About Rivenwood Gardens
Rivenwood Gardens is a certified Organic farm in Floyd, VA specializing in nutrient dense organically certified fruits and vegetables that we grow exclusively for our local communities. We moved our operation to the Floyd Ecovillage in 2022. We began our farming Journey in 2018 after getting married and moving to New Zealand for a year where we worked and traveled on organic farms. In 2019 we spent a year in Bend, Oregon farming on a large diversified organic farm. 2020 tried to stop us, but we made the decision early in the Pandemic to take a leap of faith, and move to Virginia (Where else?) and start Rivenwood Gardens. We farmed for two years in Franklin County before moving to the Floyd Eco Village. Our academic and professional backgrounds are in ecology. Corey studied agro-ecology at UC Davis and has a B.S. in Ecological Management and Restoration. He worked as a Land Steward for many years helping restore native grasslands and wetlands. Christine has a Masters of Science in Marine Ecology and studied tidally influenced wetlands. Her studies focused on the very important, but often overlooked micro fauna (tiny invertebrate animals that live in the soil). She has brought this passion to farming with a particular interest in soil microbiology and insects, both beneficial and let’s just say “annoying” ones.
Our Farming Principles
We are proponents of organic regenerative agriculture and are attempting to practice regenerative farming principles to the best of our ability. The main focus of regenerative farming is fostering soil, plant and animal health while capturing and sequestering carbon. While it is often said that healthy soil grows healthy plants and animals, there is no straight line in nature but rather circles and cycles. Healthy soil, plants and animals all help grow and build one another. More so, it is the microbes in and on all three that actually drive and determine whether that system is healthy or not.
We Farm Regeneratively by Adhering to the Following Principles to the Best of Our Ability:
-Keep the Soil Covered with Plants (Crops, Cover Crops, living mulches) and Organic Matter Mulches (compost, roll-crimped cover crops, spoiled hay, leaves, etc).
-Diversity and Crop Rotation. Grow a large variety of plant species, both annual and perennial. For Annuals, we rotate where they are grown every year.
-Utilize Nitrogen Fixing Cover Crops for most of our nitrogen inputs.
-Incorporate Animals into our Crop Rotations, particularly through the grazing of finished crops and cover crops by ruminant sheep and cows.
-No Tilling of the Soil. We occasionally subsoil by broad-forking or pulling a Yeoman Plow, but our aim is to very rarely and hopefully never till (invert and mix) our soil. When we do, it is very shallowly with a power harrow; which essentially mimics what a chicken scratching in the top 1-2″ of soil might do without compacting or inverting the soil.
–Make Sure our Plants, Animals, and Microbes have all the Minerals and Nutrients they Need in organic biologically available forms.
-No Synthetic Inputs. This includes pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers and we are increasingly trying to reduce the use of plastic as well.
-No Genetically Modified Plants or Animals