(bright upbeat music) - [Announcer] On this episode of Postcards.

- There are about 80,000 identified species of mushrooms and over a million, they figure that has yet to be discovered or learned about.

- One thing I like about public art pieces, it jogs our thought process.

There's no right or wrong answer and I love that.

- Sometimes I go to bed at night and I start thinking what I could possibly make, you know.

(bright upbeat music) - [Announcer] Postcards is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provided by Margaret A.Cargill Philanthropies, Mark and Margaret Yigal Julene on behalf of Shalom Hill Farms, a retreat and conference center in a Prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota.

On the web @shalomhillfarm.org.

Alexandria, Minnesota, a year round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails and attractions for memorable vacations and events.

More information @explorealex.com, the Lake Region Arts Council's Arts Calendar and Arts and Cultural Heritage funded digital calendar showcasing upcoming art events and opportunities for artists in West central, Minnesota.

On the web @lracfourcalendar.org.

Playing today's new music plus your favorite hits, 96.7 Kram, online at 967kram.com.

(bright upbeat music) - There are about 80,000 identified species of mushrooms and over a million they figure that has yet to be discovered or learned about.

I know a lot of the edibles, I know a lot of the common mushrooms but I'm diving in so deep now where they don't even have common names and there's, I'm realizing how much I don't know.

So for me, if I can go out and find some edibles, that's awesome.

If I can go out and find something really weird and strange like slime molds which I'm super passionate about as well.

I wanna look at and learn about it or if I can just find something completely new to me that I've never seen before.

Oh, cup fungus and the kind I have never in my life seen.

This is freaking cool.

I would call myself a mushroom enthusiast or mycophile.

(bright upbeat music) So it started probably about seven years ago when I purchased my home.

My backyard butts up to some native Prairie land.

And so I wanted to start getting to know these plants that were in my backyard.

So I bought some ID books and just kind of really went to town with that and immersed myself in everything that was back there which then led me off of the Prairie and into the woods, seeking out different plants.

And then I started noticing mushrooms and I was just mesmerized by them and intrigued.

And so I kinda did the same thing with them that I did with the plants.

Over the years, I've just wanted to go deeper and deeper and deeper and kind of like really down at this kind of like microscopic little world that really does exist so beyond the mushrooms even.

(bright upbeat music) I call my garage, my nerd lab.

And so I'm out there all the time just learning to ID different mushrooms that, you know I'm not familiar with and there's a whole process to it.

You look at stems, you look at gills, you look at caps and doing spore prints is a part of the ID process.

I'm gonna take a black and a white piece of paper and then put the cap so it sits on both.

So I cut the STEM off the cap and underneath it could be gills or pores, folds or teeth.

There's all different things going on under the cap of a mushroom.

And so I'll set that down flat on the paper.

Usually the spores will start dropping in about two hours.

And so if I'm just using it for ID purposes, that's good enough.

After that sat for a couple of hours, we lift them up and it's always fun to be surprised at what's underneath.

I can see the color.

That's what I need to look up in a book.

And I realized I'm like, this is really pretty.

I should start photographing this.

And so that's kind of how it all started.

I don't think I create art.

I think nature creates it and I just photograph it and share the message of nature.

I just see things in nature and I wanna share that with people.

(bright upbeat music) Some days I don't know what I'm going to see and I love that.

I love being surprised.

I could walk the same path two days in a row and it's gonna be completely different than the day before.

So right here is a really beautiful specimen of chicken of the woods which is a very good edible and it actually does taste like chicken.

And again, I'm just using the common name.

I do know the scientific name but I would butcher it if I tried to pronounce it.

The underside has pores and it's a really beautiful yellow.

And then if you see, up on top it's this really beautiful kind of Tangerine orange color.

So this is a beautiful, young specimen and I'm just gonna slice it open and you'll see why it gets its common name.

Kinda looks like chicken, a little bit texturally.

And then especially when you do fry it up, you'll wonder if you're having a mushroom or chicken.

(bright upbeat music) One thing I always tell people now that I've learned, you can touch any mushroom you want.

You encounter any mushroom in the woods, go ahead, touch it, smell it.

You don't need to fear that mushroom.

Only if you plan on ingesting it and you don't know what it is then, yeah, be a little scared of that.

But mushrooms are not here to hurt us, they're here to help us.

Yes, we can eat some of them but largely they're there to decompose wood.

Without mushrooms, we would have woods that would ultimately choke on themselves.

We need the mycelial network in that fungus to connect certain plants to trees.

And so everything underground is actually all connected.

For a long time, I would just post pictures.

You know, things I thought were kind of interesting, my finds, that sort of thing.

And people really started to like message me and resonate sort of with whatever I was putting out there which kind of surprised me.

And so where I work at Minnesota West, they had asked me if I would do a half-hour talk about mushrooms.

And so I started doing that and I realized it was really interesting and fun and to hear their questions and so it just kind of spawned from that.

And so different community organizations would ask me to come and talk mushrooms.

And usually I will have, you know, mushrooms there for people that eat as well.

And a lot of times it's their first experience with anything straight from the wild.

People don't need to eat the mushrooms, they're simply there for them to try.

If they do, they get to you know, sample the mushrooms, sample a certain dish that I prepare them in and then ask me their questions and I'll give them the information that I have or things that I found that I think are pretty awesome.

I always start by telling people what a mushroom actually is.

Benjamin, do you know?

- Fungus.

Did I guess?

- It is a fungus but it's actually considered the fruit of the fungus.

So mushrooms aren't a fruit but they are considered the fruiting body of the fungus.

We've done some fun, kind of more interactive workshops and pairing events like at Bluenose Gopher Public House.

So that's been fun.

But yeah, I'm full up on workshops and speaking engagements about mushrooms which I find kind of mind blowing.

(bright upbeat music) A good forger always shares their findings but never discloses specifically where they find something 'cause we're out in the woods, we're working hard for these spots.

We're not just going to give them up.

Kinda like a fishermen, right?

They never say.

They'll just say on the lake, on the river because we want to keep being able to harvest things.

We wanna respect the land and so there are different ways that I harvest plants.

I don't take everything and I don't take the substrate behind it.

What this is fruiting from is that whole mycelium network, that's what we can't see but it is there so I don't wanna disturb that 'cause I want this to keep coming back.

Harvest with a grateful heart and walk lightly.

(bright upbeat music) Seven years ago, when I picked up an ID book, I didn't realize that I was really starting any journey.

When I started realizing how intricate and detailed and awesome nature is and how intelligent, I became hopelessly addicted.

And seriously, everyday in the past seven years there's not many days that go by that I'm not out in the woods.

It was a time now looking back on these seven years, I really did go inward and I think that just happened naturally.

I emerged, I guess, seven years later out of the woods and I feel like I have a message to share but also within myself I feel this really great sense of peace.

The woods have shown me a lot about myself.

(bright upbeat music) - Well, a few years ago, Mira Greg had called a community meeting to ask people what they thought was important for the city of Madison and there were many ideas.

You know, childcare and the school and senior center but another one was making our city more beautiful.

From that, some interested folks began to plan on how we could do that.

The senate was difficult because we had no experience in it.

But through trial and error and failure and persistence, we were able to form a network of people that helped us guide the way.

The legacy funds that are available and distributed from Southwestern Minnesota Arts Council was a tremendous help.

And they helped us with the grant writing process also and told us what was important to include and help guide us down that path.

(bright upbeat music) - Madison's new outdoor sculpture called a biome is really a demonstration or an icon of what this Prairie was years ago.

It's sort of a story of the culture and the history of the region and this region, of course being the native prairies of hundreds of years ago.

I've read stories and I'm sure many people have about the pioneers who came out here and the growth of the prairies was many times over their heads.

In fact, a lot of stories of youngsters being lost in this tall grass.

And that's what this biome depicts so well is the height of these plants and what it must've been like for these pioneers.

(bright upbeat music) - You know, the Prairie is probably not coming back but for a learning tool, like if young people want to see the actual scale of the plants.

So what we did was the smaller plants, all the way up to the big compass plant.

Now that would be their size out in nature.

(bright upbeat music) Accessibility to me is really important.

If any of you have a relative or a niece or a nephew or somebody that has any sort of disability, being able to you know, touch and feel and sit and climb.

Those are really huge and those facilitate the additional learning about, potential learning about plants and nature.

And so I feel like if a teacher were to bring a kindergarten class or a third grade class out here, they could stand beside this and say, that's how tall those plants would have been, you know, 200 years ago when they were living here.

And it will hopefully generate some kind of intrigue in the kid's mind and then they would wanna learn more.

Experiencing it within for pictures or whatever, I mean, I could see a bride climbing up there, I could see somebody sitting on that top getting their picture taken for whatever reason.

(bright upbeat music) Native indigenous materials are kinda my, that's, that's big to me.

Using weathered steel in the transportation process, you don't have to worry about scratching or dinging.

It'll last our lifetimes and probably more.

And as it weathers, it gains a little bit of character.

So that's what the method I use.

Design, cut your parts, design to where you can you know, bolt them together fairly easily, transport them, get them in place.

Hopefully they fit back together again and go from there.

(bright upbeat music) You know, half of our time on earth is spent in the dark.

The lighting gives it that second dimension that you're not gonna pick up during the day.

Like during the day, the form is kind of the strong design element but at night or at dusk, when those lights come on, that illuminates the outlines of the plant forms.

Simple LED lighting, you know, behind is really inexpensive now.

It's kind of, I wanna say available to the average, you know, person like me.

I don't have to be an expert electrician.

I mean, there's a learning curve, yeah but those lights will last for 30 to 40,000 hours.

(bright upbeat music) - It's by two highways in our community.

It's in a good location so the people driving by are gonna notice it especially at night when they drive by and they're gonna go, oh, what was that?

And they might come back.

And we hope it brings people to town.

We hope it helps our community grow with their appreciation for art.

- I've done public art pieces in big cities and small communities.

And the neat thing about small communities is they have a vested interest and they care about what the end result is.

Big exposure is always cool.

Everybody likes to stroke their ego but for me the committee members I've met, you guys, the newspaper people, the radio personalities, all the members of the committee have been so outreaching and, you know, friendly and nice.

One thing I like about public art pieces it helps us think in terms that we don't see every day.

All of us go about our jobs, our role or whatever we do every day, kinda becomes mundane and we don't think about it.

Public art allows us to be walking down the street or driving past and for a split second or maybe 30 seconds or hopefully 10 minutes, we look at these pieces and think how it affects us.

What do we think of it?

We think, what did the designer, what was their idea?

What are the rest of the people think about?

So it just, it jogs our thought process.

There's no right or wrong answer and I love that.

(bright upbeat music) - I try to dream up anything.

I like using antler a lot, I guess elk antler and deer antler in making certain projects and especially knives, I make knife handles.

So I don't forge my own knives but I make the handles for them.

Anything else, it's just my poxy work.

I just kinda started that here about three years ago or so.

And I'm really starting to get into it now, different ideas and it's a unique project.

(bright upbeat music) Okay.

Well, what I start with here is I use this colorant here and you put in two party poxy and I got half of this prepped already.

So you put in, I got marks on my cup there.

(bright upbeat music) You pour it and you try to get it so it's kind of even all the way around.

(bright upbeat music) We never know what it's gonna look like, you know.

We keep coming back, you know and looking at it and it keeps changing.

(bright upbeat music) And that's basically all you do.

(bright upbeat music) I got into woodworking in ninth grade and in high school.

In 12th grade, I did my first major project, grandfather clock.

(bright upbeat music) I guess as far as how many years I've been woodworking, I started when I was 16 and then now I'm 66 so that's 50 years, I guess.

(bright upbeat music) I make clocks or just a picture display of this electrolyte wood-burning it's called where it really burns and you know, it looks like a tree almost.

It really, it's much quicker.

This will go up in about 10 seconds and this'll take probably three minutes.

It really varies.

But I actually like this look a little better than.

They're both pretty cool but you know and this is going up, you know and then once they touch, then you gotta quit it 'cause it'll burn out your transformer and then it's shortened out and it's, and it really burns deep.

So you can kinda control where you wanna go by welding it down, you know, to stop it, you know so I won't go any further off the edge or whatever you know.

So yeah, it's fun.

(bright upbeat music) Any type of wood I use but I use a lot of exotic woods.

There's a friend of mine, he's a Boyer.

He makes these long bows and he'll save all his scraps, his cutouts from the bow and everything and he'll save garbage, cans and scraps for me and then I take them scraps and use it for other projects.

And it's a lot of different exotic woods that it's pretty cool to use.

(bright upbeat music) I prefer living in the country.

I did live in town when I was a child I guess but once I graduated and I moved, actually I moved up North of Sunburg here into a house that didn't have electricity or anything.

I lived there for three years just using kerosene lamps and whatever.

So that was kind of a unique experience to have that.

(bright upbeat music) As far as, you know, hunting and being outdoors, I been doing that ever since, I guess, a teenager.

A lot of bull hunting and go out rifle hunting a little bit and fishing a lot, do that quite often.

Yeah, I guess that's been part of my life.

(bright upbeat music) The boxes I make, usually make the box, you know dovetail it and make a fancy box and then the lids I usually, really incorporate the herringbone style topping.

Different, different layers of woods, exotic woods and oak and Walnut, different colors, you know so you can get a variety of the herringbone look.

(bright upbeat music) What I like about woodworking is just the what you can come up with, you know.

Sometimes I go to bed at night and I start thinking what I could possibly make, you know.

It's just the combination of the uniqueness of it and the different colors of wood and the green and that type of thing is just a unique item to work with.

(bright upbeat music) (bright upbeat music) - [Announcer] Postcards is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provided by Margaret A.Cargill Philanthropies, Mark and Margaret Yigal Julene on behalf of Shalom Hill Farms, a retreat and conference center in a Prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota, on the web @shalomhillfarm.org.

Alexandria, Minnesota, a year round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails and attractions for memorable vacations and events.

More information @explorealex.com, the Lake Region Arts Council's Arts Calendar and arts and cultural heritage funded digital calendars showcasing upcoming art events and opportunities for artists in West central, Minnesota.

On the web @lracfourcalendar.org.

Playing today's new music plus your favorite hits, 96.7 Kram.

Online @967kram.com.

(bright upbeat music)