Most of our growers are transitioning from tree fruits to vegetables at the moment. Those who have apple and pear trees have done their grafting and pruning, and now they're thinking of the garden soil prep. In order to maintain safe numbers for our apple grafting this year, we broke that into four separate
A welcomed comment from one of our first-year participants recently concerned what the program meant to he and his wife: “It has taught us many things including discipline concerning recordkeeping. We are so astonished by the harvest totals. We would have never come close to guessing our amounts without the recordkeeping.” They harvested over
One thing that's always struck me about gardening in the mountains is how we tack names to our plants. We connect the things we grow with the person who first introduced us to it, whether it's an apple or bean. When I lived in Kentucky, I would've had very little landscaping had it not been
Good start, but not without challenges In Wise County, we had the goal of adding as many new Grow Appalachia growers as possible this year, especially from the towns of Coeburn and Appalachia. We haven't seen a lot of participation from those towns in the past. We had sign-ups and the Garden Planning
Week 4 6.24.19 To start the week we did a program at Natural Tunnel for the Junior Ranger program. Phil and I talked about trees and plants, the functioning parts and did a short hike to point out tree types and interesting facts about them. Once we got back to the office I fertilized my
6.17.19 I plan on working Saturday, so I took a half day today. Used the morning to finish planning the dates and venues for my educational programs the rest of my 10 weeks here. After that I visited the home and garden of a Grow Wise participant to prepare for todays Grow Wise meeting.
Week 2 6.10.2019 Most of the morning was spent inside the office. I contacted a few people for some home garden visits for the afternoon. Went to two homes, the first garden was immaculate! The gardeners around this area really know what they are doing. She did however have trouble growing melons and wants to
Hello Everyone! My name is Joslyn and this was my first week as the summer intern at the Wise County Extension office. I moved to Virginia in January 2019 after graduating from Michigan Technological University where I studied ecology and environmental sciences. I grew up in Manistee Michigan, with Lake Michigan never more than 10
In April, we were able to take a group of our Market Growers to the Organic Crops Field Day at the East Tennessee Agricultural Research & Education Center in Knoxville. To see organic production on that scale was impressive, and we learned that a substantial percentage of what's grown on the site is marketed via
Once upon a time, Wise County was the third largest apple producer in Virginia. Today, we're down to one commercial orchard (or two if you count the 14 acres managed by the prison for their own use). Even though we no longer have this industry, home orchards can thrive, and our annual apple grafting workshops