The Forest People

Welcome to the second season of “The Positive Fantastic” podcast with an episode interviewing The Forest People. In 2022, I’m going to continue bringing you interviews with interesting folks doing awesome things in the world. My focus will still be mainly on Northern California with some forays out into the wide world. In addition, I’m going to start interspersing the interview episodes with little episodes about my own life on the homestead in Mendocino County. I loved getting to play with so many of my friends last year as I launched “The Positive Fantastic,” and this year I’m hoping to really share more of my day to day experiences with you, too. 

It was a bold move to start a podcast in which I do live interviews during the pandemic, but I felt strongly that we all needed more good news in our lives. I feel that I was able to achieve that with this podcast, and I’m stoked to continue exploring this theme of “how do we as humans thrive.” One of the things that Covid has had me reflecting on the most is the ways that our current paradigm is lacking. We can and will need to do better to stay on this planet. I feel compelled to share some of the ways that we can make small, personal impacts that will add up and contribute to a new paradigm that will hopefully be more sustainable, more life-affirming, and will support more people to thrive. 

For so many years I really thought that I was prepared for the so-called apocalypse. I wasn’t a prepper at all. I was just living my life close to the Earth and resourcing my inputs from as close to home as possible. When the wildfire came and destroyed my neighborhood, leveling all of the houses for miles in its wake, I had a dramatic awakening. On the one hand, I had been so unprepared for the fire. I was aware of California’s fire ecology, but I had not been living my life in a way that truly respected the tending of the wild lands to prevent such a tragedy. On the other hand, I had been living in community, growing copious amounts of my own food, and living a fairly simple artist’s existence in the hills that was all in all, idyllic in the extreme. 

Until about a year before the fire, I didn’t even have my own phone or computer. I used my neighbor’s landline and computer. I was too busy homeschooling, homesteading, and learning useful skills to dabble in all the technological devices that are readily available if we want them. After college, I had reverted technological and I had hardly looked back. It’s a Luddite’s life for me! While I occasionally used some tech for certain things, like chainsawing and such, I also loved studying the ways that we could perform tasks without electricity or gas. Historic mechanizations enchanted me. And, I spent a lot of time doing things from scratch, by hand, and simply to at least know the full process before I tried to speed up my roll. 

I acknowledge the extreme privilege of going slowly in a society bent on achieving the fastest possible processes on all levels. I regularly did all the gardening at home by hand. I would peel the bark off of fir trees with a drawknife in my leisure time. For anger management I would wrestle with an invasive patch of blackberries with pruners in hand because although blackberries are by far my favorite invasive species, they had taken over my small backyard zone and I was bound and determined to create a food forest with a more diverse eco-system. 

I share all this because I’m still in the process of learning and exploring how to do things well. While I appreciate efficiency and effective time management, I also revel in the opportunity to take my time with a new project, getting it wrong several times to understand what I need to do to improve my concept. This is a pretty useful skill in rural living situations, and one that I feel has served me a lot. My intention and new year’s resolution is to bring more of these skills forward in the year of podcasting episodes to come in some segments about life on the land. 

And where better to start this year off than with a podcast interview about growing mushrooms! My first guests in 2022 are Lama and Matthew of “The Forest People.” These two live in the woods in Boonville, California, where they have created a low energy input, nutrition dense output mushroom cultivation scene. I had a great time learning about this small scale commercial mushroom production family facility. I hope you’ll enjoy geeking out on mushrooms with The Forest People as much as I did when you tune into this new supermoon episode.

You can check out The Forest People’s website or follow them on Instagram and Facebook at @Forest_People_Mushrooms And at the time of the airing of this podcast episode, The Forest People have their mushrooms available at Ukiah Natural Foods, Corners of the Mouth, and the Ukiah Farmer’s Market (Saturdays 9-12 at the Alex Thomas Plaza). Go get your Oysters and Shiitakes on! You can also tune into the KZYX&Z “Farm and Garden Show” which Lama and Matthew host once a month, interviewing local farmers. Additionally, to see some of the bounty of the Forest People’s efforts, you can check out my Youtube channel.