Growing in this riverbottom since 1981 . . .

More than forty years ago, me and my buddies were canoeing on the Chattahoochee river around Atlanta and north of Lake Lanier, and doing our first backpacking on the Appalachian Trail, when we must have realized there was "a world" where we wanted to be, beyond the Atlanta suburbs in the late 1970s. Dunwoody was actually much less developed back then, with plenty of woods and creeks in between neighborhoods where we could roam and camp as young teens -- I even found a Clovis point spear point in a creek behind my house. 

After our "discovering" the mountains, we quit our school sports clubs, took on more hours working part-time jobs restaurants, a hotel, bakery, and construction jobs and saved money to buy canoes, backpacks and climbing gear. We loaded our gear into our hand-me-down cars (a 1968 Dodge Dart for me) and explored the southern Appalachians of North Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. 

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Sunday newspaper classifieds included a "mountain land for sale" section that also fed my imagination, and I set off on a quest to find some land in the summer of 1981 about a month after my sixteenth birthday. By the end of a long day looking at land that was much more expensive than the $500 an acre deals I had seen in the newspaper (I didn't realize you had to buy a thousand acres to get that deal!), a real estate person in Dahlonega showed me some land on the Etowah river. I bushwacked through the riverbottom to the river as the sun was shining its last rays of the day on the water and it seemed to say to me that I belonged there. I started off making payments on four acres then, and in 2022 I am six months away from paying off twelve acres after refinancing to purchase eight additional acres over the years. The two acre river-bottom is the only tillable land and the gardens have been growing since the beginning in 1981.

I always had my own garden growing up as a boy in southern New Jersey and in Dunwoody, Georgia, so gardening on this two acre river-bottom was a natural progression. Willy Dowdy, a neighborhood farmer, taught me how to fertilize with local chicken manure and plant crops at the right time, which for him was according to the stars and moon too. With help from my friends and neighbors, I was able to start building a cabin on the mountain above the garden, where I moved for good when I turned 18. 

Besides learning carpentry and other trades to make a living in north Georgia, I became a lifelong student of world history.  My work and studies brought me to Japan for two years, Hawaii for three years as a graduate student, and back to Japan for three years where where I met my wife, Sayuri, who was a teacher in one of the public elementary schools in Yamanashi where I also taught for three years. 

Sayuri and I returned to my land to raise our quickly growing family and many gardens together. By the time our three kids were barely walking in 2002, we had seven hundred tomato plants one season and were sending our best tomatoes down to Bacchanalia, a restaurant run by Anne Quatrano, in Atlanta. We were USDA-certified organic for six years in the late 2000s and offered CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) box subscriptions, but we decided the best way to share our produce was through our own monthly garden dinners, selling extra vegetables after the dinners. Some of our dinner customers have fondly come to call Sayuri's cooking, "Jappalachian" because she combines Japanese and Appalachian dishes. We're really just using every resource we have to make it happen!

After more than 15 years of having dinners at our house, we took a few years off while the kids were in college to retool and finish a building in the garden we had been talking about for years -- a seven-sided pavilion inspired by a Cherokee council house we saw at the Okonaluftee village in Cherokee, N.C. We added two sheds to the building for a kitchen and we started doing dinners in the summer 2021.  Dinner guests are able to walk in the gardens before and after eating and even have a float in the river if they come early enough. The building also provides space for events and environmental education described on our web-site, headwaterslearning.org.

Read a much longer, occasionally academic, history of Revival Gardens that I have been writing since we survived  a flashflood March of 2021 --> here.