The 90-second version

Every woodshop makes sawdust. Most pay to have it hauled off. A few years ago I started packing mine into bags, sterilizing it, and growing Reishi on it — first as medicine, then as food, then as something stranger: mushrooms grown in bonsai form out of bowls turned from the same tree. The sawdust from the bowl grows the mushroom that lives in the bowl.

That loop kept extending itself. Spent mushroom blocks turned out to be exactly what compost piles and worm bins want. The compost feeds the gardens. The gardens feed us and the chickens. The chickens eat scraps and turn them into eggs and manure, which go back to the piles. At some point we stopped having a trash problem and started having a system.

The Living Workshop is that system, plus a promise: build it in the open, film it, write it down, and open-source every part that works so other people can run their own loop. The end goal is a full campus — a timber-framed workshop with walls grown from our own mycobricks on 40 forested acres. We're not there yet. We're at the homestead-scale proof, and you can watch it running live any day of the week.