Hello all, this is David Cornette with Hindman Settlement School Grow Appalachia. In today’s blog post, I will give you some updates about what we’ve been up to over here and share some photos of the beautiful gardens our participants have raised!

This week marked the beginning of our Farmer’s Market, and we have big plans to continue to grow our local market. Once a month, we will be holding the Farmer’s Market downtown on a Saturday and will incorporate music and crafts to help bring people in to support our farmer’s. We are looking forward to this new promotional event, and will even be having our third and final Saturday market during the Gingerbread Festival, which should bring a lot of attention (and money) to our local growers.

Our attempt at urban gardening (in the most rural of places) has been a success! The soil in this parking lot was better than we could have hoped and everything seems to be producing healthily.

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Also, we seem to have really good luck lately when it comes to people just giving us stuff for free! As I mentioned in the previous post, we received around $1,000 worth of plants from the Berea College Greenhouse. This time, our local seed store (Childers) made a donation of around the same amount. Sure, they were Bonnie plants that didn’t sell very well, but we were more than happy to make good use of them! Here is a portion of what he gave us (there were enough flats to fill up that trailer twice):

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Things have been going great here. We have actually seen an increase in attendance at our meetings and workshops since the beginning of the year. In fact, just yesterday we happened to have two events in one day: a canning workshop sponsored by the Knott County Extension Agency, and our monthly Grow Appalachia participants meeting. Both events were attended by more than 30 people, many of whom were not participants but expressed interest in joining next year! We are excited to have so many people actively engaged with our program, and can’t wait to continue the work in years to come!

 

And now, enjoy a gallery of the lovely gardens we have had the pleasure of visiting over the past few days (I tried posting them here but there were too many): Click here to view the pictures!