Our Team
Karen Wiseman
Co-owner, Lead Medicine Maker, Mom, Homesteader
The themes that guide my life are serving others and making medicines.
I have had the opportunity during this journey we call life to experience many amazing things. When I seek to understand my driving forces I see a desire to serve others and to create health and well-being and I have never been one to shy away from challenges. Looking in the rear view mirror, my gift for making medicines actually started with my very first book report in the fifth grade about herbal medicines. My fascination with chemistry and making things began to take direction with a chemical engineering degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (when it was only 25% women!!).
My dedication to serving others really began to surface during my years at Merck Research Labs as part of the core development team for the first protease inhibitor for HIV. For a time I was working 19 hours a day, 6 days a week developing the manufacturing process and making material for clinical trials of the drug that would help get the AIDS epidemic under control. Many years later I found myself managing the engineering department of a contract biopharmaceutical manufacturer (yes, one of the ones currently working on COVID vaccines), leading an amazing team of engineers and mechanics, with a beautiful family, volunteering my time so support local charities. But…
Somehow my soul was not happy. I could check all of the “successful” boxes yet I no longer felt connection to my vocation nor to its ability to truly help people.
So my husband and I summoned up all the courage we could muster and left it all behind with our three children. I never believed I would make medicines again but the universe has a way with things like this whether we see it or not. I have spent the last 10 years unlearning, relearning and reestablishing my knowledge of and connection to the earth, to my gift for medicine making, to my family, to myself and to my community. I have built upon my western scientific training and broadened my understanding of the human body, ecosystems, and natural healing and have done the internal work too.
Gratefully, I have had the opportunity to learn from many amazing teachers and herbalists along the way, informally and formally through The Wisdom of the Herbs School, Heartstone Center for Earth Essentials, and am currently in my second year of a three year clinical herbalist program at Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism. I strive to bring all that I can to every bottle, jar or bag of our products, every question I receive, and with all of the partners we work with to contribute to all of our health and well-being. I am deeply grateful for this journey and am humbled everyday by the opportunity to make medicines and serve others and contribute to making our world a better place.
Brian Wiseman
Co-Owner, Lead Grower, Father and Homesteader
I’ve had wildly different types of jobs in my 30+ years as a working adult that all somehow led to owning a homestead and mushroom farm in a tiny corner of Vermont that most people have never heard of. From a Pipefitter on nuclear submarines to a Business Degree and through a series of office type jobs I ended up in the Purchasing department of a small but quickly growing BioPharm company in southern NH. I was lucky to be surrounded by great people and travel to work on some pretty big projects to support the company’s explosive growth. I made lifelong friends during that decade but I hated the job. I was very good at it – but every day I was trapped in a cubicle felt like a slow death. I needed change badly but didn’t know how to begin.
It was during this time that Karen and I decided to have children and it made economic sense for me to be the stay at home Dad. I happily complied and quickly learned I would need a new hobby to maintain my sanity. I decided to teach myself to grow mushrooms at home and spent a few years exploring low tech growing methods using very common household items. It became a never-ending rabbit hole as I dug through the internet for information and connection with others who shared the same interests. It was during this period that we also decided to make a radical lifestyle change and moved to Vermont for a simpler, smaller and more self-sustaining future for our family.
My hobby finally culminated with me taking a seminar at the farm of Paul Stamets in Washington state about 7 years ago. Karen and I had finally decided to invest our own money to build our first mushroom growing barn to allow us to provide local markets and restaurants with 2 or 3 different varieties and since then the demand has been amazing.
We’ve grown steadily and our products and business model have evolved to be able to provide our customers with locally grown and produced, high quality and affordable medicinal mushroom health products. It’s been an amazing journey and I hope it continues for many years to come.