Happy 2016 Folks! Lori here from McDowell County, West Virginia. We hope you all are having a great January so far. Lets get to it shall we. First of all, I think our chickens are confused…They are laying more eggs now than they ever have which is weird given last winter we were lucky to get 3 eggs a day and that they didn’t freeze on the way out of the chicken. So far since the first of the year we have gotten 306 eggs. Even our one remaining female duck is laying overtime. It used to be one egg a day, now she just shoots out a weeks worth at a time. Maybe she has PEZ dispenser super powers. We are definitely not complaining, in fact we are thrilled to be able to provide fresh eggs to people more often. We were given a nice donation by one of our long time supporters, so we went and bought an incubator. This is the first time we have ever tried to incubate eggs, and we hope we have good luck with them. If we have a good hatch rate we intend to share the chicks with our participants if they would like some and of course we would keep some at the center as well.

We have a work team coming in April that is going to help us get a new fenced area in for the goats, and are going to help us build our outdoor canning kitchen. It’s a group of 52 11th grade boys, we can get er done.

We are tickled to death to be a part of the Grow Appalachia Family for a third year. We have started recruiting our participants, so far we have 15 returning and another 12 new ones so far. That’s a few more than expected, but we got this. Our first get together will be after the All Hands Gathering in February. We are expecting more people to sign up especially given the recent developments down here. More of our coal mines have shut down and hundreds of miners are out of work, and today we found out our Wal-Mart will be closed on the 28th of this month. There are another 140 jobs gone. People are going to have to go back to the land to survive.

We are doing our seed inventory and making lists of what other seeds we need. Orders will be going out soon. Tools are being counted, classes are being set up. At the center we are planning creative planter ideas, We asked for tires last year, and people did not disappoint! I have a feeling our parking lot is going to get a lot smaller, and the best thing about that is it’s all free stuff.

Dj, our pepper meter man is throwing out ideas at least 74 times a day. I think he might be a bit excited.

Oh yeah our Reading Camp theme this year will be “Down on the Farm”. I’m hoping we have some baby goats and pigs by then.

I hope I got everything in here that I wanted to share. If not next months blog will be an epic novel.

See you all next month.