This is Wendy with GASP – Grow Appalachia at the  Appalachian South Folklife Center in Pipestem, WV

The first of our seed orders arrived at the house. The mailman left us a card last week that the order was at the post office, it wouldn’t fit in the mailbox & there was too much snow for him to get up our driveway. That meant that I had to wait the entire weekend to get them. It is hard to describe the feeling I get when I order vegetable seeds and even harder to describe how I feel when I open the package. Today I made myself wait until some of my work was done before opening them. These will mostly be seeds that we will plant in the Folklife Center Teaching Garden as well as sharing some with our “at home” gardeners. We will also be starting our plants to set out with these seeds. This is just the first of several orders and we are more than pleased. While reading the names on the packets I began to imagine what it will be like to set each of those little life-giving seeds into the dirt and then I imagined how excited I will be when the little plants peek up out of the soil and the joy of seeing blooms and small fruits. And then, Bang! before you know it we will all be harvesting our food from our gardens. Now, I’ve been gardening and farming long enough that I know that it doesn’t happen quite like this and that there is a whole lot of work that goes on long before you enjoy any harvest, but on this cold, snow on the ground, February day, I chose to lose myself in the bright sunny daydream that will soon be reality. If we can just get through a few more cold and snowy days.