East Grove Farms

08/19/2025

08/10/2025

Clearing out our inventory! $2 bottles of wine, shirts half off at $10, hats $5.

08/10/2025

We are cancelling our outdoor music event this afternoon due to the unstable weather and chance of rain throughout the day and evening. We are open this afternoon and Monday for tasting and purchasing mead and wine while supplies last.

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08/04/2025

This coming weekend is our last weekend of sales. This Saturday the 9th we will be at the Bloom and Bark farm on the J40 Farm Crawl and at the wine barn at East Grove.

On Sunday August 10, our last day for tasting and purchasing, we will be open from 1-5 with homegrown music by Checks and Balances and Whiskey Friends from 3-5pm. Purchase an unopened bottle of our products and wander over to the shade trees off-premises. Bring a lawn chair, cork screw, or favorite beverage and enjoy the country air.

We will be permanently closed on August 13, 2025.
The family is sponsoring an end of the road celebration on September 13.

07/02/2025

We will be closed down for maintenance from July 4 through the 6th. Have a happy 4th of July weekend celebrating our independence!

06/12/2025

We will be closed Saturday June 14 and will re-open Sunday the 15th at 2:00 pm. Sorry for the inconvenience!

02/08/2025

Part 4 - East Grove Farms Story --Following our trip back from Hartsburg we tended to our patch of elderberries suffering from drought and w**ds through the rest of the summer of 2011. We picked wild elderberries for experimentation of different recipes, settling on mead if we were going after a wine license. In the fall we officially incorporated as East Grove Farms LLC and began the process of obtaining a federal and state license for making alcohol.

In 2012, inspired by the success of the Missouri growers we developed unused areas of the farm to plant more elderberries. We purchased more cuttings from River Hills Harvest and propagated some of our indigenous wild elderberries in our recently purchased greehhouse. Planting and mulching by hand is hard work if you are doing multiple acres so we purchased a mulch layer and waterwheel planter do plant our next 12 acres.

In June of 2012 we were back down to Hartsburg for the elderberry workshop and 3rd annual Elderberry Music Festival to further our elderberry education and have a bit of fun listening and playing music. We set up "Owl Camp" in the same place and this time we had a keg of our new experimental mead called Bumbleberry. It was a big hit and didn't last long. The music was as great as it was the year before and many of the bands were back again. Again we played the tweener stage for T-shirts and I got to jam on the main stage with Dave Dearnley, Dyno Don Perry, Heather Wilson and the Roadkill Orchestra.

Back on the farm for the remainder of the summer and fall of 2012, we got hit with another year of drought so we did a lot of watering to keep the plants alive. Marlene worked on our logo and bottle label designs. We began working on the old Garretson house as a possible headquarters for our operation then planning for the next year ahead.

01/29/2025

Part 3 - The Hartsburg Connection- With the cuttings in the ground in May, we attended River Hills Harvest's elderberry workshop followed by the 2nd Annual Elderberry Music Festival on Norm's farm in June 2011. The night before the workshop we made our way in the dark to the farm to camp out. We were just wandering around trying to figure where to set up when out from no where a long haired gray bearded gentleman jumped out in front of our headlights. He shouted "What are you hoot owls doing out here?" We introduced ourselves from East Grove here for the workshop and told him we had musical instruments and mead with us. He directed us to a camp spot and invited us up the hill to a cabin where a jam session was already in progress. And thus began our long term friendship with Dyno (Don Perry) founder of the Roadkill Orchestra. More on Dyno later..

The workshop was great and we met growers from all over the midwest including Chris Patton from Minnesota. Patrick Byers and staff from the U of Missouri and MO NRCS provided a lot of expert advice as did Terry Durham and Deni Phillips from River Hills Harvest. The workshop ended with a field tour out on the farm where the festival was about to take place.

This was the 2nd year of their festival and a new outdoor stage had been built at the end of the elderberry field. It was a wonderful musical experience; banjos. fiddles, harmonicas, washboards, mandolins, acoustic guitars, drum circles, fire dances, mass sky lantern launches, tie-dye vendors, wood fired pizzas, homemade wines, and much more!

The awesome line up of eclectic bands ranged from the Missouri Ozarks to the Appalachians of North Carolina. Mark Bilyeu with Big Smith, Cindy Woolf, Mercer & Johnson, Hooten Hallers, The Rounders, and Dyno & The Roadkill Orchestra just to name a few. For a free t-shirt, they let us, The Nearly Great Horned Owls, play the tweener-stage in between the scheduled bands. Well this all sparked the idea that maybe someday we could do our own music festivals up here in Iowa? More on that in Part 4.

01/26/2025

Part 2 of the East Grove Story. Spring 2011- We developed our business plan and named our business after the small abolitionist community of East Grove, of which our farm was a part of back in the 1840's. We purchased a greenhouse from the Eiperts in West Point and rooted our cuttings that we purchased from River Hills Harvest. By May the ground was dry enough to plant and with the help of neighbors and friends we planted 1,200 elderberry plants, using scrap cardboard and tree mulch for w**d control.

01/23/2025

First in a series -- With the announcement that we will be closing our mead operation later this year, I thought it would be fun to look back and reflect on our 15 years of operation. East Grove Farms was the brainchild of Kurt, Justin, Joel, and Marlene Garretson way back in 2010 after "re-discovering" that you can actually make good wine and mead from elderberries. Then we discovered a whole lot of folks down by Columbia and Hartsburg MO led by Terry Durham who were growing and marketing them for the health benefits. So on a cold frigid November day in 2010 we hooked up an old mold board plow and plotted out 1-1/2 acres of an old garden and hay field. Photo is of Kurt and Jim Dean measuring out the plot in 2010. Next up in series 2 we will be planting the first plot in 2011.

01/12/2025

Thanks everyone for all the very kind comments regarding our closing! We have so many great memories from our beginning back in 2010. We will still be producing and selling our products until August, but after that the farm will still be here and we will continue to grow some berries, have a few music events, have a little "home-made" wine and mead on the porch or out in the barn. We just won't have the headaches of production issues, licensing, reporting, taxes, accounting, and all the not-so-fun things that go with operating a licensed winery. So it's more time for music. merriment, laughter, and friendship! JG

01/11/2025

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT-- After much thought over the holidays, I have decided to retire the mead and wine business at East Grove Farms when our current license expires this August 13, 2025. I had a long statement written out about how much fun we had and what we plan to do now but will shorten it and just say thank you to all our customers and friends! Joel

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