After years of intentionally building our farmstead by hand and piece by piece, we're opening our hollow up to community. We're sharing the overflowing abundance of native plants with other plant nerds, inviting adventurous folks and more experienced foragers to eat the mushrooms and other wild edibles that grow in our mountain forest, and crafting spaces for all of us to grow and deepen our relationship to the land under our feet.
Feral Hollow is an acidic cove forest at the end of its second succession of growth in unceded Monacan territory. Like many eastern forests, our forest was victim of chestnut blight and our mountain was selectively logged about 70 years ago. We can still follow the remains old logging road across the ridge and see where the loggers tethered their horses. It’s one of the few flat spaces in the hollow! History has marked the hollow in other ways. You can still see the faint outlines of a cabin built sometime in the early 1800s and follow the wagon trail that cut through the mountains to the James River.
In more recent times, Feral Hollow was the home of the Blue Heron Outdoor School, which registered it as a botanical sanctuary with United Plant Savers in 2011. It was through Blue Heron that our family was first introduced to the hollow, and we made it our permanent home in the summer of 2020. In the past handful of years, we’ve reintroduced native plant communities that were destroyed by logging, cleared springs to make ground water available, and built our farm infrastructure mostly using resources from the land itself. We've carefully felled trees, milled wood, and used recycled doors and windows to help minimize our impact on the mountain we've fallen so in love with.
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