This has been a very productive week for Grow Appalachia here at Red Bird Mission. We got a lot accomplished with the help of volunteers from the University of Tennessee, and Deerfield Illinois. We bagged a few hundred pounds of seed and divided them out so that all our families could take one at our meeting and would have more than enough seeds to fill their gardens with a variety of things. Most all of these seeds were donated to us by the Mennonite Central Committee in Isom, KY. This donation included 4 varieties of sweet corn, three types of beans, three types of squash, zucchini, lettuce, turnips, mustard and melons. A very big thanks to them for the donation.

The volunteers also aided us in starting some more plants in our greenhouse in addition moving some raised beds to another location. This year we are growing produce to sell to the Red Bird Mission Work Camp program. We have been giving out seed potatoes and onion sets to the participants and many of them have been planted.
We had a meeting Thursday March 29.  It was a Basic Gardening workshop.  We had about 40 in attendance at the meeting. Afterwards they took their gardening plans and picked up their seeds. We have all our soil samples in and should be getting results back any day. Thanks to David Cooke we received our shipment of fertilizer this week and will begin to distributing it as soon as the soil sample results come. This will enable us to make proper decisions on how much each participant needs. God Bless and Happy Planting!