Half Hill Farm now on Amazon

We are so excited to announce another way to purchase our mushroom dual extracts on Amazon! You can see all our products on our Amazon store page.

While you can always get a better deal on our website due to special deals and free shipping, Amazon is just another way to add convenience to your shopping experience and to introduce our unique, quality products to new customers.

Half Hill Farm offers the largest bottle size for liquid mushroom dual extracts and one of the best prices per ounce on Amazon. The biggest benefit with Amazon is being able to subscribe to monthly deliveries and keeping your card on file.

Here are the product listings on Amazon:

Thank you for continuing to make Half Hill Farm your home for better health and well being for more than 10 years!

Get 20% off our mushroom dual extracts throughout September!

Celebrate the enduring power of mushrooms with 20% off your mushroom extract purchases throughout the month of September! Mushrooms have been used for centuries for better health & well being. As one of the planet’s oldest living things, mushrooms have evolved over eons of time and every imaginable condition to produce unique fungal compounds.

Tap into the wisdom of the ages with Half Hill Farm’s Turkey Tail, Lion’s Mane, Chaga, Red Reishi, Cordyceps, and Five Blend mushroom dual extracts. Our mushroom dual extracts come in 3.38oz and 6.76oz glass bottles. We only use fully mature organic and responsibly wildcrafted mushrooms for a quality our customers have come to love for a decade.

Take 20% off your purchase of our mushroom dual extracts using coupon code MUSHROOM20 at checkout. Offer valid September 1 – September 30, 2023.

All orders over $150 get automatic free USPS Priority shipping. All orders ship within 24 hours except weekends and holidays. We are forever grateful and humbled by your love and support over the past ten years. If you’ve purchased our mushroom dual extracts before, click here to leave a review on Google. Thank you!

Get 15% off our Turkey Tail Mushroom Dual Extract


TURKEY TAIL MUSHROOMS: Get 15% off when you buy four or more 200ml bottles of our mushroom dual extracts in any combination using code “4PACK” at https://store.halfhillfarm.com - all orders over $150 ship for FREE.

We’ve been making and using our mushroom dual extracts for over 10 years. Our mushroom dual extracts are made with all organic and responsibly wildcrafted ingredients in several stages through a 45 day extraction process. We only use the full fruited mushroom body in our extracts.

Mushrooms have been used for centuries for wellness and evolved through every imaginable condition to become one of the oldest life forms on the planet. Tap into the wisdom of the ages with our Turkey Tail, Lion’s Mane, Chaga, Red Reishi, Cordyceps, and Five Blend mushroom dual extracts.

Celebrating 10 years with 20% off!

10 YEARS: Half Hill Farm is celebrating 10 years with a huge 20% discount for online purchases! Use coupon code “10YEARS” twice this year on any two orders and get 20% off your order. It’s one way we’re saying THANK YOU for making us your home for better health & well being!

When we first started making our mushroom extracts, we had no idea anyone outside our own family would need it. You surprised us with stories of healing that changed everything! Making our mushroom extracts continues to be a labor of love for all of us here at Half Hill Farm.

You can only use one coupon code at a time. Don’t forget other coupon codes you can use to continue helping you save throughout the year:

  • 4PACK – get 15% off when you order four or more 200ml bottles of our mushroom extracts in any combination.
  • 10FOR20 – get 20% off when you order 10 or more 200ml bottles of our mushroom extracts.
  • intro10 – get 10% off any one order as an introduction to our products!

Half Hill Farm: Celebrating 10 years!


Christian and Vince (2013) – photo by BrassPenny Photography

10th ANNIVERSARY: All year we are reflecting on ten years of big dreams and big change at Half Hill Farm. A lot can happen in ten years, but one thing is true: life has a way of showing you the path forward in every challenge if your heart and mind are open to it.

We moved to Woodbury from Murfreesboro to build and open Short Mountain Distillery for the Kaufman brothers after helping change county law in 2010 by referendum to allow it. I had just quit my job producing evening news for a local television station in search of something with more meaning and purpose and found way more than I could have imagined.

It took 16 months to build the distillery but not nearly that long to be inspired enough by the community and country living to want to slightly change direction again to start our own farm.

It almost didn’t happen. We looked for months when we saw a “for sale by owner” sign on what appeared to be a heavily wooded property. When we drove up the first part of the driveway, we stopped and looked at each other and said we should leave before seeing anything more. Something about the entrance kept us away for months until we saw a listing that showed what we had missed. Luckily, it was still on the market, and we bought it!

When we moved to our new farm in 2012, a good friend opened our eyes to nature’s possibilities with a surprise find of a giant 9 lbs Maitake mushroom growing at the base of an old oak tree. It moved us toward growing mushrooms, but not nearly as seriously as life had in store.

We started our farm with selling our organic vegetables at our local farmers market, but everything changed when Vince’s mother was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. The farming side waned as we focused more on mushrooms and what they could do for her.

While her quality of life was dramatically improved, stage four eventually proved too difficult a challenge for Sandy. Her passing was hard, and we almost decided to stop farming when friends who needed our mushroom extracts encouraged us to keep going.

Over time, the word-of-mouth growth in demand for the mushroom extracts we made required us to move to a larger commercial kitchen we invited another new business to share. Very soon after, our new gut healthy beverage took off and we brought on a partner to get bigger space that has grown us into three retail stores.

Despite the growth, we are still based in our small hometown of Woodbury, TN. We are here because of help from a lot of friends and neighbors who believe in our vision. We still make our mushroom extracts with all organic ingredients and a monkish reverence in service to customers who need it. Because of stories of healing and personal transformation from our customers, we personally take the products every single day and will for life.

In the past ten years, we have gone from making our liquid mushroom dual extracts because no one else was to seeing a whole industry grow around what these mushrooms can do for people. We see what some get wrong and what some get right. We see companies making the most of it and companies with the same level of passion for better health & well being.

It’s exciting to see customers’ mushroom consciousness grow no matter how it happens. However you come to use mushrooms in your life, know that the roots of our dedication to better health & well being with mushrooms runs deep and is personal. Thank you for continuing to trust what we do and for choosing our farm’s products!

Shop our mushroom extracts and other products online, or visit our retail stores:

Five Mushrooms Liquid Dual Extract Blend from Half Hill Farm

Over the years, many of you requested a mushroom extract that blended what you love the most about each of our liquid mushroom dual extracts. And for years we’ve encouraged customers to blend the extracts they love the most in any combination.

As I turn 50 later this year, I feel better than I ever have in my life. Aside from good diet and exercise, taking our liquid mushroom extracts daily for years is my only “secret.” After enjoying a test blend of all five of our mushroom dual extracts daily, I have a new favorite that we are ready to share with you!

Introducing Half Hill Farm’s Five Mushrooms – a mushroom dual extract blend of USDA certified organic and wildcrafted Turkey Tail, Red Reishi, Chaga, Lion’s Mane and Cordyceps mushrooms. This extract combines the unique myco-nutrients of five mushrooms used for centuries to support good health.

Now available through our online store and at our farm’s stores below:

Please consult your doctor if taking any of our products for health reasons. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

 

COVID-19 Pandemic and our commitment to better health & well being

COVID-19 PANDEMIC: Our wellness advocates are committed to your better health & well being no matter what life throws at you. During public health emergencies, our advocates are vigilant with cleaning procedures designed to disrupt transmission from touch surfaces and providing you the very best natural products to boost your immune response. We are closely monitoring CDC guidelines for businesses and will remain open with capacity limits set at 10 people in our retail spaces. We are here to arm you with knowledge, confidence and nature’s best tools to defeat fear and the health challenges fear can amplify.

While there is no known cure for COVID-19, there are a couple of ways to make transmission more difficult especially for those at higher risk. Both of them require acting on shared knowledge. The first option is entirely up to you – creating physical boundaries. Wash your hands. Don’t touch your face. Stand at a distance from others. Regularly clean your cell phone. The second option is a more elusive knowledge of natural remedies that can help amplify your immune response. Supplement your gut health with probiotics, locally fermented foods and beverage, whole food sourced vitamin and mineral supplements, elderberry, essential oils, immune boosting mushrooms and herbals.

 

We can’t be there to remind you to wash your hands, but we are here with knowledge of nature’s remedies and hand crafted quality products for better health & well being.

SHOP ONLINE: Shipping is FREE for all online orders over $150. There are coupon codes posted on the store page. If you want an item shipped from our store and do not see it listed online, please phone in your order.

SHOP OUR STORES: Stop by Wellness Emporium at the following locations and learn more.

UPDATE 3-21-20: We’ve moved to curbside service only to further protect our employees and customers. We’ve temporarily closed our Bell Buckle location. Our Jackson store has normal business hours. Below are our temporary curbside hours and locations. Thanks for your understanding!

GRAND OPENING: Half Hill Farm opens Wellness Emporium in Woodbury

Half Hill Farm’s new location at 110 West High Street is now open to the public. The Wellness Emporium is next door to DTC and features kombucha, tonics and extracts made with love on site as well as other natural health and wellness products.

Grand Opening: The public is invited to enjoy free samples of komchuca and meet the owners and staff at a grand opening ribbon-cutting of the Wellness Emporium with the Cannon County Chamber of Commerce Friday Nov. 9, 2018 at 10 am.

It means a lot to us to have a permanent home here in Woodbury. We want to thank Tommy and Linda Malone for this opportunity. We wouldn’t be here without the opportunity to grow our business at the Arts Center over the past three years and for them thinking outside the box with us and letting us share the space to make that possible. It feels like forever ago that we were a 6 foot table of organic vegetables at the farmers market next door!

Earlier this year we partnered with Manchester’s Scot Smotherman to expand retail with the Wellness Emporium, a second store location in the heart of Bell Buckle, TN. We truly believed if it failed we could always offer services installing taps and walk-in coolers!

With Bell Buckle doing well, growing demand quickly led to the need for bigger manufacturing space. We were running out of product and turning away a lot of wholesale requests. High Street was the right place at the right time.

High Street: Half Hill Farm is expanding our craft fermented food and beverage manufacturing in the back part of the High Street location off the square. This includes kombucha and kefir, popular probiotic fermented beverages we lightly flavor with organic herbs and juices and bottle as a fizzy soda alternative. We will also continue expanding extracts and hemp oil products to include infused food and beverage and partner with MTSU’s Fermentation Science program for shared learning and resource opportunities.

We are proud of the work our team does to bring better health and well being to our community. Come visit us!

The Wellness Emporium is open seven days a week with several flavors of Half Hill Farm’s kombucha on tap and available by the cup, bottle or growler refills. Follow us on Facebook.

Farm Fails and How I Learned To Love Weeds


The only surviving blueberry bush at Half Hill Farm

I know it’s silly, but I’ve anguished over how to write this post for about two years.

What it boils down to is a struggle between my vision for our organic farm and what life had in mind. It literally took me a couple years to believe what was really happening.

About a year into farming, a family battle with cancer focused me on the emerging science and healing power of mushrooms that grew without any effort on our farm. It’s what I could do, so I poured myself into cultivating and perfecting a quality product I needed to work for people I loved. It took a heavy toll on the farm. We stopped going to our local farmers’ market. The hops slowly faded into the hillside. Season after season, the deer were having their way in the orchard, and I started growing way more dandelions than anything I actually planted.

Failure and Success: I felt like a total failure even though something amazing was happening at the same time. Customers began calling me from all over the country because they had heard about our mushroom extracts. Our farm’s creation of a natural remedy from our first forage in our woods was changing people’s lives. I got letters and phone calls from people telling me they felt I had saved their life. I cried many times with people on the phone who called to encourage me to keep doing what I was doing. It took a lot of healing customers to convince me it was really happening, and every one was a timely miracle.

It was a life lesson and one of the most humbling experiences of my life. Here I was trying so hard to bring another pound of produce to market when the land had a much bigger purpose in mind with mushrooms and herbaceous weeds if I would just listen to life and let it be. Eager for a purposeful life, that’s exactly what I did..

Half Hill Herbals: As our extract business grew, Vince came on full time and we moved production into an FDA-registered manufacturing kitchen in Woodbury. We expanded our mushroom extracts, partnered with certified organic growers and added new herbal tinctures, extracts and tonics. As I listened and grew with our customers I could see more clearly the path we were always on and how it unfolded in our products and stories of healing. I fell more in love with our weeds, sometimes spending hours identifying and understanding them. I still have a lot to learn and a lot more to share.

      

It literally took mowing down all but one survivor of our 100 blueberry bushes last month to find the language and finally come to terms with the fact that our farm is not what I envisioned. The farm is actually something bigger and more powerful: a beautiful mess of weeds, fungi and a platform for understanding, connecting with, and sharing the healing power of nature.

There were times I sat and cried on the hillside wondering what I was doing selling cucumbers by the pound from two farmable acres. I’ve learned to listen a lot more and trust what the land has been telling me all along. With smarter stewardship and patience, the land will show you its gifts. Weeds and wild herbs that were once in the way of another small crop row have captured my imagination, my heart and my soul.

As I look five years ahead, I see a lot less struggling with mowing and keeping a tidy garden. I see more mushrooms, clover, yellow dock, elderberries, burdock, nettle, mint, yarrow, bee balm, mullein, plantain and yes, dandelion. I see sanctuary. I see more healing. I see life and sharing our future together in the weeds!

Shop Half Hill Farm online or visit our retail store in the Arts Center of Cannon County.

How to get more vitamin D from your Shiitake mushroom harvest


Shiitake mushrooms growing on oak logs at Half Hill Farm in Woodbury, TN

If you purchased a Shiitake mushroom log from Half Hill Farm that is tagged “F14,” now is the time to follow your soaking / shocking steps to get your first edible mushrooms within a week.

Once your Shiitake mushroom log starts producing mushrooms, there’s a simple technique that dramatically increases their vitamin D before you either eat them or dehydrate them for long term storage.

Mycologist Paul Stamets details this simple process and science here, but the basic steps are pretty simple:

  1. Remove stems and slice into roughly half inch slices.
  2. Spread slices evenly on drying racks (anything that allows air flow) in the sunshine with the gills facing up for 6 peak hours avoiding early morning dew and evening moisture.
  3. Bring the mushrooms indoors overnight to avoid humidity, then repeat 6 hours of sun exposure the next day to achieve 12 total peak hours of UV exposure.
  4. Finish completely drying your Shiitake mushrooms in a dehydrator, and store them in sealed jars. To enjoy anytime, simply soak them for an hour and follow most any recipe for fresh mushrooms.

According to Stamets, Shiitake mushrooms that are not exposed to sun may have less than 40 IU/100g of vitamin D. With the steps above, you can expect 46,000 IU/100g of vitamin D, D2, D3, and D4!

To achieve healthy serum levels of vitamin D exclusively from your dried Shiitake mushrooms, you will need to eat no more than 10 grams a day which is roughly equivalent to 100 grams of fresh Shiitake (3.6 ounces).

Purchase your own mushroom log: Our one foot Shiitake mushroom logs are available for scheduled pick up on our farm in Woodbury, TN. They are $22 and will produce 15-20 lbs. of mushrooms over a 3-5 year period. Here is how to get yours.

Make your own mushroom log: Schedule your own private 2-3 hour mushroom log workshop for groups of up to four people on our farm, take home the log you make, and start turning your own logs into a sustainable food source. Here’s how to schedule your workshop.

DISCLAIMER: I am a farmer. I am not a doctor. Please consult your physician before using any of our products or advice for health purposes.