a few weeks period as he worked on a sign for the jericho elementary school on the fine is modeled after the historical elementary school which is currently the jericho town hall that also underwent a major restoration of the think tank so what's your background in stone sculpture and how did you you run through the process of the design and fabrication of the jack o and she schools my son went to jericho elementary school at the time that i made this sign someone from the parent teacher organization approached me about needing a new sign with the reader board underneath so that they could make announcements for the parent teacher association and obviously a stone was what they chose because they came to me so we started out with you know some general sketches pictures of other real everybody had their own say even people in the community like the woman who said snowflake chocolates was there and that one of the men on the board had an idea of making the  sign resemble the town hall which is the old school house so he gave me his little sketch of what he thought it might look like and i went back to my studio put it on graph paper thought it out a little more  funding and grants and whatnot this happened and i figured the models and that's going to do that it turned out that it was just what we wanted we went ahead funding became available setting the post themselves getting the concrete poured underneath it was i think we were six feet deep report a two foot slab and then boxed in that legs into concrete and back filled everything  quite a bit of work and we had quite a bit of help from community in that process and at that point settings approach technical work and artistic work differently to say that my technical work and is out but still being artistic in some respects in that i use levels i use squares and i use tape measures but i always step back and question them first can't always trust the level so you know a lot of my stone carving that i do on using a lot of natural stone not necessarily the cut fabricated granite like on the school's side so in that case i had to train my eyes to you know work around irregularities slopes of the stone different contours sometimes level just doesn't look right i would say about fifty to sixty percent is commission work everybody else besides the fun at the elementary school do you have any other work that that's on display around jericho or any place in the in the surrounding countryside that people could go go visit i have a community park down the road mobs mobs community park if you will that has had a large stone bench that had down there it was a memorial for a woman who has been commissioned it saying that even in death she would want to share it with the community so  brought it down there with a pair of draft horses and a half mile into the woods set the bench where a lot of you know community help there as well and people go down there and use it all the time as a  have all these neat words carved in like true love and happiness and best dog ever so it was hard to want to throw those away it seems a little blasphemous sell yeah we just started playing around with it and then you became so much fun  grew and became purchased and said what do you see for the future and eventually i'd love to have a larger shop with all of the tools i need but i have for the future of on the rocks i would like to see at a little more a national presence i'd like to get out to galleries around the country and not necessarily stay here in vermont vermont's a great great place to be an artist and very very supportive community but really huge on the west coast and trying to kind of bring some of that here on the east coast along with the fact that mushrooms have a three hundred percent biological efficiency that's what really got me interested in vascular plant so like corn for example takes many months and you get this one thing that grows a couple of years it just seems kind of wasteful inefficient compared to  black trumpets oyster mushrooms are probably at the top of the list here in vermont though we do find lots attack either hedgehog mushroom head of the woods chicken of the woods quite a lot of different species probably twenty eight or more gloomy yet to say that mushrooms i do the chicken of the woods is probably my favorite mushroom looks taste texture absolutely like chicken if you know anything about it coverage you know it kind of sets me apart from other people that might just go into the woods come out with a backpack full of mushrooms and try to sell them to the establishments which they can anyone can go into the woods and pick any mushroom right now in vermont northeast and bring them to any establishment it's not their job to identify them they've had to slap a sticker on it one hundred ninety nine a pound and throw it on the shelf and i discovered one time going into a co op that they were selling wild crafted oyster mushrooms and they were oyster mushrooms they were another species and i brought it to the attention of the produce manager and it's that scenario that build the mushrooms that they had on the shelf or dangerous they were edible but you could see where the problem will probably possibly come into play even right now this year in new hampshire there's been fifteen poisonings from people while prepping mushroom so it's letting you know that the interest is gaining but i think that the education behind it needs just a little bit more improvement or people just need to slow down you know cross reference between two or three different fiel guides and then at the end if they still don't know they can they can seek advice either online or in libraries there's always a mushroom club in every state so you know there's people out there willing to help you identify them anderson in france all  you i have been known to fill my truck in a day and i would say on the average anywhere from six hundred pounds to twelve hundred pounds depending on the season then how often i go out varies from year to there are on average most of the mushrooms we pick are around ten dollars a pound but there are some that probably range anywhere from twenty five to sixty five dollars a pound when the the price goes traumatically higher because as you know mushrooms are mostly water so ninety percent of their weight is lost during drying so trumpets is a good example i can get probably anywhere from twenty to  workshops that entail two powerpoint presentations there's over one hundred forty pictures for five video clips mostly an introduction to my business some identifying characteristics of certain core me species here vermont and also i dabble little bit in showing people how to cultivate their own gourmet mushrooms at the end of the workshop i will hand out was to mushroom spawn with an instruction sheet on how to grow them out on a really cool interesting substrate cardboard so we can take something that would normally be thrown away or recycled in turn the food so it's kind of cool that you know that some of them that  involved in scientific research for anti cancer into bacterial research ok you know i think worldwide mushrooms in the family of him in need are dangerous it's just a family of his it's not experiment with there's only really one mushroom in the whole family that's probably most of those are either deadly toxic pollution to janick recreational and you wouldn't really want to risk your life just to find out you know but the gall actually is will it does something with the enzymes in your liver and kidney and so basically you will if you were to consume one or stop and eventually you would experience of your stomach upset vomiting diarrhea you have a short remission so you actually think you're feeling better for a few days and then it would come back tenfold eventually you would need a liver or kidney transplant otherwise you would fall into a coma or death so it's probably not it's not pleasant but it's not it's not it's not immediate toxicity you know like where you're not going to die like an  mushroom is very easy to a giant puffballs or really easy to identify i personally think oysters are easy to identify i think a lot of the mushrooms that are not easy to identify are the ones that grow in the ground so like when areas and can easily mistaken because of the rain sometimes the volga or the cup with which from once were growing out of the cat gill structure how the capitol looks so i think some of those are probably property and the logs are infused with my fill in from either or stir shit talking mushroom it's really easy for people to grow mushrooms on logs log culture you just need a hammer drill and the spawn you don't need any k you know i'm hoping to do a lot more workshops for the local areas you can't see that most of the co ops in the area i'm hoping to branch out a little bit more and possibly expand my business to more cultivation so it seems as though there's quite a market here in vermont being local war organic and all natural