A forest has no landfill. Every falling leaf is someone's dinner. The Living Workshop runs the same way: three crafts chained together so the waste stream of each one is the supply line of the next.
Locally sourced timber becomes bowls, cutting boards, and furniture. Most shops treat sawdust as a disposal cost. We treat it as the harvest: every grain from every cut gets collected, weighed, and bagged.
→Sterilized oak sawdust becomes substrate for Reishi, Lion's Mane, and Chestnut mushrooms in climate-controlled grow tents. Light and CO₂ levels shape how the fruit bodies form — that control is what makes the art possible.
→Spent substrate is exactly what thermophilic compost piles and worm bins want to eat. Finished compost and castings feed the garden beds; the beds feed the kitchen and the chickens; scraps and manure return to the piles.
↩ THE SOIL GROWS THE NEXT TREE. THE LOOP CLOSES.
The workshop sits five miles over the New Hampshire border, in the western Maine woods where the White Mountains taper into forest. Permaculture has a principle for this: use edges and value the marginal. The edge between two zones — forest and field, pond and bank — holds more life than either zone alone. That's where the exchanges happen.
This whole project lives on edges. Between two states. Between craft and cultivation. Between art and agriculture. Between the workshop and the wild. The Reishi Bonsai Bowls exist because woodworking and mushroom farming were allowed to overlap instead of staying in their lanes. The liminal space isn't a compromise — it's the design.
The same sawdust, followed far enough, becomes all of this:
Bowls, boards, tables, chairs — functional craft from local timber.
Dual-extracted Reishi and Lion's Mane from mushrooms grown on our own sawdust.
Lion's Mane and Chestnut mushrooms, grown, harvested, and sold fresh.
The signature pieces — a bowl and the Reishi grown from its own sawdust, as one work. See the art →
Mycobricks, mushroom leather, and structural material grown from Reishi mycelium.
Dried mushroom powders, cooking salts, and cocoa blends for the kitchen.
Finished hot compost, sold as-is or brewed into liquid amendments.
High-value vermicast from bins fed on spent substrate and food scraps.
An open-source AI assistant, built on Home Assistant, running on a computer in the workshop — not in anyone's cloud. Lyra reads the sensors in the grow tents and garden beds, watches the cameras, keeps the growing logs, and messages us when a tent drifts out of range or a soil bed runs dry.
She's also why you can watch this place live. The same cameras Lyra uses to keep watch feed the public streams. Nothing about this workshop is hidden, because the monitoring system and the window are the same thing.
The end state: a timber-framed workshop on 40 forested acres with walls grown from mycobricks — structural building material grown from Reishi mycelium and agricultural waste, in the tradition of Phil Ross's work and the Hy-Fi tower at MoMA PS1. A building that is, in the most literal sense, alive.
We're honest about the distance between here and there. Today the loop runs at homestead scale: two grow tents, 600 square feet of gardens, a flock of 17, a woodshop, and the compost piles connecting them. The full campus needs land, a filmed and funded buildout, and years of documented work. That's the project. That's what supporting this actually funds.
And when each piece works, its plans go public. The Living Workshop is meant to be copied — a MycoMakerSpace blueprint for any community that wants one, not a trademark to defend.