Peak season work!

This is an exhausted Maria writing from Williamson, WV.  I have just made it through four days of field work with volunteers, and have two more to go! Luckily I have had the afternoon off, as we have had some rain today, and all of the crops that we planted throughout the week are getting drenched.

This week we have had the pleasure of hosting three wonderful interns from Nazareth College. These three students were here last summer with a group from Amizade, and loved the work so much that they set up and internship to come back.

For the beginning of the summer we focused a lot of our work on our main community garden, but this time we decided to share the volunteers with some of our market gardeners. The volunteers went to Smith Farm’s to learn about honey (and I chewed my first honey comb and it was amazing!) They also spent the day with Paul and Arlene Starr this morning (in the rain) and helped them harvest their tomatoes, beans and peppers. Each of the gardeners that we helped were incredibly thankful for this assistance during peak season. The New Yorkers definitely got their fill of southern hospitality. They also worked with Living Water Daycare on Wednesday to help the kids plants their fall crops as well

Yesterday we held our fall planting event and as always I was amazed at the turnout. My volunteers made one round of calls on Tuesday to let everyone know about the event, and so many people showed up!! One of which is a patient at the Diabetes Coalition in Williamson, and kept saying how gardening has saved his life and how appreciative he was of the opportunity to garden there. His grandson who is raised and who is 13, came out and helped him and he seemed to really enjoy picking out the seeds and showing us girls how to weed:)  We planted swiss chard, lettuce, fall beans, cabbage and more.

So far it has been a successful week and looking forward to the next two days!