This week brought a wonderful donation offer to the Grow Appalachia Red Bird Mission site.  I was contacted by a warehouse owner just north of  Knoxville Tennessee who has thousands of cases of a product called the “Mater Moat”. It seems the inventor has passed away and has left them on his hands and he has offered us all we can haul if we can come pick them up.

The” Mater Moat” is a feeding  and watering system created to reduce the number of times one has to water and feed by directing all of the water directly into  the root system. For more information click on link below.

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/5/prweb9552323.htm

We plan on going  to pick up all of the units we can haul and feel they will be beneficial to our participants especially the ones practicing raised bed gardening. We are going to place a few in our raised beds here on campus and experiment with them using the principals of companion planting and square foot gardening.

Saturday will bring our second Farmers Market and despite the delayed planting due to all the rain in our area we are seeing an increase in the number of people interested in becoming vendors at our market. We have also had two of our Grow Appalachia members begin to utilize the Home based Micro-processing certification that they obtained with the aid of Grow Appalachia and Red Bird Mission.

It really pleases me to see our efforts of promoting entrepreneurship pay off and to see our participants realize the opportunity to create an income from their homes and gardens in an area where economic growth has become nearly stagnant. This could change our community on so many levels. It would increase our food security,increase the amount of affordable healthy foods that are available and provide a much needed income to the people of Appalachia.

I am so blessed to have a job that gives me the opportunity to make such a difference in my community . Thanks Grow Appalachia.