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Before The Sole Connection was a farm, it was a question I couldn't stop thinking about: could fungi actually break down plastic? I first ran into the research on fungal plastic degradation years ago, but it became a real, hands-on project during COVID, while I was working for a plastics manufacturer. I started experimenting with different oyster mushroom strains against different polymers on the side — informally at first, then with an actual protocol. That work became the s

Here's something most people don't realize until they've looked into it: a mushroom's most valuable compounds don't all dissolve in the same liquid. Some only come out in alcohol. Some only come out in hot water. If you extract with just one, you're leaving a real, measurable share of the mushroom behind — no matter how good the mushroom itself was to begin with. That's the entire case for dual extraction, and it's why we run every batch through both an alcohol extraction and

If you pick up ten mushroom tinctures off a shelf right now, chances are that none of the ten companies behind them ever grew a single mushroom. Most functional mushroom products in the U.S. are made the same basic way: a company buys bulk extract powder, usually imported, mixes it into a base liquid, bottles it, and puts their label on it. The mushroom itself might have been grown, harvested, and processed on another continent, by people the label-owner has never met, using

Most tinctures on a store shelf started somewhere far away, as bulk powder or bulk extract, from mushrooms nobody at the company ever actually grew. Ours don't. Every bottle of Sole Connection tincture starts as a mushroom we grew ourselves, on our farm, in grow chambers we built and manage every day — and it ends, roughly four months later, as the tincture in your hand. Here's what happens in between: It starts with what would otherwise be waste Before a mushroom exists, it