Spring is in full force here. We’ve had a lot of very warm weather, and a few cold days to set spring’s progress back. The thunderstorms last night have ushered in another cold front bringing chilly and windy weather again today and a chance of freezing temperatures and a little snow. Since it is the beginning of April, the weather is still unpredictable! We might want to throw a cover over our blooming strawberries or any tender plants we have in the garden. I’ve noticed that nature itself thinks spring is ahead of schedule. I’m finding squash, tomato, and cilantro seedlings sprouting in random places in the garden. I guess the soil has warmed enough to encourage the sprouting of these seeds.
The 2017 Grow Appalachia program in Scott and McCreary counties are up and running with a lot of eager participants. During our first meeting, we were able to give our Scott county participants a bonus of a dozen or more strawberry plants each that we dug up from runners from two strawberry beds we planted last year. We demonstrated planting cool season plant seeds, potatoes, and onion sets at our second McCreary County meeting which provided a lot of good hands on learning and discussion. We are looking forward to some scheduled garden tour meetings to help our participants to get even more hands-on garden lessons from gardening experts in our area.
Our Grow Appalachia program recently benefited from the volunteer help of many students from local churches who are members of “Disciples Now”. As a part of their mission project, a youth group from a Discipleship Now conference helped us get ready for our first distribution of seeds. This amazing group of young people from our local churches had a wonderful time sorting thousands of seeds and getting a little dirty sorting potatoes and onions! They quickly packaged vegetable seeds, potatoes, and onion sets for our program participants. With the help of many hands, they made a difficult job much easier and we greatly appreciate their time and effort. We are thrilled that they are planning to make us a part of their ongoing outreach to the community.
I guess the next time I blog we will be harvesting our cool season gardens and we will have planted a good portion of our warm season crops. April is an extremely busy month for gardeners who are trying to keep up with the weeds in addition to all their gardening chores. Happy gardening to all and I’ll be back in May.
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