based lifestyle in a more progressive community.
Living in the redwood forest is such a beautiful experience and we are grateful for the opportunity to live and breath with the trees. The forest around us is a thriving ecosystem. Many animals grace us with their presence and quiet wisdom. We fall asleep to the sound of crickets in the summer and frogs in the winter. When the rains come, the forest transforms into a wonder of color and form. Ferns flourish and mosses unfurl. We love going on rainy day hikes, finding mushrooms of all shapes and color!
We have a dedicated mushroom house where we are able to grow mushrooms year-round. With a background in regenerative farming technologies, we’ve custom built our operation with whole systems awareness. We never use harmful chemicals or pesticides and only use organic practices. We are ‘Certified Renegade’ through the Mendocino Organic Network.
A Changing World
In a world that is rapidly transforming, we believe that it is imperative to cooperate with each other and develop sustainable relationships with our biosphere. This includes developing innovative ways to provide nourishing food for all the hungry bellies on the planet. Mushroom cultivation can provide large quantities of nutritionally dense food of with very few inputs. This can be done in a small space with relatively little water usage (as compared to other conventional food production). And, the potential for mycoremediation is extensive. Mycelium can be used to clean up petroleum products, including oils spills and pesticide run-off, and can be used to remove E.coli and heavy metals. The mushroom seems to have a lot of answers for us in our post-industrial world.
Mushrooms Are Just One Part of Our Vision
While we specialize in growing mushrooms, we also tend a large subsistence garden down in the valley (farming in the forest doesn’t work very well!) Our grand vision is this: The Human Sustainability Project, which aims to create a small scale, closed loop and restorative food production system. The central guiding theme is that we will give back to the earth more than we take in the form of land stewardship, soil building and compost, compost, compost! Read more here!
Radically Sustainable Mushroom Cultivation 