While traveling through the country roads of southern West Virginia numerous thoughts, memories, songs, and words can pass through ones mind, and for myself in particular one word captures all passing me by; entrancing. The area still “seems” to remain untouched and Alderson especially retains an amazing sense of purity rare to find in this tumultuous and hectic world we find ourselves a part of. In this small town exists a community that encourages you to sit down for awhile and embrace the freshly blooming daffodils. A community where the grocer isn’t just a grocer but instead a place to unite with friends and actually listen to what is going on in their lives. This slow paced and connected community is an ideal host to the Grow Appalachia Organization and both the organization and area do nothing but thrive from each others company.

This is shown particularly even in the past month at Alderson and the Green Grocer. Participants have really grown tremendously with the aid of the organization. The Garden Planting workshop has produced such amazing seedlings that the farmers could not wait to retrieve from the Alderson USDA Green House! The varieties of spinach were ready to plant and with the help of a local nursery in Hinton, West Virginia we transplanted between one hundred to one hundred and fifty spinach seedlings from the huge flats and were able to send them all off to be successfully planted into the newly rain glazed West Virginia ground!

Sadly, the past couple weeks have brought a lot more rain than necessarily desired, but people here are now planting their tomatoes and peppers and warm weather plants now that the chill is moving out! Our participants visited an amazing farmer named Thomas Keys and his wife and were able to see a great amount of land being used organically and successfully! Thomas went of garden planting and maintenance with us all while giving us an amazing tour of his orchard, green house, and so much more! Alderson Grow Appalachia is now getting ready for out Healthy Cooking workshop and we cannot wait to see what awaits! Until next time!