Living Root Garden is built on ingredients we can trace — and on neighbors who share our closed-loop way of thinking. These are the farms and folks who supply what our soil is built from. More partners will join this page as the farm grows.

Flying Frog Mushrooms

Every Living Root soil blend and precompost batch starts with ingredients we can trace — and one of our favorite ingredients comes from Flying Frog Mushrooms, a gourmet and medicinal mushroom farm.

They grow mushrooms for food, plus extracts, teas, and mushroom coffee, and when a block has finished fruiting, it doesn’t go to waste. They pass their spent lion’s mane blocks on to us — generously.

The blocks go into our precompost, where they cook down into food for our African nightcrawlers. One farm’s spent substrate becomes another farm’s soil food — that’s the closed loop we’re building.

Visit them at flyingfrogmushrooms.com.

Whisk Cafe

Ask a soil nerd what a used coffee ground is and you will not hear “trash.” You will hear “nitrogen” — and a standing invitation for microbes to get to work. That is why the crew at Whisk Cafe sends their used coffee and tea grounds our way instead of to the bin — and their kitchen food scraps, too. Whisk Cafe brews its own coffee and tea and cooks homemade food in its own kitchen, so the pile gets the real thing twice over: grounds from the brew bar, scraps from the kitchen.

Spent coffee (Coffea arabica), tea leaves (Camellia sinensis), and kitchen scraps join our precompost as greens, the nitrogen side of the pile’s diet. The microbes eat first and the worms eat second — by the time our African nightcrawlers (Eudrilus eugeniae) get to it, yesterday’s brew and yesterday’s prep have already become tomorrow’s soil food. Nothing fancy. Just a cafe and a worm farm agreeing that a good meal — and a good cup — should keep working after the last bite.

FirePower Coffee Roasters

With a name like FirePower, you’d expect something loud. What they actually send our way is quieter — buckets of used coffee and tea grounds from a family-run roastery and café that roasts its beans on site. The roast is done, the cup is poured, and the grounds still have one more job to do.

Here’s the nerdy bit: caffeine (C₈H₁₀N₄O₂) is an alkaloid plants make to defend themselves, and in the pile it breaks down like everything else — no jitters in the worm bin, just more fuel for the microbes and, eventually, the worms. Spent coffee (Coffea arabica) and tea leaves (Camellia sinensis) go into our precompost as greens, and come out the other side as soil food. FirePower brings the fire; the worms bring the appetite.

Visit them at firepower.coffee.

Keystone Inn Family Restaurant

Some partnerships start with a handshake. This one started with a bus tub. The crew at Keystone Inn Family Restaurant feeds a lot of neighbors every day, and now the part of the meal that doesn’t get eaten feeds something else, too: their kitchen scraps and their cardboard boxes come our way instead of going to the bin. Ask a worm what a restaurant owes it and the answer is simple: dinner and bedding — and Keystone Inn delivers both in a single donation.

Follow the two streams. The scraps are greens, nitrogen-rich, the dinner. The cardboard is browns, carbon-rich cellulose, the bedding — and mixed about three parts cardboard to one part greens, they land near the carbon-to-nitrogen balance pile microbes like best. Bacteria and fungi eat first, chewing cellulose down to simpler stuff; our African nightcrawlers (Eudrilus eugeniae) eat second, grinding it all in their gizzards, and what comes out the other side is castings. Plate to pile to soil, with nothing wasted in between — neighbors feeding neighbors, all the way down to the worms.

Visit them at facebook.com/keystoneinn.