Happy Easter Eve everyone. Lori here from McDowell County.

Here is a follow up from last month. We had the second info meeting for McDowell County as scheduled, with 6 more participants signing up. We also did our first info meeting in Mercer County with 10 signing up.
We made the fertilizer delivery to High Rocks and Linwood with minimal trouble. The biggest issue was when we got to Linwood’s drop off spot there was snow on the ground. I am not a fan of snow.

Since then, we have been hard at work organizing our participants paperwork into their locations so we can get the plowing started and not have to back track a lot. We got the seed lists, garden plans and soil samples from our participants.

We attended our Regional Meeting in Mullens at the MOC. They have a really cool place there and were very hospitable. Lunch rocked! We also picked up the seeds that David was nice enough to bring with him.

We had our first of two Planning and Planting Classes for McDowell County on the 13th. About half of our participants made it to that one, and the rest will be attending the next one on Monday the 17th. Some of them are going to try growing some of their seed potatoes in feed bags to see if the Pinterest hype is real. Since we save all the bags from our livestock feed we passed them out to the ones that wanted to try it. The picked up their fertilizer, seed potatoes and some seeds that are ready to plant now. We sent them out with the very handy soil temperature chart that was emailed to us. So thank you for that. We will be doing the first Planning and Planting class in Mercer County this coming week as well as starting the plowing.

The returning participant family from Mercer county that allowed us to have the info meeting in their home is going to let us do the planning and planting one there as well. After class is over we will be discussing some possible options they found for the other classes. There is a possibility of them finding us a building that we can rent and will have fund raisers to be able to pay for it. We are looking forward to seeing what we can do.

I think I may have caused one of our volunteers from the DHHR to have a breakdown. I was teaching them how to make newspaper seed starters because they wanted to know what I was doing. The one poor girl just could not grab the concept and just couldn’t handle the stress. She didn’t handle the seed separating on the 12th well either. Three of us started separating the seeds into 100 count baggies for the participants, and see couldn’t handle the peas rolling away from her. She is lucky we didn’t hand her the cucumber seeds instead. A couple of the guys decided to help us, but of course they went for the bean seeds and left the small ones for us. I wish now I would have got the cabbage seeds too,a little pay back for them.

We have been so busy, it’s hard to remember everything that has been happening. It seems like everyone else is concerned about that giraffe having her baby or hiding Easter eggs, and we are down here concerned about keeping everything organized and hoping the weather cooperates for plowing.

We are on a roll and loving every bit of it.

Until next time, have a wonderful Easter.