The Stories We Don’t Often Tell: A 10-Year Retrospective

By Lyndon, Amie, and Kether

Ten years is a lifetime in farming. It’s a decade of seasons, storms, fermentations, and growth. As we hit this milestone at Botanist & Barrel, we wanted to do something different. Instead of just celebrating the wins, we wanted to pull back the curtain on what it actually took to get here.

We are pulling together three different perspectives—the founder, the partner, and the mother—to tell the real story of our first ten years.

It hasn’t always been pretty. In fact, it started with a fire.

Lyndon’s Story: The Spark & The Scars

Here’s a little story we don’t often tell.

Ten years ago it was just four of us. Me, my sister, and our spouses, standing on a piece of land that barely felt like ours, trying to build something from nothing. No investors, no plan B, just long days, borrowed tools, and a whole lot of faith that this work mattered.

The day before we opened to the public, I blew myself up with propane.

Not metaphorically. Literally. One bad move and a spark, and I was in the burn unit ICU with 2.5-degree burns, the kind that leaves your nerves intact so you can feel everything. The sounds on that floor can never be erased from memory. IYKYK.

I walked into the winery, skin dripping, my hat burnt to my hair, and asked my sister for some wet paper towels. I didn’t know what was coming. The adrenaline and the shock were taking over my body, fighting the truth.

I had a five-week-old baby at home and an eight-year-old trying to understand why dad was gone and why she couldn’t visit (it was too risky for infection). Our parents gave Amie breaks every chance they had, to hold everything together while I lay there wrapped in grafted pigskin, waiting to heal.

When I got out, I couldn’t go in the sun for almost a year. That’s a hard sentence for a farmer. My family and partners carried everything. They ran the farm, the fermentations, the business, all while I sat inside with my arms raised above my heart, clicking and clacking away on a computer, doing whatever I could while the blood pulsed and throbbed through my healing arms.

In the years since, we’ve been through it all. Five out of ten years of significant crop loss. Hurricanes that ripped through our work. A pandemic that shut everything down. We’ve lost trees, lost fruit, lost faith more than once. But somehow, we kept on.

I’ve always said, I know a lot more about what not to do, than what to do, but if there are a few things we know as a business, it’s recovery. It’s humility. It’s being burned to a crisp and learning how to spark yourself alive again.

For a long time, we hid this vulnerability. Trained in that old-school idea to never let the guests know anything is wrong, we always tried to look fine even when we weren’t. We smiled, poured drinks, and pretended that nothing was wrong. But the truth is, all we know how to do is fix things. We kick ass when we are kicked down.

What we’ve built isn’t the product of one-sided luck or money. It’s the result of stubbornness, teamwork, love for this place we call home, being in the right time at the right place, a loving family, and some damn good luck too.

We’re not chasing perfect. We’re chasing real. And that’s enough for us and we hope it’s enough for you too.

Amie’s Story: The Pivot

Ten years ago, I was at a crossroads in my career. I knew I wanted to run a small business, I just didn’t know which one. Do I stay in distribution and keep selling other people’s juice, or do I take the leap and start making my own? It was one of the hardest decisions I’d ever had to make.

Partnering with my serial-entrepreneur husband felt like the world was suddenly wide open. We didn’t have many resources, but we had a little piece of land with incredible fruit, a giant bare-bones warehouse, and the willingness to make a square peg fit into a round hole if that’s what it took.

Then came opening weekend, and the accident.

I was at the grocery store in the ketchup aisle with a cart full of last-minute things for our very first day in the tasting room when my phone rang. It was Lyndon’s sister Kether.

“There’s been an accident. It’s bad. He’s burned… his face and arms. They’re taking him to the ER.”

The bottle of ketchup slipped right out of my hand.

I don’t remember grabbing my keys. I barely remember the drive. I just remember pulling into the hospital lot and seeing my husband — my tough-as-nails, stubborn-as-hell husband — crossing the parking lot with wet rags draped over his face and arms like a mummy.

Inside the tiny ER room, it felt like every doctor, nurse, and med student squeezed in at once. That night, I sat upright in a stiff hospital chair beside him, my first night away from our five-week-old baby. Thankfully, my mom stepped in to hold everything together at home while I tried not to break under fluorescent lights and the steady beep of machines.

And then, in true Lyndon fashion, the next morning, barely able to open his eyes, he looked at me and said he wanted the tasting room to open.

“We’ve worked too hard. You have to open.”

I argued. I cried. But he insisted.

Reluctantly, I left him in the ICU and drove back to the farm. We opened the doors to the community for the first time, without the heart of our operation. And somehow, it was a great day. People loved the cider and they ate the pig Lyndon had been roasting—the very one involved in the accident. It was surreal. It was beautiful. It was terrifying. No one knew what our last 24 hours had been like. They just knew they were tasting something we’d poured the last two years of our lives into.

As soon as it wrapped, I rushed straight back to the hospital and told him everything. Even through the pain, he smiled. He was proud.

He spent a full week in the burn unit, away from our kids, and when he finally came home, reality set in. He closed his farmscaping business to focus on healing and helping Botanist & Barrel take shape in whatever way he could. And I jumped in head-first, driving our tiny lineup of bone-dry, still ciders all over the state, convincing people to try something they’d never seen before.

All of this was happening while I was raising my first baby, my eight-year-old, and my injured husband. 2017 was the most intense year of my life. It nearly flattened us and forged us at the same time.

Three years later, we were finally hitting our stride. And then the pandemic hit. Just like after Lyndon’s accident, we pivoted fast. We got a loan for a canner. We did plant sales and drive-through booze pickups. We opened our Asheville tasting room in 2021.

But somehow, we made it through.

By 2024, it finally felt like this was going to be our year! Then Hurricane Helene hit. Asheville was devastated. Our community is still rebuilding. Another reminder that nothing in this industry, or this life, is guaranteed.

But here’s what I’ve learned: after everything we’ve weathered—burns, babies, crop failures, pandemics, hurricanes—resilience isn’t something we reached for; It’s something we became.

We aren’t big on numbers but we sure are proud that over the years we have put over half a million dollars back into local fruit farms. This is the single most important number to us. Every dollar is a vote for Southern farms and Southern fruit, and we are not done.

Kether’s Story: The Balance

As this year winds down, and after looking back on our Ten Years In story, I have been sitting with what it really means to be a small business owner and a mom. How this chapter fits into the different eras of my life.

I tend to break my life into sections. Student. Life before kids. Life after kids. Life before Botanist. And now, ten years into life as a business owner.

This latest version of me comes with incredible rewards, but I do not always talk about the harder parts. The parts that ache a little when I look back. People often assume that owning a business means freedom. Calling your own shots. Choosing when to work, when to rest. And sometimes that is true. But just as often, the reality is the opposite.

In the last decade, weekends slowly turned into workdays. When everyone else is out seeking experiences, we’re the ones creating them. And while that matters, it has also meant missing baseball tournaments with my preteens. It has meant sending them off with other families so they could chase their passions while I stayed back to do the work that keeps our family afloat and keeps the business growing.

It has meant not being in the bleachers cheering them on. Not sharing a post-game dinner to lift their spirits after a tough loss. Not always being there for the small everyday moments that never make it into a photo album but live forever in your chest.

It is hard. And I have learned to wear a brave face. Not to pretend it does not hurt, but to find a way to keep moving forward. To make some kind of peace with the sacrifices. To remind myself that I am doing the best I can in this season of life, even when it does not look like the version of motherhood I once imagined.

If any of this hits home for you, especially if you are a parent walking that same tightrope, I would love to hear from you. Hit reply and tell me what this season has looked like for you, or come see us at the tasting room so we can trade stories over a glass.

A Note From All of Us

Ten years later, we feel more hopeful than ever—and endlessly grateful for the people who have carried us, believed in us, and grown with us.

If this all resonates, all we ask is that you support the farms and makers who keep showing up. We all have stories like these, we often just don’t share them. So go ahead and leave that review you haven't made time for, and shop at your local co-op when you can’t make the farmers markets.

Buy local. Drink local. Share local.

– Lyndon, Amie, & Kether