Wicker Branch Farm

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🌿 Plastic-free, peat-free ecological nursery
🌱 Native & useful plants for gardens, homesteads & food forests
🌳 Permaculture • tree guilds • hedgerows • consulting
🥚🥛Working sustainable homestead 🐑🐓🐇
📍 Union County, NC

08/20/2026

🌱 ASPARAGUS: A PERENNIAL CROP FOR YOUR FOOD FOREST

What if you could plant a vegetable once and harvest from the same bed for 15–20+ years? That's the beauty of asparagus. 🌿

Asparagus (Asparagus officinalis) is one of our favorite crops for a perennial garden, food forest, or thoughtfully designed tree guild because it occupies a different niche than many annual vegetables.

🌳 In a food forest or tree guild:

Asparagus works well in the herbaceous/perennial layer, especially around, but not directly against, established fruit trees.

🌱 Why we love it:

🥦 Perennial food: Once established, asparagus can produce for decades with proper care.

☀️ Likes sun: Give it plenty of light. It's not a deep-shade forest plant, so position it on the sunnier edges of a food forest or in an open guild.

💧 Deep roots: Once established, asparagus develops an extensive root system, making it more drought tolerant than many shallow-rooted vegetables.

🐝 Supports beneficial insects: If you allow the ferny growth to remain, mature asparagus produces small flowers that can provide resources for insects and eventually red berries.

♻️ Low disturbance: Unlike annual vegetables, you aren't constantly tilling, replanting, and disturbing the soil.

🌿 Multiple years of harvest: After the establishment period, you get a reliable spring harvest year after year.

🌳 Where would you put it?

Think sunny edges and open spaces rather than underneath a dense tree canopy.

It can be beautiful planted alongside other perennial edibles such as:
🌿 Sorrel
🌱 Chives
🌼 Yarrow
🍓 Strawberries
🌿 Comfrey

The goal isn't simply to cram plants together it's to create layers of plants that occupy different spaces and perform different jobs.

And that's what makes a good tree guild or food forest so interesting: you're designing an ecosystem that produces food, habitat, biomass, and beauty, not just a row of vegetables.

🌱 Asparagus is the kind of plant we love at Wicker Branch Farm: plant it once, care for it well, and let it become part of your landscape for decades.

Interested in building a perennial food system? Wicker Branch Farm offers perennial plants

🌺 SCARLET RUNNER BEANS: THE PERENNIAL BEAN YOU SHOULD KNOWMost people think of beans as something you plant, harvest, an...
08/19/2026

🌺 SCARLET RUNNER BEANS: THE PERENNIAL BEAN YOU SHOULD KNOW

Most people think of beans as something you plant, harvest, and pull out at the end of the season. Scarlet runner beans (Phaseolus coccineus) are different.🌱

In mild climates, runner beans can behave as short-lived perennials, producing a large underground tuberous root that can survive winter and send up vigorous new growth the following spring.

🌿 Why we love them for permaculture:

🫘 Food:The young pods can be eaten like green beans, while mature beans can be dried and used as a protein-rich staple.

🌺 Beautiful: Those brilliant scarlet flowers are a magnet for hummingbirds, bees, and other pollinators.

📈 Vigorous climber: Give them a sturdy trellis and they'll climb 10–15+ feet, making excellent use of vertical space.

🌱 Perennial potential: In areas with mild winters, the roots can overwinter and return. Even where they don't reliably survive winter, the large seeds are easy to save and replant.

♻️ Multiple functions: Food + pollinator habitat + vertical growing + nitrogen fixation + biomass.

And there's something especially satisfying about establishing a perennial food crop that can become part of your garden year after year instead of starting from scratch every spring.

🌳 In a food forest or permaculture garden, think vertically.

While your trees occupy the canopy and shrubs fill the middle layers, runner beans can make use of the vertical space below them provided they have adequate light and a sturdy support.

🌱 That's the kind of plant we love growing at Wicker Branch Farm: beautiful, useful, edible, and capable of becoming part of a long-term ecological system.

Scarlet runner bean seeds are available from Wicker Branch Farm! 🌿🫘

🌿 TRUE COMFREY: A Permaculture WorkhorseIf you're building a food forest, orchard, or ecological homestead, true comfrey...
08/18/2026

🌿 TRUE COMFREY: A Permaculture Workhorse

If you're building a food forest, orchard, or ecological homestead, true comfrey (Symphytum officinale) is one of those plants that can earn its space over and over again.

🌱 Plant it once. Harvest for years.

Comfrey is a hardy perennial that forms a large clump and comes back every spring. Once established, it can be cut repeatedly throughout the growing season and regrows vigorously.

🌳 Why put it around fruit trees?

Comfrey is often used as an understory plant in fruit tree guilds. Its large leaves create substantial biomass that can be cut and dropped around trees as a natural mulch.

✂️ Cut it → drop it → let it break down → repeat.

Its deep roots also bring nutrients from deeper soil layers into its foliage, making that nutrient-rich biomass useful for building soil fertility.

🐝 Pollinators love it, too.

The bell-shaped flowers provide nectar for bees and other pollinating insects, making comfrey useful beyond the soil-building side of the garden.

♻️ And there's almost no waste.

Comfrey leaves can be used for:
• Green mulch around trees
• Compost activator
• Comfrey tea/liquid fertilizer
• Biomass production
• Pollinator habitat
• Orchard & food forest guilds

🌿 A note about "medicinal" comfrey:
Comfrey has a long history of traditional topical use, but true comfrey contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids, which can cause serious liver injury if taken internally. We don't recommend consuming comfrey or using homemade preparations internally. If using it medicinally, stick to appropriately prepared topical products and follow professional guidance.

🌳 True comfrey is exactly the kind of plant we love at Wicker Branch Farm:

One perennial can support soil building, pollinators, orchard systems, composting, and nutrient cycling all while coming back year after year.

That's what we mean when we say useful plants for ecological systems.🌱

🌿 True comfrey available from Wicker Branch Farm.

🌻 Sunchokes: One Plant, So Many JobsIf you're building a permaculture garden, food forest, or low-maintenance homestead,...
08/18/2026

🌻 Sunchokes: One Plant, So Many Jobs

If you're building a permaculture garden, food forest, or low-maintenance homestead, sunchokes (Helianthus tuberosus) deserve a spot on your list.

🌱 Incredibly easy to grow:Plant the tubers, give them sun, and they basically take care of themselves. They're drought tolerant once established, thrive in poor-to-average soil, and return year after year.

🌻 They get TALL:Sunchokes can reach 8–12+ feet, making them useful as a seasonal windbreak, privacy screen, or tall backdrop in a food forest. Their yellow flowers also provide late-season forage for pollinators.

🥔 And they're edible: The underground tubers are crisp and mildly sweet when raw, with a nutty, earthy flavor. Cook them like a potato roasted, sautéed, mashed, or added to soups. The texture becomes creamy when cooked. Every part of the plant is edible. The flowers, the leaves, the roots.

🐴 Historically, sunchokes were also grown as livestock fodder. The tubers provided an energy-rich feed, while the tall leafy growth could be used as forage or silage for livestock. They've been fed to pigs, sheep, cattle and horses. Our sheep love them.

🌿 A traditional herbal food:Sunchokes are particularly rich in inulin, a type of prebiotic fiber that feeds beneficial gut bacteria. Because of that, they're often considered a functional food rather than simply another root vegetable. Start with small portions if you're not accustomed to them the inulin can cause some serious gas in some people! 😂

♻️ Permaculture value:
• Perennial food crop
• Tall biomass producer
• Pollinator-friendly flowers
• Seasonal screening/windbreak
• Low-input once established
• Excellent addition to perennial food systems

They're also prolific—which is both their superpower and something to plan for. Give them a dedicated space where you don't mind them spreading.

🌱 We're growing sunchokes at Wicker Branch Farm as part of our edible perennial & permaculture nursery.

If you're interested in building a food forest or perennial garden, we're happy to help you choose plants that can serve more than one purpose.

Sometimes I think our page can be a little confusing, so I wanted to take a minute to explain what Wicker Branch Farm ac...
08/17/2026

Sometimes I think our page can be a little confusing, so I wanted to take a minute to explain what Wicker Branch Farm actually is. 🌿

For the better part of a decade, we've been operating as a homestead. We've raised pigs, donkeys, geese, ducks, sheep, built gardens, experimented with greenhouses, grown food for our family, and tried a lot of things that worked… and a lot that didn't.

Those seasons of experimenting have helped us figure out what we actually love, what works in our climate, and where we can be most useful to other people.

Today, Wicker Branch Farm is primarily an ecological nursery and permaculture-focused farm.

Our market garden, eggs, sheep milk, and other farm products are part of our homestead system. We grow food to feed our family, and when we have a surplus, we sell or barter it. We've diversified our farm because multiple income streams make a small farm more resilient—but those aren't the heart of what we're building.

Our heart is helping people build living, productive ecosystems.

We grow native plants, edible perennials, medicinal herbs, pollinator plants, and other useful plants with an emphasis on low-input, ecological growing and reducing our dependence on plastic wherever we can.

And we don't just sell the plants.

We help people figure out what to plant, where to plant it, and how to make the pieces work together.

🌳 Fruit tree guilds and food forests
🌿 Native plantings and pollinator habitat
🌱 Edible and medicinal perennial gardens
🌾 Hedgerows and living boundaries
🏡 Homestead and small-farm planning
🌎 Permaculture-inspired landscape design
🌱 Ecological nursery and plant sourcing
🤝 Consulting for people who want to grow more of their own food and create healthier landscapes

We've spent years experimenting on our own land because we believe you shouldn't have to figure everything out from scratch.

If you've ever looked at your property and thought, "I know I want something more useful and ecological here, but I have no idea where to start," that's exactly the kind of person we want to help.

We're still growing, learning, and building Wicker Branch Farm right alongside our customers.

We're not trying to sell you more plants. We're trying to help you build something that keeps growing long after you plant them. 🌱

Gardening in the morning followed by flower arranging as a treat for all my hard work.
08/15/2026

Gardening in the morning followed by flower arranging as a treat for all my hard work.

What's your favorite flower? For me it's a loaded question because what's my favorite flower vs what's my favorite to gr...
08/13/2026

What's your favorite flower?
For me it's a loaded question because what's my favorite flower vs what's my favorite to grow vs what actually grows. Zinnias and cosmos are easy to grow! Dahlias are one of my favorites (did you know they're edible). Trying my hand at roses this year and we'd love to continue planting perennials around the farm.

I surprised the ladies I do life with, with a bouquet making session. It was a lot of fun making our arrangements and do...
08/12/2026

I surprised the ladies I do life with, with a bouquet making session. It was a lot of fun making our arrangements and doing our Bible study. Tilly helped harvest the flowers and greens, and we made Maret a bouquet too, so four arrangements all together 💐🌺🌼🪻

08/11/2026

If you wanna know why I love my sheep! They are the sweetest most in your pocket pets I have. I have never loved being a farmer or shepherdess more than I do with adding the dairy sheep to Wicker Branch. They're super sustainable. Quick fun fact. It looks like they've been nibbling on the sunchokes, which is packed with nutrients, people in the old times used sunchokes to keep their race horses plump, which says something if you know anything about skinny race horses. We are planting sunchokes strategically around our farm for our rabbits and sheep, and ourselves as they are native and great for food forests.

I start mentioning figs for sale and now all up and down my personal social media pages it's recommending fig growing gr...
08/11/2026

I start mentioning figs for sale and now all up and down my personal social media pages it's recommending fig growing groups, fig fanatics, fig recipes, etc. So please buy the figs so I can stop talking about it so my feed goes back to normal 😂

Now that I think about it I kinda like the fig content better than the stuff it tries to push me. Do you know how many times I have to tell meta about things I'm not interested in seeing. Like Taylor Swift, true crime, sick babies dying, the news, politics, horses, non eco growing content, cringe homesteaders.

I'm putting in my order Meta: I want more dairy sheep content, gardening advice, gardening experiments, foraging, homeschooling, perennial gardening, fruit guilds, permaculture, self sustainability, eco gardening, etc.

Address

Charlotte, NC

Opening Hours

Monday 8am - 10am
Tuesday 8am - 10am
Wednesday 9am - 5pm
Thursday 8am - 10am
Friday 8am - 10am
Saturday 9am - 5pm

Telephone

+17047745032

Website

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