Planting a Vision at Goldberry Grove: Your Guide to Get Going
Goldberry Grove’s Roadmap: Understanding What, Who & Where We Are – a regenerative agroforestry orchard in Appalachian WV, led by Abigail & Josh Dunbar. We blend family tradition with regenerative methods, chestnut restoration trials, mycoforestry, and community building.
At Goldberry Grove, we’re planting more than trees—we’re cultivating a living legacy of resilience, community, and regenerative stewardship. It can be a bit daunting to navigate a website and farm that is basically around ten major projects and twenty side projects deep. So this is an article I'm pinning with snippets of best places and ways to follow along.
Below is a high‐level roadmap of what’s unfolding:
Deepening Our Community
We’re doubling down on the agroforestry orchard you discovered on our About page—introducing new high-yield, blight-resistant varieties and fine-tuning our JADAM methods to supercharge soil health and tree growth. Here’s where we started, who we are today, and how we make it all happen.
Your Go-To Agroforestry Resource & Farm Life
Goldberry Grove’s blog is your one-stop hub for building a multifaceted agroforestry enterprise on 20 acres (or less)—warts and all. Here’s what you can count on:
🎁 Free, Open-Access Content
- Site Design: Layouts, guilds, and spacing for diverse tree crops
- Crop Selection: Choosing the right chestnuts, fruit trees, shrubs, and understory plants
- Soil Building: Compost, JADAM brews, cover crops, and more
- Pest Management: Eco-friendly strategies to keep your orchard thriving
- Raw, Day-to-Day Updates: Equipment hiccups, weather surprises, trial-and-error learnings
💎 Optional Paid Offerings
Our paid tiers are entirely optional—and engineered to either
- Deliver direct value to you (early insights, exclusive products, Q&A access), or
- Fund our passion projects (the American Chestnut restoration you care about).
Transparency: 98 % of your support goes straight into chestnut research and community education.
The remaining 2 % covers essential website upkeep and admin costs.
Join us—free or supported—and let’s grow resilient orchards and forests together. 🌱🌰🌿
Membership & Support Tiers (Only Seedling out now)
🌱 Seedling — $2/month
For early looks & exclusive insights
- Premium posts breaking down specific business insights, cost, and grant application tips
- Early access to new products: trail mix, nut flours, chestnut flour (seedling pre-orders 2026)
- Seasonal postcards expressing our appreciation for the Goldberry Grove family
🌿 Sapling — $15/month (30-day free trial)
For beginning homesteaders & gardeners
- Everything in Seedling
- Nursery pre-orders (1 year in advance) + batch-specific updates
- Behind-the-scenes videos & photo journals
- Priority on soil tests, seed sourcing, and native-plant trials
🌳 Grovekeeper — $50/month (30-day free trial)
For deep support of Appalachian forest restoration
- Everything in Sapling
- Monthly Q&A or consult email/video response
- Limited-edition Christmas nut sampler box
- Name listing on our Grove Wall of Supporters
- First dibs on chestnut flour, trail mix & freeze-dried treats
How Your Support Matters
- Keep the blog free—so everyone can learn without barriers
- Fund our American Chestnut Nursery & Research, including breeding and hypovirus trials
- Expand community education—underwriting workshops, demos, and university partnerships
Together, we’ll keep growing knowledge, roots, and resilient ecosystems—one reader, one seedling, one forest at a time. 🌱🌰🌿
American Chestnut Nursery: A Passion Project
Beyond commercial nursery offerings, we’re running a lab-to-land American chestnut trial focused on:
- Cultivar breeding & genetics: crossing diverse American chestnut lines to stack resistance traits.
- Hypovirus inoculation: testing multiple CHV1 strains against Cryphonectria parasitica in living bark assays.
- Transgenic Chestnut Cultivation potentially in the works
Through this multifaceted work, we aim to generate American chestnut genotypes with stronger, longer-lasting blight resistance—both via traditional breeding and by honing a robust hypovirus that can infect blight fungus across its vegetative states.
The American Chestnut Foundation
Nursery Growth & Spring 2027 Offerings
Our nursery is evolving into a one-stop supplier for homesteaders/orchardiests/food plots and rewilding projects alike:
Fall 2026: Nut-tree seedlings (chestnut, black walnut, hazelnut)
- Spring 2027: Fruit trees (apples, pawpaws) and pollinator-friendly shrubs (raspberries, aronia)
Discover full details on our Nursery page.
Mycoforestry with Appalachian Truffles & Hazelnuts
We’re layering in king bolete and Appalachian truffle inoculations alongside hazelnut understory plantings to:
- Enhance nutrient uptake via ectomycorrhizal networks.
- Diversify harvests with gourmet mushrooms.
- Strengthen soil structure and carbon sequestration.
This partnership of fungi + trees exemplifies true agroforestry synergy.
Ohio 12 Acre Mycoforestry Sister Orchard
DrMycoForestry
Documentation of Ectomycorrhiza Fungi - Coming Soon
Agroforestry & Multi-Layered Systems
Weaving chestnuts, hazelnuts, elderberries, mushrooms, and understory guilds to mirror a healthy Appalachian forest—boosting pest resilience, cycling nutrients, and delivering staggered yields for market and community-supported agriculture.
Community Education & Third-Space Gathering
Goldberry Grove is also a living classroom. Look for on-farm workshops, seasonal farm-to-table events, and JADAM deep-dives designed to share regenerative techniques and native-plant wisdom with neighbors and fellow growers.
Come Work A Weekend | Coming Soon - 2026
Research Partnerships & Innovation
We’re collaborating on porcini-chestnut co-cultivation trials, hypovirus delivery methods, open-source soil mapping tools, co-op building, and so much more. We want to partner with grants, universities, and educational opportunities that better the agricultural community as a whole to drive the adoption of all the above and more. How can we work with the land not against it. Feel free to reach out to us via our social media or sales@goldberrygrove.farm if you'd like to work with us as well. We always love a good community that can turn great!
Grant Projects
Revitalizing and preserving Central/Southern Appalachia - Carbon Sequestration
Farms & Nurseries We Partner With
See MoreSee Less
Ohio | Chestnut Seedlings & Orchard Mentor
Vermont | Grafting Stock & Orchard Nursery Mentor
West Virginia | Permaculture Mentor & Tree Nursery Stock
West Virginia | Mycoforestry & Mycology Mentor
Ohio | Chestnut Advocacy & Cultural Burn Mentor
Grocery & Food Hubs We Partner With
Virginia | Social Media & Appalachian Community Building
Honorable Individual Mentions
Yeon O Dunbar - Our greatest family mentor and ally.
Kevin Johnson - The greatest DIY neighbor one can have
Zack Mcclund - The second greatest DIY neighbor and cheerleader one can have
“Every seed we plant is an investment in tomorrow’s ecosystem.”
— Abigail & Josh Dunbar
Stay tuned here for regular updates. Together, we’ll grow roots, grow food, and grow people—one seed at a time.
References
- Thomas & Jump (2023). Edible fungi crops through mycoforestry, potential for carbon negative food production and mitigation of food and forestry conflicts. PNAS. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2220079120 (pnas.org)
- Environmental Evidence (2022). Evidence for the impacts of agroforestry on ecosystem services and productivity. Environmental Evidence. DOI: 10.1186/s13750-022-00260-4 (environmentalevidencejournal.biomedcentral.com)
- Functional Complementarity (2025). A review and new methodological protocol applied to agroforestry systems. Restoration Ecology. DOI: 10.1111/rec.70036 (onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
- Mesquita et al. (2021). Agroforestry Systems: A Systematic Review Focusing on Traditional Indigenous Practices. Sustainability. DOI: 10.3390/su132011397 (mdpi.com)