Hello everyone. My name is Alex Sanders and I am the Grow Appalachia Site Supervisor at Project Worth Outreach in Menifee County, Kentucky. Project Worth Outreach is located in beautiful rural northeastern Kentucky.

The weather has finally began to improve and you can actually see the ground. It is quite wet but improving. We have had some nice temperatures recently and the ground has started drying up. We recently began preparing our greenhouse to provide some early spring plants for our gardeners. In our greenhouses right now we have broccoli, cabbage, peppers and tomatoes.  Before you know it we will be distributing these plants to our gardeners.

On Monday, March 9, 2015 we held our second Grow Appalachia meeting. The first meeting was an organizational meeting and the second meeting was our garden planning and garden planting meeting. The great news is that our Director, Gail Mills, was not only able to attend, after an extended and ongoing recovery from an automobile accident, but was able to lead these lessons. During the meeting Gail stated how important it is to plan your garden. What you want to grow and how much. The size of your garden and the importance of only growing a large enough garden that you can handle and not be overwhelmed. She said that a small garden can produce a lot of food if it is well taken care of throughout the growing season. She also stated that you should consider how much food you want to consume, preserve, share and sell while planning your garden. Also, Gail touched on several topics including when seeds and fertilizer would be available, when certain vegetables should be planted, different ways to control weeds, how wide row should be, how far apart certain plants should be planted and many other topics. We have 40 garden families signed up and we had 48 people in attendance at this meeting. We have 15 garden families who have given us a verbal commitment but have yet to sign an agreement. I am in constant contact with these gardeners and answering any questions they may have. We are still hard at work trying to identify and inform other potential garden families. We hope with the improvement in the weather we can finish our recruitment of garden families in a very short amount of time.

I thought I would share a few photos of Project Worth, Staff and Volunteers with everyone. I hope you enjoy these.

Until next time, I hope everyone enjoys the beginning of Spring and gets all their gardens started in a timely manner. Happy gardening.