The "food forest"

The Crew family is caring for growing collection of native Black Walnut trees along with groves of more than a dozen other types of fruit trees, a handful of other nut trees, young olive trees, berry bushes, and more. Phill Haines of Appin Bees tends some of his beehives here as well.

We no longer sell at many regional venues as we did in 2020-2023. Please be patient; most of these trees take a decade or more to come into full production. In the meantime, we're selling berries locally in season, as well as other fruits and honey as they are ready.

Brief history of this place

About a century ago, the majority of this land along Riverton Road in Wagram was a patchwork of plowed fields, mostly cultivated with cotton. Various small farm plots were divided by hedgerows and old ditches. In the northwestern few acres, a lumberyard and train depot sprawled out with a collection of warehouses and other buildings next to the railroad (which is now long abandoned).

Later in the 1900s, the train stopped running and other factors combined to send the economy of Wagram and Scotland County into steep decline. This change likely coincided with the exhaustion of soil on many farmlands after intensive use for many decades. (Layers of topsoil and humus can be easily stripped of natural fertility when this sandy soil is repeatedly plowed.) Soon, almost all the old cotton fields reverted to forest. Local old timers could probably tell a lot more details about the ensuing decades. Life went on, and Wagram shrank and continued as a quiet little backwoods town on the river.

At some point around 2007, the old lumberyard acreage (now our main chestnut field) began to get cleared of trees, cleaned up of old buildings, mill machinery, etc. and tilled to cultivate annual crops again. By then, all the old houses on it were gone except for the one built in 1950 by the owner of the lumber mill.

Other than the upper five acres and a one-acre garden plot on the southeastern edge (near Crumptown Road), the rest of this space continued as woods until 2016, when it was stripped -- almost all clear-cut for timber money. Luckily, the soil here can be resilient even after such abuse.

By 2020, both of the cleared spots had been abandoned again, and the land had returned to a state of neglect. Nate and Amanda Crew bought the southern nine acres and immediately got to work. Over the following two years, they secured the rest, which they initially toyed with a couple different names for, but now simply call it "Wagram Woods & Orchards".