SubLink™ Ultralight Hammock System
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The Bluffs-A Wonderfully Nostalgic Restaurant
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SubLink™ Ultralight Hammock System
July 15, 2024
The Bluffs-A Wonderfully Nostalgic Restaurant
September 3, 2025

You can see the mountains from Susan Owen’s porch—blue layers rising soft and wide like folds in a quilt. Her cabin, a two-century-old structure rescued from the other side of Watauga County, sits like it belongs there, not just placed on the land but carved into it. Every corner of the home has been touched by intention: blooms spill from handmade planters, heirloom furniture rests beside folk art, and each detail feels curated—not for show, but for meaning.

Susan has spent more than forty years as an organic farmer, working closely with the rhythms of earth and water. Her days have been shaped by soil, seeds, and the steady patience that growing things requires. So it’s all the more striking that she’s also a blacksmith—comfortable at the forge, working with fire and metal. That blend of elements shows in everything she touches. The home she shares with her husband is part living gallery, part mountain haven, where strength and beauty live side by side.

Step off the porch and follow the gravel switchbacks through the garden beds, and the mountain begins to swallow you. The light changes. Trees lean in, and sound softens. You walk deeper into the holler, where wildness takes over and cultivated order gives way to something older, looser, more alive. And then, suddenly, it opens.

At the bottom of the wooded fold, nestled in a clearing ringed with thick forest, stands her pawpaw orchard—rows and rows of trees planted with precision, their trunks still slender, their roots reaching deeper each year. The symmetry of the orchard stands in quiet contrast to the wildness around it. The fruit won’t be ready until September, but the space already hums with life and anticipation. This is where her magic happens.

 

A Dream, Planted

“You know the old song about the pawpaw patch?” Susan said, her voice half-laughing. “I remember asking my mom what a pawpaw was, and she just shrugged."

That mystery stuck with her, lodged like a seed waiting for the right time to sprout. She grew up in Winston-Salem but dreamed of a different life—one rooted in the mountains, in a place where she could grow things, make things, live quietly. She even wrote an essay for a college application  describing the life she imagined: a cabin in the woods, a bit of land, a farm to tend. “You can’t live like that,” a college advisor told her. “You need to think about becoming a CEO or something.”

When Susan discovered the cabin—rough-hewn, weathered, and more than 200 years old on a nearby mountainside—she relocated it to a place that felt just right, nestled in nature and alive with birdsong and breeze. That was nearly three decades ago. Though she didn’t live there full-time at first, she began planting anyway, including three small pawpaw saplings Susan picked up on a whim. She didn’t know much about the fruit, only that the name stirred something familiar—like a memory trying to surface, or a line from an old song half-remembered.

About ten years ago, Susan and her husband realized there was nothing tying them to town any longer, and they could live full time on their mountainside. Now Susan wakes up surrounded by the very life she imagined as a young woman—the cabin, the quiet, the food she grows, the orchard beyond the garden beds. What once seemed like a pipe dream is now something solid, rooted, and very much alive.

Growing What Few Know

Pawpaws are generous in fruit, but finicky in almost everything else. They don’t take kindly to mistakes, as Susan learned early on.

The first time her trees bore fruit, she was thrilled. She carefully saved the seeds from that harvest, imagining all the new trees she’d grow. She laid them out to dry—like she’d done with other plants a hundred times before. But pawpaw seeds are different. Once they dry out, they’re done. They won’t germinate, no matter how lovingly you plant them.

“I was so proud of that first harvest,” she said. “And then I ruined every single seed.” She laughed when she told us, but there was something else in her voice, too—reverence. The kind you develop when you learn something the hard way.

Since then, she’s grown into one of the region’s most knowledgeable pawpaw growers, and it didn’t come from books. “Sometimes, you get advice that sounds confident but turns out to be wrong,” she told us. “There just aren’t that many people who know how to grow pawpaws well. So I had to figure it out myself.”

She grows native trees from seed in her greenhouses—carefully stored, never dried—and grafts rare cultivars onto some of them. The wild types remain her favorites, but the grafted trees produce larger fruit with more consistent flavor. What began with three saplings has become a forest in progress.

And even after decades of working with plants, Susan still finds the pawpaw a worthy challenge. “They’re not like anything else,” she said. “That’s what makes them interesting.”

A Fruit You Have to Chase

Even now, most people have never tasted a pawpaw. That’s not because they’re rare in the wild—they’re not. It’s because pawpaws don’t behave the way modern fruit is supposed to. You can’t pick them early and let them ripen in a truck. You can’t store them for weeks. You definitely can’t bounce them around in a shipping crate. They bruise fast, soften quickly, and go from perfect to mush in the blink of an eye.

That fragility is part of their charm—and their curse. “They’re not a commercial fruit,” Susan said plainly. “They don’t fit into the system.”

Instead, pawpaws have to be eaten fresh, or frozen quickly. And because they’re only in season for a few short weeks in late summer, you have to know when to look. That’s why families used to guard their pawpaw patches like secrets—racing the critters each year to get to the fruit before the raccoons, possums, and squirrels beat them to it.

These days, Susan shares her fruit with restaurants, breweries, and customers lucky enough to catch her at the right time. She freezes pulp as soon as it’s harvested, packing it in containers that end up in beer, pudding, and even sorbet.

Boone’s Lost Province Brewing Co. has made pawpaw sorbet. Appalachian Mountain Brewery has brewed pawpaw beer. Over Yonder restaurant makes a pawpaw pudding that’s pure Appalachian alchemy.

And on the day we visited, Susan served us pawpaw ice cream—soft, creamy, golden as custard, with a flavor that lives somewhere between banana, mango, and vanilla. It’s tropical, almost. But there’s something Appalachian about it too. Something quiet and full.

“People always ask me what it tastes like,” Susan said, smiling. “But to me, a pawpaw tastes like a pawpaw.”

Pawpaws and the Creatures They Keep

Pawpaws don’t just taste like they came from another place. They feel like they came from another time.

“They go back to mastodons,” Susan told us, brushing a hand across the leaves. And that’s not just poetic—it’s botanical fact. Pawpaws are one of the oldest fruiting plants in North America, dating back tens of millions of years. They existed before bees did. Their pollinators aren’t the fluttering types we usually picture—they’re beetles and flies.

The flowers themselves are strange: deep maroon, with a scent that’s earthy and slightly fermented. It’s not unpleasant, but it’s not delicate either. It’s designed to attract creatures that most gardeners would swat away. Pawpaws thrive in relationship with what’s ancient, overlooked, and essential.

Susan knows this rhythm well now. She doesn’t expect her orchard to behave like a row of peaches or apples. She lets it be what it is—wild, rooted, and older than memory.

That deep connection to the natural world has brought unexpected visitors. The zebra swallowtail butterfly, rare in this region and considered absent by official records, still appears in her orchard from time to time. She sees them—just now and then—black and white and flitting low among the leaves. She knows there are caterpillars too, resting on the soft underside of pawpaw leaves.

“They find the trees,” she said simply. “They know.”

The zebra swallowtail depends entirely on pawpaws. It’s the only plant its caterpillars can eat, the single thread tying its fragile life cycle to the forest floor. Without pawpaws, there are no zebra swallowtails—no flicker of black-and-white wings, no flash of red near the tail, no summer dance above the leaves. And here, in this quiet hollow, they’ve found a patch of forest where that old partnership still holds.

A Growing Patch, A Growing Legacy

What began with just three saplings has grown into a living archive of flavor, memory, and biodiversity. Today, Susan tends a total of seventy pawpaw trees, with sixty carefully planted in her orchard. The collection includes several prized varieties—Rappahannock, Potomac, Susquehanna, Rebecca’s Gold, and Overleese—each offering its own balance of texture and taste. Some are grafted from the legendary Peterson line, known for their size and reliability. But Susan still makes room for the wild ones—the untamed natives—because they matter, too. They carry the old genetics, the deep-rooted resilience, and a flavor you can’t quite pin down, except to say it tastes like the forest remembered.

She attends pawpaw conferences around the country, often finding herself the only woman—or one of very few—in rooms full of men focused on breeding bigger fruit, smaller seeds, tighter yields. But Susan doesn’t shrink in those rooms. She speaks up.

“I’ve told them,” she said, “there’s something to be said for native plants.”

For Susan, the smaller, wild-growing pawpaws aren’t inferior—they’re practical. “They’re eating size,” she said. “You can pick one off the tree and eat it fresh. Those larger ones can be up to a pound. You can’t just eat that off the tree! You can’t even share that with a friend...you have to take it inside to process it. There’s room for both.”

That balance—between cultivation and wildness, science and story, old and new—is what defines her orchard. In her greenhouses, tucked into the hills beside the old cabin, she grows pawpaw seedlings with care and patience.

Each one is a small miracle—sprouted from seeds that must be kept moist, coaxed into life by someone who’s learned what most people have forgotten.

She shares what she’s learned at festivals and workshops, speaking as someone who’s paid close attention. She believes in biodiversity, in old knowledge, and in growing food that means something.

Grown to Share

We end our visit in the greenhouse, where rows of young pawpaw trees stretch toward the light, their slender trunks marked by graft scars—visible reminders of the careful union between rootstock and cultivar.

Like apples, pawpaws are often grafted to ensure consistent fruit quality, and some seedlings grow wild and unaltered; others carry names like Potomac or Susquehanna, waiting to become someone else’s orchard, someone else’s beginning.

She sells both the fruit and the trees—fresh pawpaws during the brief window when they’re ripe, frozen pulp year-round, and young trees ready for planting.

“It’s a way to keep them going,” she says, brushing soil from a pot. “To make sure they’re not forgotten.”

For anyone interested in buying fruit or trees, the best way to start is simply to reach out. Email thelilypatchfarm@gmail.com to begin a conversation. Susan will likely ask where you live, what your land is like, what your goals are. It’s not just about selling a tree—it’s about putting the right one in the right hands.

As we leave the greenhouse, the air warm with leaf smell and potting soil, we can see the forest line just beyond the plastic walls. The pawpaw patch is still out there, waiting—an orchard planted by Susan’s own hands, each tree placed with thought and purpose, each row a testament to years of care. But in here, something else is growing—a quiet promise of more. These young trees, with their graft scars and tender leaves, hold within them the hope of future orchards, of shaded groves heavy with custard-sweet fruit. They carry the potential to restore what was once nearly forgotten, to bring pawpaws back into yards, parks, and homesteads where they can thrive. Each pot, each sapling, is a beginning—not just for the land where it will root, but for the people who will tend it, taste its fruit, and weave its story into their own.

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