[piano intro] - [host Heather Burgiss] Our farming adventure starts on the coast with a chilling harvest of Carolina oysters.

- [Man] People really trust us to bring them the freshest oyster.

- [Heather] Next a visit with some hungry goats and mushroom farming in the Piedmont.

- [Chess] Do you know what those are called?

- [Sarah] Mushrooms.

- [Chess] Yeah, they're called mushrooms.

- [Heather] And then some sweet family farming legacies high in the mountain.

- That's what we're selling is that memory.

- [Heather] And they're taking a little piece of Asheville home with them.

- Exactly.

- [Heather] It's all on "My Home," coming up next.

[upbeat music] All across the state we're uncovering the unique stories that make North Carolina my home.

♪ My home, come home ♪ ♪ come home ♪ [upbeat music] [seagulls chirping] - We separated it away from either the stuff that's been eaten by crabs or just, you know, isn't really necessarily a pretty oyster.

It's still gonna taste the same but we wouldn't want to give that to somebody.

- [Heather] I kind of think it's pretty though.

- It is pretty, it's nature's art.

- I kind think it's pretty.

- Yeah, yeah.

- I mean-- - That traditional oyster folks would be like, "What is this?"

- Right.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, yeah.

- And you know, I mean, this really just shows it's an ugly oyster for us but it really shows kind of the conservation efforts that people have done and the kind of the fruits of that with all these healthy, wild baby oysters on it.

[seagulls chirping] You can't do this very long unless you love it, unless you're passionate about, you know, providing North Carolinians fresh North Carolina seafood.

It's challenging, there are some days that it's not easy to get out in the water, and then there's other days where I couldn't imagine doing anything else.

[engine revving] [oyster shells landing] [engine revving] My name is Ryan Stelter Bethea and my home is North Carolina.

[upbeat music] So the name of our company is called Oysters Carolina, and what we wanted to do is we wanted to bring fresh North Carolina seafood to North Carolinians.

It's important to have really good stewardship with anything, especially farming, but with oyster farming it's really important because you're out here in this great natural resource that is so pristine.

You know, it's so much easier to keep something pristine than it is to clean something up.

- [Heather] So you guys would come out here.

How many oysters are out here in these beds right now, if you had to venture a guess?

- Right now, there's about 200,000 out here.

You know, you're planting 'em kind of in different times throughout the planting season, which is generally, you know, March through November, but they're wild animals.

They're not wild animals, but they're animals.

So they grow in different speeds.

You might plant 100,000 and half of those are ready within the first year and then the other half might take two years.

- [Heather] So when you get these oysters out and you take them to... You know, there's gotta to be such satisfaction to be able to farm these and get them to the people in North Carolina that really maybe never have had oysters.

I know that that's really one of your missions-- - It is.

- Is to do that.

- It is, we have a lot of people that have... We're a lot of people's first oyster.

You know, people really trust us to bring them the freshest oyster.

They know that we're harvesting it that day and bringing it to them.

So I think, you know, they have a lot of trust in us.

We grow oysters here, we harvest them the same day that we deliver 'em.

We take a picture and a video with a timestamp and then we text it to you, so you know that we pulled 'em outta the water that day, and then we deliver 'em ourselves anywhere in North Carolina.

[upbeat music] We're gonna finish out today, probably around 450 miles.

It's gonna take about nine hours overall, nine to 10 hours, and we're gonna get to see some cool things and deliver some great seafood.

[knocking on door] We got your oysters right there.

- We got oysters today.

- Yep, you got your oysters.

- Thank you.

- Pleasure to meet you, I'm Ryan.

[Ryan laughing] I've been great.

Oh, I didn't even know you even had a cat.

I really enjoyed talking with you two on the phone the other day.

- Have a good day.

- Thanks, you too.

- Have a good weekend, thank you.

[upbeat music] - Herons is our only restaurant that we work with and we're really proud of our relationship with them.

Chef Thompson, maybe either two, three times a week, texts us to say, "Hey, we need this many oysters tomorrow."

We go out, we get him his oysters and then just drive 'em right there.

So if you've eaten oysters here, they are definitely the freshest oysters in North Carolina.

- There you go, man.

- All right.

If you're looking through for an example of how to shuck an oyster, you scoop through these and then you hand then you hand them one of these, and you're like, "Here you go, good luck."

[men laughing] - [Ryan] You made it look so easy.

[man laughing] Good seeing you, man.

- Good seeing you, thank you again.

- Good to see you, bro.

- Good to see you, buddy.

[upbeat music] - I came up with the idea to grow oysters when I came home one night after bartending and there was a magazine on the coffee table and it just happened to be flipped to something.

I think it was about how North Carolina just has the perfect water.

It's pristine, there's no development other than housing out here.

It's just a place that would grow really good oysters and everything just kind of clicked, and I thought, "Okay, this is, "you know, this is what I want to do."

[upbeat music] We'll take the oysters when they're like this with the shell growth, and in order to keep the oysters from growing long and thin like a blade, okay, we tumble them until they grow fat like this with a cup.

So you can kind of see the different stages of growth.

So we'd put it in a bag.

We're gonna shake it 'cause we do everything by hand.

That's gonna knock all this off and it's gonna have the oyster continue to grow fat instead of just long.

- So you're just kind of looking for quality.

- Yep.

- Is what you're looking for.

- That's exactly right.

So, like this, this is gonna be low quality 'cause it has a bunch of this wild strike on it.

Like you know this one doesn't, so this one right here we're gonna tumble it, get this shell growth off and then it's gonna be a nice pretty oyster.

This we have to continue to work on.

[upbeat music] - [Heather] What goes through your mind when you see your farm?

- Oh, well, it's great.

It's great, right?

I mean, you can't beat this.

We're out here on a beautiful day.

Everything that's out here, we've worked really hard to get to this point and we're really proud of the oysters that we grow out here.

[gentle music] [upbeat music] - [Chess] Ella, good job, Sarah.

Oh, they're so big.

- I have two mushrooms.

- [Chess] You have two mushrooms now?

- Yeah.

- And a horsey.

Do you know what those are called?

- Mushrooms?

- Yeah, they're called mushrooms.

They're called Lion's Mane.

- [Sarah] Oh.

- [Laura] We grow fungus for a living.

[upbeat music] Are they ready?

I would go ahead and dice up the Lion's Mane smaller and cook it with butter.

A lot of people, particularly in the United States, a lot of people did not grow up foraging mushrooms and they think of them as toadstools, and there's a term mycophobia.

We're kind of a mycophobic culture that we've been raised to almost be afraid of mushrooms.

Going on a mushroom hunt, gonna catch a big one.

But you have like 40,000 pet worms.

My name is Laura Stewart.

- My name is Chess Stewart.

What are you doing with the spoon?

- [Laura] Our girls are Sarah and Ella.

They're three years old and they are twins, and our home is Saxapahaw, North Carolina.

[upbeat music] We're mushroom farmers.

We specialize in hardwood mushrooms.

Most of what we do is sell fresh mushrooms and we've just started doing some prepared foods like oyster mushroom jerky and Lion's Mane crab cakes.

♪ Home ♪ ♪ And I'm coming home ♪ ♪ I'm coming home ♪ ♪ Don't you know ♪ - [Laura] And we just got unbelievably lucky that we ended up in the Piedmont-- - Central North Carolina.

- And central North Carolina has been such a good fit for us.

It's such a strong, small farming community, such an an amazing culinary scene.

♪ I'm coming home ♪ - [Laura] We're really happy to be raising our girls here.

If you ask them, they'll say that they have a job and that they're both mushroom farmers.

Ella said, "I'm a mushroom farmer "but I grow different mushrooms than Sarah."

- Yeah, yeah.

- So they're differentiating.

- There's a little competition there.

- It's interesting, mushroom farming is starting to become more of a thing in North Carolina.

A lot of people will assume we grow soil based mushrooms like portabella and crimini, you know?

So we'll kind of explain the difference in our production.

- We actually grow everything on sawdust.

- [Heather] Is that a normal process with the sawdust?

Is that normally what most mushroom farmers would do?

- A lot of people that grow exotics like we do will use sawdust.

- [Heather] Okay.

- What we do is we mix a substrate.

So we mix all the materials that go into each bag, seal it, and then sterilize it and then inoculate it with the culture.

So once it leaves the lab, we let the mushrooms grow and colonize that material in this room.

- [Heather] And so you're growing how many varieties of mushrooms?

- 10 to 12 a year.

- Okay.

- Different varieties throughout the year.

[upbeat music] - This is the grow room, and this is where after the mushrooms have been inoculated and colonized, we bring them to actually fruit.

We can grow quite a few different varieties of mushrooms using that substrate.

So here you're seeing blue oyster mushrooms.

- What's really cool I think, is you partner with a lot of local restaurants to be able to provide them with unique mushrooms to use for their dishes.

- [Laura] We're really lucky to be in the triangle and with the culinary scene that we have here.

So at this stage in our business, we have chefs who've been buying from us for coming up on five years, you know?

So every week we're there and it's a true relationship.

- [Man] Hey Seth, if you have a second would you grab me like two or three tomatoes?

We try and keep it as seasonal as possible, but having the mushrooms year round really is a benefit, you know, for our vegetarian dishes and just putting a little twist on anything else.

[upbeat music] - [Laura] A lot of it, I think that motivates us is building a business that is making a better world for our girls and for their generation.

[upbeat music] [gentle music] - Yeah, this goes here with the light body and the dark head.

We've done a cutting job for a guy and he was talking about that goat being way up the tree, and it must have been 25 feet off the ground, a leaned over tree and the goat had crawled up that thing eating that kudzu.

- Do goats normally climb trees like that?

- Nope, not most.

A rare one, but... [goats baaing] - When Ron told me that we were going into the goat business, I said, "You are nuts."

[Cheryl laughing] [upbeat music] I'm Cheryl.

- And I'm Ron Sarcy.

And our home is in Horseshoe, North Carolina.

[upbeat music] That's a nice looking one there, that red one.

- [Cheryl] That's one of my favorites.

- That's a big-- - I like that little brown one.

- When people ask me, I say, "Well, we rent goats."

"Rent goats for what?"

I said, "For weed control."

The federal government made an estimate a few years back that there's seven and a half million acres in the United States that's unusable because of kudzu.

We've specialized in taking them into areas that are difficult with machinery and manpower, places that are kind of steep and hazardous.

Yeah, she's a good goat.

That's her kid right there, the brown headed one.

- They seem like they like to be in a group.

- Yeah, they're a herd animal.

If a goat's in there by themselves, they'll really get panicked, but you go to a kudzu area, and they just annihilate it.

It goes from head high to the ground and everybody's just, "Wow."

You know, they just can't believe it.

- [Cheryl] I mean, they have it made, they get to eat.

- They just love to eat.

- They do, they love to eat.

[dogs barking] - [Ron] Up in the morning and we'll have a few goats to feed.

- Get it ready to go out.

And I always let Ron put the nipple on because they're hard, and that's our third bottle.

We're ready to go feed.

[upbeat music] - [Ron] We had tried a little bit of everything from tobacco to row crops, we dabble a little bit with cattle.

- [Cheryl] This farm was bought by my grandparents in '38.

[upbeat music] We have about 250 adult goats.

The babies, they're kind of increasing by the day.

So that usually will bring us up to around 300.

- We had moved back to the farm here and it was kind of overgrown and a little outta hand, and the guy said, you know, he said, "You need to get you a gang of goats."

He says, "You wouldn't believe what they can do," and that's kind of how we started.

We started a few and then a few more, and then we bought a Billy and the next thing you know, our son said, "It's dad's hobby that's gone wild."

[upbeat music] - Oh my goodness.

- They'll lick your fingers.

- So cute, watch my fingers.

- There's a lot of maintenance.

People think they could take a group of goats and just put 'em out.

That's further from the truth here to me.

The guy that helps us now, his name is Jake Dorner and he's worked and helped us for about six years now.

- When you take those goats somewhere and then you come back to see what they've done, what is that like for you to see?

- We do like, a divide and fence on some jobs and you can see the 10 foot high kudzu on one side and then dirt on the other and it's only been a couple weeks - The wilder and rougher it is, it seems like the more they like it.

They leave no leaf unturned inside that fence.

- Do you really get emotionally invested with these goats?

- You do as much as you don't want to.

- Yeah.

- You know, you try to keep it separate.

This is a business.

This is what we do, but it's hard 'cause they all have a cute personality, and then every once in a while, you know, you have one that's just real stubborn and that's okay too, because we all have that streak.

[woman laughing] - [Heather] Is there a lot of goat humor that goes along with?

[Heather laughing] Like, "You've gotta be kidding me.

"There's no butts about it."

No, not really?

Okay.

- No, I haven't heard anything like that or very little.

[upbeat music] The first thing we have to do is go in and get the fencing built.

So we'll have to go in, and clear and cut fence line, and then we get everything ready for 'em, and then we'll bring the goats back in.

[upbeat music] This is the Crowder Mountain State Park located in Kings Mountain.

This is the only track in the whole state park that's got kudzu on it and they'd like to get control of it before it, I guess gets outta hand and gets the rest of the park.

It'll completely consume areas.

I mean, if you stop long enough, I believe it grows in your pants leg.

- How long will it take you guys to kinda get the goats into place?

How long does it take usually?

- If it's a conventional place that we can back up to, we're probably there and gone in an hour, but this is a little unique where we're gonna kind of shuttle 'em in.

[upbeat music] There's 50 plus goats in here.

This will take about two weeks, two and a half weeks.

For the first few days, they won't eat long before they lay down because there's just so much here, and as time goes on, the vegetation will get less, so we'll have to work longer and longer, you know, to get food.

It makes me feel good 'cause I mean it really gives me a lot of pride when somebody says, "I never seen nothing like it."

[goats baaing] [upbeat music] - [Heather] For generations in the Hills of western North Carolina, preserving food was a way of life.

Well, now one family is keeping those traditions alive by making jam and also building on their family's seventh generation farming legacy.

[upbeat music] - The things that resonate about jams and preserves are that first it's so simple, right?

You've got something that at its base is just fruit.

Our recipes are designed so that you shouldn't have to check the label to see, "What flavor is this?"

You should bite into it and go, "Oh, that's raspberry."

People have such interesting stories and we recognized early on that we're only selling jam on a superficial level, right?

That what we're doing out here is making connections.

- Thank you so much.

- And they're taking a little piece of Asheville home with them.

- Exactly.

- Yeah.

- That's what we're selling is that memory of Asheville.

My name is Walter Harold.

My home is Fairview, North Carolina.

[upbeat music] We're going to Little Pisgah, a mountain that sits right on the eastern end of Scartman and on Blue Ridge.

It sits just as the mountains drop off into the foothills.

It's part of me.

I know that I'm home.

So the name of the farm is Imladris.

We named it that because like most of the Southern Appalachian farm families, my great-grandparents were Scotch-Irish, and we wanted something that had that feel to it.

And this is where my grandfathers chose to make his home in the 1950s, and he set up a lifestyle here where he planted 900 and some odd blueberry bushes, set this up as the first U-Pick blueberry orchard in Western, North Carolina.

My grandfather was still alive.

I had graduated college.

He was in his mid-80's and was struggling a little bit with couple things here.

I came up and visited and said, "You know what, "I'll be glad to help you.

"I can do some mowing."

Over dinner, we were discussing, well, "We're running out of blueberry season "but we've got lots of tailgate market season.

"What can we do here?"

And my wife, Wendy actually suggested blueberry jam and in a moment that has become infamous, my own response was, "Well, that's the dumbest idea "I've heard in a long time," because in my family, I grew up in a family where you didn't purchase jam.

Now we're in 50 grocery stores.

We're in that many or more restaurants.

We're all over the Southeast.

I didn't recognize the monetary value of that product and here we are today, that's the thing we do.

[upbeat music] So my wife and I run the farm.

My sister is my logistics, delivery, shipping person, my father provide this piece of land.

So it's very much an extended family.

I have great help.

I've been very fortunate to find staff that's amazing.

This is us.

- When the berries are really cold, the outsides will kind of start cooking before the rest of the berries.

We try to keep this closed with steam to kind of heat it thoroughly and then mix it a little bit while it's heating up before we actually start blending all of the berries, and then once we get a good puree going, we'll add pectin, and then we start adding our sugar.

Jam making is a lot of fun.

Walter is such a great guy.

- I was 11 when he gave my first job picking blueberries.

So now I've done so many other different jobs since then, and now I'm back up in the blueberry patch and then coming here to make jam.

So it's like a full circle situation.

- Well, when you were talking about Early Girl, why has that been such a special relationship for you guys?

- So many pieces to it.

First and foremost, they were our first commercial account.

At the end of the day, they draw my clientele.

If you're eating at Early Girl, you're interested in quality food, you're interested in locally grown, you're interested in small family farms, and that's exactly my clientele.

We're out there every weekend right in front of the restaurant, selling jam to their customers.

- My first day here, it's like, "Hey, so there's gonna be this guy that's outside "and he's been outside for 10 plus years "or something like that."

So it's pretty cool that he's, you know, he's so passionate about what he does but also he stays humble to his beginnings, you know.

The biscuits are so amazing.

So every day we make them in the house and then you add Walter's, you know, natural jams, and it's just a match made in Heaven.

- [Walter] Folks are coming to that restaurant from all over the country and we're able to make those connections and build relationships that continue to survive and thrive for years after someone's visit to Asheville.

So when folks take a moment and slow down and come back to something like a jam, it's not just a simple culinary issue.

It's revisiting their history when someone says, "Oh, that tastes like my grandmother's apple butter."

- I like this.

- Oh, this reminds me of my uncle's blueberry orchard.

Those are the things, those are the moments when you realize you hit something.

- [Heather] Next time on "My Home," North Carolina certainly has its share of legends and lore.

- So this rock, we kind of understand now that it actually is a boundary marker between this world and the spirit world.

- [Heather] We explore mysteries like the Roan Mountain Ghost Choir.

- So when the hotel was up on this hill, people said that they could hear that.

It sounded like a choir or voices.

- And voices, yes.

- Even some Bigfoot sightings and places created just for your imagination.

It's all on "My Hope."

[upbeat music] ♪