Since his middle son Harley already works here, our new Sr. Maintenance Technician Damion Kuzeppa had some inside intel on working at Bluestone. “It really seemed like a great company to work for, from everything I've been hearing.” Having spent 18 and a half years at his last job, he knew what he was looking for. “They sold the property I worked on and then I became a commercial maintenance tech, and that's not something I wanted to do. I like residential maintenance a lot better.”

Damion has been playing guitar since he was 8 1/2 years old and his musical tastes run from rock and roll and blues to country and folk. “If I hear a riff that I like, I guess I try to learn it.” However, most of his favorite activities take place outside.

“I’m an avid hiker. I do a little hiking several times a week, and I do a lot of mushroom hunting. Wild foraging for wild edibles and medicinals, stuff like that.”   Depending on the season, he'll be hunting for morels, chicken-of-the-woods, wine caps. . . “There's many, many mushrooms out there, but you’ve got to stay away from the poisonous ones, so you do have to do your research.”

As for his very favorite thing, Damion is not shy about sharing. “My passion would be my food forest, what you call permaculture. My backyard is a complete orchard-slash-vegetable garden. I’ve got 18 different fruit trees, probably 30 different varieties of berries, and 700 square feet of raised beds to grow vegetables in. I also have chickens. I have an almond tree, and I use the back alley black walnut trees as kind of an overstory.” So he must have a sweet little farm, right? Nope. “I have one-tenth of an acre. It's just a regular-sized yard. I also have a nice 5000-gallon pond in the backyard, and I do raise fish that we eat occasionally.”

Despite growing so much food, Damion remains loyal to wild edibles. “There's just so much out there in the woods that you can eat, and most people have no idea.” In fact, his next endeavor combines both of his interests: Guerilla Gardening.

“That’s planting some fruit trees out in the wild, somewhere where I'm not supposed to and doing it anyway.” Is that a movement? “It is slightly, yeah, but people don't talk about it because they don't want other people to know where they're growing everything.” So, if you are interested in learning about how to grow a food forest or how to get started foraging, Damion is happy to talk to you about it. Just don't bother asking him where the best mushroom-hunting spots are.