Healthy Connections
Murphy, North Carolina
Works in progress, future ideas, and evolving visions, presented in no particular order.
As opportunities arise, volunteers bring new skills, donations appear, and resources become available, we intend to remain flexible and resourceful. Rather than forcing a specific timeline, we let the land, the community, and the people involved help guide what happens next.
After all, nature’s best ideas were not planned.
Our orchard already includes more than 50 fruit trees, nut trees, grape vines, and berry bushes, with plenty of room to keep expanding as supporters donate more. Every tree is a future harvest and a living food bank that will keep producing for years to come.
We raise our birds with respect, for stewardship as much as production. Chickens fertilize gardens, reduce waste, and control pests. Our breeding program centers on Indio Gigante and Ameraucana chickens, hardy and productive birds well suited to our mountain community, alongside a diverse flock of other breeds.
A 20×100′ hoop house over an already-excavated growing area, a walipini that uses the earth’s insulation and heat from our stream-fed aquaculture to extend the season. If all goes to plan, we’ll grow mangos and citrus in the mountains of WNC. Some call it ambitious. We prefer experimental.
Tanks fed by the stream keep water quality high while fish and freshwater shrimp turn feed into nutrient-rich fertilizer. That water isn’t treated as waste, it irrigates and feeds the orchard. Fish feed the water. The water feeds the trees. The trees feed the community.
Living willow can be woven into structures, gathering spaces, shade tunnels, privacy screens, and livestock fencing that grows stronger and more beautiful with time. As the project grows, we hope to share those traditional skills and help install living willow throughout the community.
Reclaim focuses on mushrooms, composting, and the organisms that break yesterday’s waste into tomorrow’s abundance. Many mushrooms are also valued for their nutritional and medicinal properties. No project is complete without a decomposer doing some of nature’s most important work behind the scenes.
From sauerkraut and kimchi to kombucha, yogurt, cheese, and sourdough, fermentation preserves harvests, improves nutrition, and creates flavors nothing else can. We feed the microbes, and the microbes feed us. Life is a little more enjoyable when everything is moving smoothly through the plumbing.
Create is our vision for a dome-shaped commercial kitchen and maker space. Many small producers make incredible products but can’t legally sell them without a licensed commercial kitchen. Create provides that shared workspace, so local farmers and entrepreneurs can prepare, process, and package products for market. When local farmers succeed, communities grow stronger.