The Lab

The story of our herbs begins long before the packaged Products. In each ecosystem where the herb grows, the soil, the plants, the animals and the weather surrounding it all play a role in its development. The window of time in which the plant or plant part reaches peak development is finite, sometimes just two weeks long, and can vary from season to season. This makes the harvest itself a sensitive science. Fortunately, we grow many of our own herbs on the family farm or on farms just down the road from our facility in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in East Tennessee. The plants and the processing being this close allows us to connect our growing and processes— timing each to bring the best out of the other. Harvesting nearby lets us build a relationship with the herbs we grow, which helps guarantee a high-quality harvest. It also gives us the unique opportunity to perform freshest processing on some herbs in as little as an hour from when the herb was harvested. 

We grow the herbs according to its own unique needs. We provide varying soils and microclimates, which allows us to plant herbs within their ideal growing environment. A few herbs are grown as annuals, but the majority of crops remain in our fields for several years as perennials or are native plants that are harvested ethically. To ensure that we get the highest-quality herbs possible, we harvest each plant or plant part at a specific time depending on when the plant are at their peak. Regenerative farming practices like cover cropping, organic weed management and composting help us support the climate and reduce our carbon footprint. These methods take more time, but they allow us to side step the damaging use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers that most conventional farms have come to rely upon. Some might see this as not as cosmetic or eye catching as other commercial farming methods but is how mother nature intended. 

There are many herbs we cannot grow ourselves. For those plants, we source ethically from a diverse range of suppliers, from other wildcrafters to other farmers and brokers. While we prefer to support other local and independent farms, not all herbal needs can be produced in our local areas. Even though these herbs are not grown on our farm they still are subject to our rigorous series of customized quality checks. We work with many plants and plant parts, and not all are well suited for cultivation in our corner of the world. 

Other plants, however, create the best results when they undergo the stress of surviving in the wild. So, we work with responsible wildcrafters who harvest the plants from their native environments. Unfortunately this can limit us on some items due to working hand in hand with mother nature and what she feel we should have for a harvest. Hopefully our customers respect and under stand when we have limited quantities of certain items. We work with our wildcrafting partners to make sure that their practices conserve the long-term health of wild plant populations. In an effort to do whatever we can to keep all plants species safe for future generations, we limit our wildcrafted sourcing to plant species that have robust populations that can sustain the practice for our future generations.