About Sylvalchemy Grove Homestead

In July 2025, we moved onto 3.8 acres in Titusville, New Jersey that had been left to itself for years — overgrown, and dominated by invasive species.  It didn't look like much yet. But we could already see what it wanted to become.

Clearing the Way

We spent our first months here pulling invasives back, acre by acre, giving the land room to breathe again. As we cleared, we transplanted the gardens we'd already been growing elsewhere, moving them onto the property for good. It was slow, physical work — and it was also the beginning of actually getting to know this land, plant by plant, season by season.

A Vision for the Land

From the start, we had a vision for what this place could become: a working permaculture demonstration site, not just an idea on paper, but food forests and guilds you can walk through and see for yourself. Pawpaws became central to that vision early on. We wanted to grow them not in containers, but literally in the ground — and to propagate our own from seed in air-prune beds, raising the next generation of trees to plant here and share with others.

The Homesteading Experiment

At the center of it all is a simple question: how much of our own food can we grow, right here? We're planting fruit and nut trees, guilds, and food forest systems across the property — pawpaws, hazelnuts, figs, Asian persimmons, and more — testing what a working homestead can produce in this soil and this climate. It's an ongoing experiment, and we're documenting it as we go.

Why We're Doing This

Underneath the clearing and the planting is something simpler: we wanted to live closer to nature. More than that, we wanted to be part of nature again, not just observe it from a distance. That shift, from managing land to belonging to it, is really where all of this started.

It's also where the book came from. We began blogging about what we were doing here almost as soon as we moved in, mostly just to keep track of what we were learning. Somewhere along the way, sharing the process became the point — and that blog grew into something bigger: a book called Sylvalchemy, built entirely out of what we've lived, and are still living, right here at the Grove.