Goldberry Grove

Goldberry Grove Built on sustainability, community, and educating the next generation.

Goldberry Grove is a regenerative agroforestry farm focused on growing chestnuts, black walnuts, hazelnuts, elderberries, and forest botanicals like ginseng and goldenseal.

06/08/2026

There's a small tree native to the eastern United States that brews into beer.

Ptelea trifoliata — the hop tree. Sometimes called wafer ash for the papery, winged samaras it drops in late summer. Those samaras carry bitter compounds close enough to what hops provide that early American brewers used them as a substitute, especially in seasons when hop vines failed or finished too early.

The useful detail: the hop tree fruits later in the season than common hops. So it stretches the brewing calendar. When the hop harvest was done, the hop tree was just coming in. A different organism doing the same job on a different schedule.

It's an understory tree — rarely more than 15 or 20 feet — and it sits comfortably beneath taller canopy. In a syntropic planting it earns its place several times over: host plant for giant swallowtail butterflies, nectar source for pollinators, a producer of usable bitters in the seed layer. It asks for very little and gives back in pieces most people never notice.

Most of the trees we walk past used to have jobs. Bark for tannin, sap for syrup, seed for bitter, leaf for tea, root for medicine. The knowledge of what each one did has thinned out faster than the trees themselves.

The hop tree is still here, still fruiting late, still bitter in the samara. It's just waiting on someone to ask.

What's a plant or tree on your land that you've found a forgotten use for?

06/04/2026

The week in a nutshell

06/03/2026

Tag a friend who'd thrive on a day like this.

The work looks slow. It is slow. That's the point.

Every hour here compounds — in the soil, in the roots, in the trees that won't fruit for another decade. We're not building for a quarterly earnings call. We're building for grandkids.

06/02/2026

Using what you have and what equipment is on hand can unblock you. It doesn't have to be perfect, just planned.

06/01/2026

This tree is 9,550 years old. Its trunk is only a few hundred.

Old Tjikko — a Norwegian spruce growing in Sweden — doesn't survive by holding on to any one body.

When a trunk dies, the root system grows another.

Same roots. New trunk. Again and again, across millennia.

The pyramids at Giza were built roughly 4,500 years ago.
Old Tjikko's roots were already halfway through their story.

This is what persistence actually looks like — not rigidity, but continuous regeneration from a stable root.

It's a pattern we try to understand on this farm: the root is the organism. What grows above it is the expression of the moment.

Save this one. 🌲

06/01/2026

Old Tjikko doesn't look like the oldest tree in the world. That's somewhat the point.

The trunk you'd see if you visited Fulufjället National Park in Sweden is only a few hundred years old. Unremarkable, really — a modest Norwegian spruce in a cold landscape. But the roots beneath it have been alive and actively regenerating for approximately 9,550 years. When one trunk fails, the rootstock simply grows another. No fanfare. No memory of what came before, at least not in any form we can read. Just continuity.

To put that number in some context: 9,550 years ago, humans in the Fertile Crescent were just beginning to cultivate grain. The construction of Stonehenge was still 5,000 years away. The earliest Egyptian pyramids wouldn't be built for another 5,000 years after that. Old Tjikko's root system was already ancient when the Bronze Age began.

What this tree demonstrates — and what syntropic and regenerative agriculture keep returning to — is that the root is the organism. Above-ground structure is transient. It can be lost to weather, to winter, to time, and the system persists. Stability is underground, invisible, and patient.

We find this genuinely useful as a framework on the farm. We're not trying to protect any single trunk. We're trying to build root systems — in the literal and less-literal sense — that can regenerate whatever grows above them.

What's the oldest living thing you know of in your landscape? Drop it below — we'd love to hear.

05/27/2026

In October 1987, a storm crossed southern England that would later be described as the worst in nearly 300 years. At Kew Gardens in London, 700 trees came down in a single night. Turner's Oak — an old specimen that had been declining for years — was ripped entirely out of the ground, roots and all.

The story should have ended there.

Instead, Turner's Oak recovered. Within a few years it was growing more vigorously than anyone at Kew had seen in a long time. The mystery of its prolonged decline was, somewhat embarrassingly, resolved by the storm itself: decades of foot traffic from visitors had compacted the soil around the root zone so severely that the tree's roots couldn't access adequate oxygen or water. It had been slowly suffocating in plain sight, and no one had connected the cause.

When the storm yanked the tree from the ground, it shattered the hardpan. Air and water returned to the root zone. The tree recovered.

This is a useful story for anyone who works with trees and soil. Compaction is cumulative, largely invisible, and rarely dramatic — it doesn't announce itself the way a disease or pest does. Trees under compaction stress often look simply "declining," which can mean almost anything. Kew is one of the most carefully managed botanical institutions in the world, and it took a catastrophic storm to diagnose the problem.

On a working farm, we think about this every time we route foot traffic, park equipment, or plan where animals graze. The roots are doing something. We try not to interrupt it.

What does soil compaction look like on your land, and how do you manage it? This is a question we're always learning from — drop your experience below.

05/26/2026

Long before the Declaration of Independence was drafted, American resistance had a physical address: a Boston elm tree, standing near the corner of what is now Washington and Essex Streets, not far from Boston Common.

The tree had been there for generations when, in the 1760s, colonists began gathering beneath it to organize opposition to British taxation and governance. They called it the Liberty Tree. The ground beneath it — the space where people met, argued, planned, and read aloud — they called Liberty Hall. It was one of the earliest designated public political spaces in what would become the United States: no building, no institution, just a tree and the ground it shaded.

The tree's significance was not lost on anyone, including those loyal to the Crown. In August 1775, a group believed to include loyalist supporters (historical accounts name Nathaniel Coffin Jr. among them) spent an entire night cutting it down. It took seventeen men working through the darkness. The elm was enormous — they harvested fourteen cords of firewood from it. The felling was documented and discussed on both sides of the Atlantic. A tree had been recognized as a political actor, and eliminating it was understood as a deliberate act.

There's something worth sitting with in that: the tree itself had become a problem for an empire. Not a pamphlet, not a person — a tree and the habit of gathering around it.

Syntropic and agroforestry traditions understand, at a practical level, that trees structure behavior. They create shade, they define paths, they give people reason to stop. The Liberty Tree did this in a particular way, at a particular historical moment, and it changed things.

What trees in your landscape — or in your region's history — have shaped how people move or gather around them?

A day at Goldberry Grove this week looked like chainsaws, shovels, and a lot of standing around squinting at the canopy....
05/26/2026

A day at Goldberry Grove this week looked like chainsaws, shovels, and a lot of standing around squinting at the canopy.

We took down a stand of eastern white pine. Not because we wanted the wood. Because the trees were sick. White pine in the Southern Appalachians gets hit from several angles at once: white pine blister rust (Cronartium ribicola), white pine weevil, root rot in the wetter pockets. Once a stand starts going, the math doesn't favor waiting it out. The USDA Forest Service silvics on Pinus strobus is pretty clear-eyed about this. Sick trees are habitat for the next round of sick trees.
So the pines came down. And then the real work started.

Our 9 acres is classic Southern Appalachian regrowth forest. Fast pioneers in the canopy, tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera) doing most of the talking, a thin understory, not much structural diversity. Tulip poplar is a beautiful tree and an honest pioneer. Its job in succession is to grab disturbed ground, throw up a fast canopy, and hold the soil while slower species move in. The job description does not include "stay forever."

We're thinning, not clear-cutting. Selective removal of crowded tulips to let light reach the forest floor, then planting into those gaps:
Shagbark hickory (Carya ovata) for the long-haul canopy. Mast producer, wildlife value off the charts, structurally important in a mature mixed mesophytic forest (the forest type E. Lucy Braun described back in 1950 and the one this slope wants to become if we get out of its way).

Mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia) for the understory. Native, ericaceous, characteristic of these slopes, and a quiet hero for pollinators and ground-nesting birds.

We're nudging succession. Trying to compress 80 years of natural transition into something closer to 30 by removing the diseased wood, easing the pioneers off the stage, and planting the species that this hillside would have ended up with anyway. Slower. More layered. More mature.

We'll be wrong about some of it. That's fine. Plant, observe, adjust. Repeat for a few decades.

Sustainable farming requires all levels of help even from little baby chicks
05/21/2026

Sustainable farming requires all levels of help even from little baby chicks

Address

2291 Armstrong Road
Summersville, WV
26651

Opening Hours

Monday 10am - 6pm
Tuesday 10pm - 7pm
Wednesday 10am - 7pm
Thursday 10am - 7pm
Friday 10am - 7pm

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