Getting Things Started

Well, it’s been a long road, but we have finally managed to get our blog set up and we’re looking forward to getting our garden underway!  This is our first year with Grow Appalachia and we’re still trying to make our way through the manuals, but we’ve been having a lot of meetings and coming up with several great ideas. One thing we’d really like to do is get the children from our church involved with helping us set up and take care of our garden.

A couple of weeks ago a couple of us set out on a shopping adventure. Neither of us knew much about gardening or what we were looking for but the few places we went were helpful. The gentlemen at Southern States in Corbin, KY were very helpful with looking over our current soil test and letting us know what we needed to add into our soil. They also walked us through and talked to us about some things to look for when we were picking out gardening tools. Then we made our way over to Lowe’s of Corbin, where we worked with several gentlemen who were willing to help us out with discounts on supplies as well as possibly receiving some donations from them to help out with our community garden.

And just last evening we had a training on organic gardening with Mr. Paul Dengel. We learned lots of new things and he helped to give us some guidance in regards to getting our garden started. The biggest question we had was whether or not Captan was considered organic and he answered that one for us without even having to ask. He talked to us about soil testing and how to make our soil more acidic or basic depending on what we needed and he gave us some great advice on tools that we should have on hand to help us with our garden. Everyone of us at the training learned something and we look forward to working with him more on trainings throughout the season.

We have our garden layout all set up and we’re on the move with getting everything else going…if only this weather would clear up and dry out.

Just part of our motley crew!