-[Woman VO] Nestled in the remote corner of southwest Virginia, this region captivates with its rugged landscapes, natural wonders, cultural attractions, and outward ventures.

Experiences you'll only find in the heart of Appalachia.

Adventure guides available at heartofappalachia.com.

[♪ ♪ ♪] -[Host VO] In the mountains of Virginia's Appalachia, the woods hold secrets.

Ancient knowledge passed down through generations.

In this episode of Life in Virginia's Appalachia, we walk beside the New River Valley Mushroom Club, eyes to the ground, into the world of foraging.

We'll chase the fleeting beauty of wild morels.

Visit modern farms where old traditions meet new purposes, like growing herbs not just for nourishment, but for natural beauty and healing to be sold to companies and artisan tea-makers.

We'll meet the team at Appalachian Sustainable Development, where bridges are being built, connecting farmers to the tools and resources they need to grow, gather, and thrive.

And head up Whitetop Mountain to join the annual Ramp Festival, with music, mountain pride, and a ramp eating contest that's not for the faint of heart.

The festival is more than just a harvest.

It's a fundraiser for Mount Rogers Fire and Rescue and a celebration of flavor, heritage, and the community.

-[Becky Rader] We are always trying to identify the mushrooms that we find and learn about how they work in our environment, learn about how we can be better stewards of our land.

A lot of our members like to cultivate oyster and shiitake mushrooms, for example.

And some people are interested in the medicinal properties of mushrooms.

But of course, I think what gets everybody here in the whole first place is culinary aspects of mushrooms, and so in the spring, we like to find morel mushrooms if we're lucky.

Oyster mushrooms are also fruiting at this time of year.

Some of the more easy-to-identify edible mushrooms might fruit earlier in the year than a lot of the others.

Most mushrooms we're gonna find in the late summer and fall.

A lot of the things that you've heard of, like chanterelles, are going to be later in the year.

But at this time of year, there are oysters and morels, and, you know, we're not always only interested in the mushrooms that we can eat.

We want to identify everything we come across, and, you know, the mushrooms that you find in a particular patch of woods are going to tell you a lot about that environment.

Is it acidic?

Is it basic?

You know, what kind of geology is here?

What kind of trees are here?

And all kinds of things that you can find out by what you find in a particular environment.

[♪ ♪ ♪] [Becky] You know, if it was a fall walk, we would probably try to not stop and look at every little thing because we wouldn't get very far.

But collect, you know, the number of specimens we might need to reach an identification later.

So not picking everything that you see.

So all these oak and maple, the morels are not going to associate with those.

So your best bet is to find tulip poplars and kind of look around within the drip line of that tree.

I feel like our best hope is where it's fairly moist.

Um...I'm personally not headin' in that direction because there's a lot of rhododendron, which is a sure-fire sign that there's no morels because it likes really acidic soil, and which probably-- it may mean that all this is too acidic-- but I'm kind of heading away from that.

Also, I don't know how much bushwhacking this is going to entail.

[♪ ♪ ♪] [Becky] You've really got to watch your footing, whatever you decide to do here.

And we usually sit down at the end of those walks, then, and look at the books and use our online resources and work on identification.

Try to make a list of what all we found that day and, you know, inventory the same area over time.

If there are morels, sometimes they'll jump out at you because they're so soft and smooth-looking.

You know, if we don't find any morels when this airs on PBS, people will be sayin', "Oh, sure, they didn't find any morels.

They're not putting their morels on TV."

[chuckles] Morels fruit often in old apple orchards, and that's the kind of place that old people know-- there's an old apple orchard there-- and people will trespass, and definitely people have been shot over that kind of thing.

We did find a black foot polypore.

This has probably been around since last year, but that's the common name.

I'm not sure of the current scientific name.

A lot of the scientific Latin names have been changing.

Obviously, it's got a black stem.

It's a polypore because it has little tiny pores that the spores fall out of, as opposed to gilled mushrooms that have those blade-like structures called gills.

And the morels we've been talking about are different entirely from those other groups.

[♪ ♪ ♪] I would say it is the time that I get to spend with the members.

I really think that the people are the important part of our organization.

I think that organizations like this are the real essence of what community means, and I feel like, in this world, maybe more than ever, it's important to have community, give something back to your community, to your neighbors.

I think it's important to educate future generations on a subject as important as fungi, because most of what we have that we see right now and that we depend on for sustenance comes from the relationships that fungi have in our ecosystem.

In particular, all plant life-- 95% of it-- has a relationship with fungi.

It's the unseen kingdom that holds everything together.

It's the foundation, in a lot of ways, for all the life that sustains us.

-Well, of course, land use patterns have been a big influence on what's foraged, and also ethnicity and where people were from.

Of course, Native Americans, Indians, had a long history of the use of the botanical wealth as a region before colonization.

When colonization happened, you have plants that were native to Eurasia being introduced and escaped, became naturalized, so that added to the amount of plants that were foraged in the region.

So lots of different influences from lots of different places.

So I think foraging played a huge role in the ability for the colonists and people that were new there to survive.

A lot of times, the crops they brought from Europe and other places maybe didn't do as well as they had hoped, or maybe they performed differently than they did where they were from.

So a lot of times, folks had to depend on either the wild game that they killed or the wild--hunt-- plants that they harvested to get them through a winter where maybe the crops were not particularly as available as they were anticipated to be.

You know, there are a lot of plants like ramps that are pickled and used as side dishes today.

There are a lot of plants, fungi like morels, that are used in a lot of dishes in fine restaurants-- white-tablecloth restaurants-- sought in high demand.

There are mushrooms like hen of the wood, or wishi-- that's the Indian name for hen of the wood-- that are highly sought after.

So it's a large mushroom that grows on the base of oak tree, collected in the fall.

What I find amazing is where a lot of the nouveau cuisine-- a lot of chefs and folks coming out of culinary school now-- are taking a lot of these wild crops and adapting them to the modern palate and integrating them into modern cuisines.

[♪ ♪ ♪] -[Host VO] Springtime in the heart of Appalachia means one thing--ramp season.

These wild onions, with their bold flavor and earthy aroma, have deep roots in the region's culture and cuisine.

For generations, families have ventured into the woods to hunt for ramps, which often grow in patches beneath trees.

In Appalachian kitchens, ramps are fried up with potatoes, mixed into cornbread, or served with bacon and eggs.

They bring a seasonal taste of the mountains to every plate.

Communities come together every year to honor this tradition at local ramp festivals, like the one at White Top, Virginia.

There, you'll find live music, local vendors, and even a ramp-eating contest, all in the spirit of Appalachian pride.

Ramps aren't just food-- they're a symbol of heritage, connection, and the land we call home.

-It's really an important part of the healthy biodiversity for our forest ecosystems in Appalachia.

And just in general, you know, there's-- with over harvest of these plants and habitat loss over the past 300-plus years-- we are starting to see a number of these plants that are declining in the wild.

And so it's just really important for us to protect those plants and to conserve them with sustainable stewardship practices and cultivation to maintain that biodiversity in our woodlands.

And that's why, at ASD, we started teaching folks how to forest farm in a number of different practices with different botanicals.

Forest foods--it may not necessarily be, you know, an entire staple of someone's diet-- but I think, in a lot of the areas in Appalachia, a lot of the different species like ramps or pawpaws or elderberries are harvested as supplemental sources of food.

And, you know, we think about the preservation techniques like canning for pickled ramps or ramp pesto or things like that that sort of extend the seasonality of the products.

It's definitely a big part of the cultural significance of our foodscape here in Appalachia.

[♪ ♪ ♪] -[David Wallace] I'm David Wallace, and so we're in Russell County, Virginia, and we're here at Reeds Valley Farms.

And so we're about a thousand-acre, rotationally raised cattle farms.

I'm a third-generation farmer.

And we've been doing rotational cattle for probably, oh gosh, 50 years now.

And then I kind of wanted to branch out and diversify into medicinal herbs.

So we do field-grown herbs and wild-picked herbs.

But the way we do field-grown is we have this two-acre field right here.

It's all organic inputs.

And so this is lemon balm-- we do it under irrigation, so everything's irrigated.

We do lemon balm, stinging nettle, elderberry, and spearmint are big ones.

This started as a pilot program to see what the most profitable field-grown herbs are to be grown in this area.

So all this stuff was originally grown in the woods.

It's all medicinal.

Most of this stuff is used for medicine and tea companies.

This lemon balm is mainly tea companies.

The nettle is used for a lot of medicine.

And the way we harvest it, we just take hedge trimmers and just go through it.

[hedge trimmers whirring] You just want to cut it off about two inches because you want it to come back.

[hedge trimmers whirring] We grow on plastic here, but we only grow on plastic for the first year, and then, after the first year, we'll pull the plastic up once it's all cut, cause of microplastics and everything.

And I think you should try to be... done as organic as possible.

So we, you know, we use some mechanical stuff, but we try--this is mostly all done by hand-- every bit of it, this.

It's also--it works good for weight loss.

So it's similar to Ozempic, but they say it'll only take it for four to five days and row straight.

So I got a lot of people that come down here and take it for that use.

But most of this goes to tea companies.

[♪ ♪ ♪] [David] Drip irrigation lines are running here and running there, and we have an automatic irrigation controller, and this is actually just the farm water for the cattle, and I just tap into that and bring it down here.

So they're all started in the greenhouse, and then they're all transplanted to this field, so I don't start anything from seed.

And the [inaudible] is that I just try to get that harvest that year.

If you start from seed, you're not gonna have a really good harvest on your first year.

And sometimes I do flowers, sometimes I do berries.

It just depends on the year.

It was so dry this year, that we didn't really have a good harvest.

I don't have drip irrigation on that yet.

I need to get the drip irrigation over there.

And so, like this nettle here, you can tell this was planted this year.

It's just not like that.

There's a difference on it.

It really takes two years to kind of get your crop going before it's kind of stabilized, and you'll just have kind of sporadic growth like this.

But this will fill in next year, and it'll be twice as thick as that.

To help from ASD, we have the ability and the infrastructure to be able to take it to their processing facility and get it all processed.

And so it's really worked out, and we've got a lot of interest in.

So we do contracts with some of the biggest herb buyers, and we do these contracts at the first of the year, and then, so I meet those quotas throughout the year.

[♪ ♪ ♪] -We're standing in one of the oldest food hubs in the country, Appalachian Harvest Food Hub, where we've worked since 2000 with a network of produce farmers to help aggregate their supply and help connect them to grocery store markets up and down the East Coast.

So the farmers came to us and said, "Could you do the same thing but for medicinal herbs?"

So that's sort of where this notion of the Appalachian Harvest Herb Hub came about, is to essentially try to offer training services, shared-use herb processing equipment that's commercial scale-- that might be difficult for an individual farmer to afford.

Make that available to the community, and then provide aggregation and marketing services to help pool supply together from multiple herb producers so that they can reach fair-wage, profitable markets for all their hard work over the past seven years, and we've been doing it ever since.

I think the economic benefits of foraging for forest botanicals-- you think about a crop or a forest botanical like American ginseng, for example-- dating back to the 1700s in our economy in Appalachia, it was one of the very first exports that we ever had as an early nation to China.

And since then, that-- it's really helped develop a lot of our communities.

A lot of the early settlements were developed with earnings that were made from the trade of fur alongside American ginseng and goldenseal.

So there's that historical component in our economy.

And even today, when we think about different forest botanicals, there's an entire network of wild harvesters in our communities that have been carrying on those traditions for generations and generations, and still, to this day, are selling into a global herbal products company.

So over 50% of the medicinal plants from the forest in the herbal products value chain in the world come from Appalachia.

So we're really a beautiful, unique hotspot for biodiversity, and it's a really big part of our local economy here.

[♪ ♪ ♪] - I mean, it's, you know, when it's thick, it'll be four-foot tall.

It's all--everything's been harvested now.

That nettle ate me up.

Aaahh!

[♪ ♪ ♪] Okay, so here we are, we're in the woods.

So another thing we do with Reed's Bay Farms and Appalachian Stone Development is we have a point-of-harvest program.

So we are harvesting-- you know, always growing up around here, there's so many wild harvesters, but it's almost like this underground thing that no one knows about.

You know, all the times these harvesters are not paid enough, and so we want to kind of bring it out, bring these people out, and kind of aggregate them and try to teach them how to sustainably harvest, which 99% of them already sustainably harvest here.

And so the point-of-harvest program-- what it does, it pays.

So we had 21 companies from seven different continents last year come here, and we told these people why they needed to pay more for sustainably picked herbs.

And so we have actually certification, that we have classes every year.

It's sponsored by Virginia Tech and ASD, and we bring them to the woods, and we teach them how to-- it's everything from harvesting to your post-processing to processing to packaging.

But the point of harvest starts in the woods, and that's where we really teach how to, like, harvest, divide rhizomes, divide the roots, and plant back so you'll have more populations there for the next year.

And then we pay these guys three to sometimes ten times more for their harvest of roots.

We have a lot of companies that are really interested, and they're willing to pay more for a sustainably harvested product.

And so we're trying to kind of capitalize on that and get more money in the harvesters' pockets.

[♪ ♪ ♪] - Hello, I'm Paul Michael Combs.

I'm from here in Russell County, Virginia.

I am a wild harvester.

I've been harvesting and stewarding land since I was very young-- first with my father, then by myself-- but before him, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, they were interested in herbs and using them for medicinal purposes.

My grandmother had a ginseng patch that she liked to keep, and I still steward it and try to expand on it.

I'm also growing some goldenseal, some bloodroot, cohosh, different things like that.

But we have, earlier in the year, put some goldenseal back so we could divide it for next year to have some starts.

And we're getting ready to dig it up.

These rhizomes, they have little buds on them.

And as long as there's a pretty good piece of the root, even without the bud, it will grow.

Like there's a new one starting down here, but usually, if there's a bud on it, that's a great indication that it will grow back, so we will trim it just on its natural breaking points.

I'm using the knife today so I don't mess it up in front of the camera.

Now we'll have at least twice as many, and we won't dig these for a couple years, but then we'll either dig them for harvest, or we'll dig on them and divide them again and make more root starts.

We're trying to get root starts for our program-- Point of Harvest program.

I am Point of Harvest certified, but we would like to have root starts and seeds to send out with our Point of Harvest people, so when they dig, they'll have something to put back, even if they haven't figured out how to divide or steward the land yet.

So hopefully, we will make the world better-- many more herbs instead of fewer-- while we're harvesting.

A lot of people use black cohosh.

There's a lot of supplements made from black cohosh, blue cohosh, bloodroot, Solomon's seal, then even walnut and burdock, stinging nettle.

There's all kinds.

Like, it's a biodiverse place.

It's crazy how many medicinal and botanical herbs and flowers grow here.

And that's part of what we're trying to do is-- instead of letting that die with people forgetting how to do it, we're trying to spread the knowledge of doing it and spread the herbs and plants too.

[♪ ♪ ♪] -[Robin Suggs] I think foraging probably has evolved from something that was very much part of folks' subsistence-- their ability to survive-- to supplement maybe crops they grew, or maybe some folks in some areas relied totally on wild foods for their existence.

In our modern culture, you probably see much less of that in terms of the proportion of society.

A lot of folks use harvesting and foraging of wild plants as an avocation rather than a subsistence-level activity.

There are a lot of folks that, you know, if you-- this is a hobby, and it's a nice pursuit, a good reason to go out in the woods and get some exercise and some fresh air and enjoy themselves-- but I think, you know, that regardless of what the purpose is, the usefulness of the plants and the ability of the plants to be used by folks is still rare.

[♪ ♪ ♪] -[Woman VO] Nestled in the remote corner of southwest Virginia, this region captivates with its rugged landscapes, natural wonders, cultural attractions, and outward ventures.

Experiences you'll only find in the heart of Appalachia.

Adventure guides available at heartofappalachia.com.