Happy Ides of March y’all! Lori here from McDowell County West Virginia. Spring is almost here we think. We’ve got the fever, either for the flavor of fresh produce, or hay fever. I’m going with the food even though our sinuses may disagree.

Erratic weather has been fun around here. Just when we were working on our plow schedule with our participants, Mother Nature says “Nope, not today”. No worries though, we can handle her and we have plenty of other things to do.

We have had an information meeting in between rain/snow and snow/rain days and have started getting seed lists and are getting soil samples gathered up. Another meeting is being scheduled for other folks that didn’t make the first one.

We have gotten tools and seeds ordered, and are looking into a connection for seed potatoes.

We are looking to have our first of two planning and planting classes before the end of the month. We had to push them back a bit since we had a teachers strike here in our lovely state and folks wanted to stand with the teachers or be at home with their kids.

We would like to let it be known that if any partner sites in our region need to have fertilizer hauled this year, we are able to do it as we have in the past.

We were sad to find out we weren’t having an all hands gathering this year, but are looking forward to our regional meeting that I believe is scheduled in April. It will be nice to see everyone.

The plow has been serviced and is ready to go. We have been trying to recruit some volunteers to help us out with our program this year, and so far so good with that. We have our regular yearly work groups that come in to do home repair and other work, that are always willing to help.

We are hoping that this year turns out as well or better than last year. We are looking forward to working with our returning families as well as bringing new participants in to the fold.

Like last year, we will have participants from both McDowell and Mercer counties. We will all be working hard to make this the best year yet.

Our next post will have pictures, and we apologize for the lack of them this time, but other than snow and mud ther really wasn’t much chance for photo ops.

Until next time, Have a wonderful and productive month, I know we will.