The chestnut was
the first seed.

Where the name comes from

Goldberry Grove is named for our daughter, Aileen Goldberry Dunbar, our River-daughter of the Old Forest. We took the name because it sounded like a place rather than a brand, and because it carries the same reverence for the natural world that we wanted the farm to carry. The chestnut is the star, but the whole forest is the cast.

The chestnut, and why it matters

Josh is Korean American, and chestnuts were a constant of his Korean home; roasted in the fall, steamed in winter, ground into porridge. When we moved to West Virginia, we learned the American Chestnut had once been the dominant tree of these forests before the blight wiped it out in the early twentieth century. Restoration efforts are still underway. The chestnut at Goldberry is our way of joining that work: a Korean-Appalachian bridge, planted as a quiet act of restoration.

Abigail is the creative one, and she has always heard the call of the forest. A mother of two, she wants to raise our family inside a slower, more intentional life, and to stay close to her own family, who range from Maryland to Ohio to South Carolina. Here in West Virginia, we are the middle of it all.

An educational farm, first and foremost

We are first and foremost here to push the limits of temperate agroforestry. Goldberry is an educational farm: we want to host mushroom-inoculation workshops, forest-farming seminars, foraging walks, JADAM and KNF intensives, u-pick weekends, and family events that put visitors on the land. The seven cleared acres of u-pick and the nine wooded acres of mushroom yard are the curriculum. The medicinal understory; ginseng, goldenseal, ramps, black cohosh. All of it is one story: the story of agroforestry, regeneration, and Indigenous practices, wrapped into a single interactive farm.

We do sell seedlings, and we intend to sell more, but under our sister brand At The Grove Nursery. The farm itself is the classroom; the nursery is where you can take a piece of it home.

What we believe about how to farm

We farm by JADAM and Korean Natural Farming principles: soil-led, microbe-led, no synthetic inputs, no shortcuts. The design is syntropic, adapted for a temperate Appalachian climate. Temperate syntropic farming plants dense, layered guilds; a canopy of trees, a shrub line, an herbaceous floor, and mushroom logs in the woods, so that each species feeds the next and the whole system accumulates life over time instead of depleting it. The goal is not maximum yield; it is a farm that gets healthier every year, that runs on biodiversity rather than fighting it, and that someone two generations from now can keep going.

Who's around when you visit

You'll usually meet at least one of us, Abigail or Josh, and almost always Quasar. On most weekends our farmhands George and Wesley are also on the land, running the rows, prepping for seminars, and keeping the mushroom yard honest. WWOOFers pass through in spring and fall; family events bring in our wider circle a few times a year. The farm is a small village, in the making.

Where we're headed

The plan thinks in decades. The chestnuts in year one are barely knee-high; they'll fruit in five to seven, and the canopy they form will define the farm twenty years from now. The mushroom yard fills in faster; a log lasts five years and pays for itself in two. The medicinal understory is the slowest layer; ginseng wants a seven-to-ten-year horizon before harvest.

We're a WWOOF host site, an ecovillage-in-the-making, and a farm built to welcome anyone learning to farm like a forest. If that sounds like your kind of place, the gate is open.