By GreenHouse17 Staff

Autumn has been called the year’s last loveliest smile. Although the leaves haven’t even begun to change colors yet, our grins go ear-to-ear when we think about the early fall happenings on the farm and all the people who support our work to nurture lives harmed by intimate partner abuse. This week’s post features a few of the reasons we’re smiling so much lately.

Popcorn 🙂

Popcorn has been making people smile for thousands of years, and this week we started harvesting ours! This NPR video covers the history and science behind the amazing little kernels in less than two minutes. And that’s about how long it will take us to finish off the first delicious popped bowl, but we  have to wait for it to dry a little bit more before we dig in.

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High Tunnels 🙂

Grow Appalachia Technical Director Mark Walden and Americorps VISTA Member Holly Korb helped us to build a gothic-style high tunnel. Holly wrote a great blog about the ins and outs of the process. You can read it here. We captured one of the final magic moments of the construction in this video.

 
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Fall Weddings 🙂

Many soon-to-be-couples have been turning to us to provide bouquets and centerpieces for their big day! This year we’ve received several fall wedding orders. And we just love that our flowers get to be part of such a special celebration of love. Here’s a beautiful photo of the centerpieces for a recent ceremony.

 

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These flowers look pretty proud of themselves – as well they should!

 

Commercial Kitchen 🙂

A small but might crew of contractors has been working hard to renovate the small outbuilding on the back of our property for our new commercial kitchen. So much progress has been made, and so many people have helped along the way! JP’s Peace, Love & Happiness Foundation was the first to step in with generous funding. United Way of the Bluegrass and Grow Appalachia have supported the project too, and local home builders and philanthropists Don and Mira Ball  are committed to helping us see the project through. And that day is quickly approaching.  The inspector will be visiting our new commercial kitchen on Monday to make sure everything is good to go. Wish us luck!

 

 

Online Storefront 🙂

We’ve been learning all kinds of new things during the build out of our new Etsy online storefront! The first order of business was taking photos of the Handmade by Survivors products we’ll be selling. We watched all kinds of how-to and best-practice videos before the big photo shoot. We chose three “looks” for each item: clean white close-up, garden background, and on-the-fencepost.  You can find some of our favorite helpful product photo links here, here, and here.  (Oh, by the way, our shop should be open for business in the next couple of weeks!)