Elderberry's Farm

12/21/2024

Happy Winter Solstice Sunrise from Elderberry's Farm in Paonia! Wishing you all a new solar year full of joy, blessings, abundance, community & connection with our beautiful Earth and the medicine of the plants!

10/27/2024

"Commercial orchards in the U.S. grew about 14,000 unique apple varieties in 1905, and most of them could be found in Appalachia, says William Kerrigan, author of Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard and a professor of American history at Muskingum University. [Until ...] Conglomerates negotiated national contracts and switched to apples that matured fast and were suited to long-distance shipping. By 1950, most smaller orchards had been forced out of business ... By the late 1990s, U.S. commercial orchards grew fewer than 100 apple varieties—and just 11 of them accounted for 90 percent of grocery-store sales. Experts estimated 11,000 heirloom varieties had gone extinct." - Atlas Obscura

But there are folks propagating the survivors, like Tom Brown in WNC: https://lnkd.in/gWs54J96
and Colorado's Montezuma Orchard Restoration project: https://lnkd.in/gzUpPy7x

10/24/2024

Apples, apples, apples! Perfect illustrations of "Food is Medicine" ... Our Grandmother tree has been harvested, and we're working on the "youngster" heirloom this week. We don't really know the variety, but it's covered in small, aromatic, tart, ruby red fruits with a bright white flesh. Sooooooo delicious: not what you might expect from an Apple ... but it's a *rapidly* acquired taste.

Y'all, we as a society have been hoodwinked with those huge, sweet, relatively bland, sometimes mooshy, store-bought varieties. All about carbs! But these feral Malus varieties are super rich in medicinal constituents: Tart = fruit acids including malic (yep, named after Apples), citric, ascorbic (vitamin C). Astringent = polyphenols including lightweight tannins & flavonoids. Phenolic acids (e.g., HCA derivatives or hydroxycinnamates). Colorful = anthocyanins. All antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, cell growth normalizing compounds. Crunchy: dietary fiber, pectin ... microbiome bliss! And those swoony aromatics (featuring the sesquiterpene alpha-farnesene with its antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, neuroprotective actions) ... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19425016/

10/23/2024

There's still great need in the Western NC / Asheville area. My friend Corey Pine, who runs the Blue Ridge School of Herbal Medicine, says these guys are great & are helping many local folks

Donations to this fund will help support the greater Wild Abundance community in the Asheville, NC area drastically affected by Hurricane Helene. Wild Abundance has partnered with a local non-profit to create the Wild Abundance Disaster Relief Fund. Barnardsville and surrounding areas have been espe...

10/21/2024

This year's Roots of Vitality workshop was a great success - it started out with a magnificent double rainbow - so we knew it was going to be amazing! I missed getting pix of Ben's adaptogens classes on Friday (which I hear were super interesting & fun), but here are a few from Shane's fascinating functional mushrooms class on Saturday & organoleptics with Boneset in the garden on Sunday. So grateful for the enthusiastic participants - we made great connections & learned a lot from each other!

10/08/2024

https://www.gofundme.com/f/chestnut-school-herbal-relief-fund

Hurricane Helene has left a heartbreaking trail of destruction a… Chestnut School needs your support for Chestnut School's Hurricane Helene Herbal Relief Fund

09/28/2024

My heart goes out to the Asheville community & all WNC devastated by the rain-out from Hurricane Helene. It's super bad. All major roads still closed, some seriously damaged, bridges out, historic flooding, comm still down. We lived in the area for 10 years and always will be connected. If anyone out there needs any help that we can offer from afar (Paonia, Colorado), relaying messages, etc., let me know. Herbal friends: if you need to get away to a high & dry place for a while, Elderberry's has plenty of space. PM me.

09/23/2024

Welcome Fall! Today's Autumn Equinox has me thinking about a little road trip to the high hills to bask in the beauty of Aspens and other colorful plants. This is Anthracite Creek coming down to meet the North Fork of the Gunnison, only a few miles East of Elderberry's. We can thank a group of phytochemicals called carotenoids for all those glowing yellow / orange / golden colors. Carotenoids (aka tetraterpenoids) also color our yellow / orange fruits, berries and veggies and hide behind the chlorophyll in our dark leafy greens. They're fat-soluble antioxidants with anti-inflammatory and cell growth normalizing actions. Carotenoids are rather hard to extract as herbal products, so eating carotenoid-rich foods regularly is important for maintaining health and preventing chronic disease. Mountain Ash (Rowan) berries, Sea Buckthorn berries, and Rose hips are good sources too!

09/21/2024

Awesome! Some fabulous SWSBM grads have updated Michael Moore's classic website to be more accessible now! Check it out at https://swsbm.org/.

09/20/2024

A little Reishi in the forest of North Carolina reminds me it's time to toot this horn: Fall tonics, medicinal mushrooms, adaptogens to build resilience for Winter wellness, deep nourishing soup, hands-on medicine making, basking in the Colorado mountain beauty - all this medicine for the heart, soul, body & mind is coming up with Roots of Vitality, Oct. 17-20 at Elderberry's Farm in Paonia. Sign up now for the last workshop of the year! https://www.elderberrysfarm.com/event/roots-of-vitality-adaptogens-mushrooms-for-seasonal-wellness-october-17-20-2024/

09/18/2024

Look what we're cooking up for 2025! A membership subscription to Herbal Constituents with all kinds of members-only offerings including a private podcast, monthly live Q&A meetings, Materia Medica monographs & resource library, exclusive discounts on courses & consulting, and early registration opportunities. We are super excited to be putting this together now & aiming for a January 2025 launch. You can get on the waitlist by going to our home page, HerbalConstituents.com & scrolling down to the Membership button. We'll be sending out an email with details mid-October.

09/17/2024

Here it comes ... Spring is amazing, Summer is fine, but Fall ... my favorite season! We have one more workshop coming up at Elderberry's in Paonia before winter sets in - The Roots of Vitality with special guest teachers Ben & Shane - come nourish yourself & discover adaptogens & tonic mushrooms for building vitality & immunity as the cold season begins. https://www.elderberrysfarm.com/event/roots-of-vitality-adaptogens-mushrooms-for-seasonal-wellness-october-17-20-2024/