Springin' Up and Crop Mobs

I’m posting a couple of articles I found this morning.  Please bear with me.  I’m going through a bit of a struggle with some personal matters.  But I’m hanging in there.  The list of projects helps - not to mention my four-legged kids.

For now - learn and enjoy!

Kit - " A Simpler Time "
by Kimberly Stewart

' Crop Mob' volunteers help small farms in North Carolina


Rob Jones, his boots smeared with mud, was trying to get the attention of a ragged group of young men and women dressed in jeans and work boots. They were toting shovels and rakes as they stomped across a barren field toward a plot of freshly turned earth.

This was Crop Mob, a roving band of volunteers dedicated to helping young farmers build sustainable small farms. It's a modern version of a barn-raising, with volunteers brought together by Google and Facebook.

Jones, a Crop Mob founder who grows his own vegetables at home, gathered up the volunteers to help farmer Jason Oatis build rice paddies. They were to be taught by Oatis, a bearded 40-year-old who is trying to carve out a sustainable farm on a few acres of sticky clay soil on a pine-studded plot in central North Carolina.

"It's fantastic -- these people love working the land, but they don't have their own farms, and I could definitely use the help," Oatis said as the mobbers' shovels smacked against wet clay, pounding out low earthen walls for each rice paddy.

( Read more... )


Pig City Garden Calendar:
Gardening that Amounts to a Row of Beans

By Dan Marvin

As we all plan toward what we want to plant, where we want to plant it and how much we want to plant to satisfy our needs and possibly extra to take to CazCares, we should consider putting together a list of those things we need to get the garden off to a good start.

If you will have pole beans you will need six- to seven-foot-long treated one-inch-by-one-inch poles to set up like a teepee.

I am working on a plan to have pole beans by special arrangement on a raised patio with the beans planted in large pots around the poles where they enter into the planting medium in the big pots. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

( Read More... )

There's been discussion about dogs that kill chickens in one of my Yahoo Groups.  One of the girls found a video that she shared.  I decided to pass it along here.  I never even imagined Ceasar  - aka - "The Dog Whisperer" initiating this!  But then - I never connected the dots from Jet Mechanic back to Auto Mechanic with my Hubby when we first met!  " Duhhhh!! "