Hi everyone!
Many thanks to the Schaumburg and Bensenville Garden Clubs for great programs! I mostly do question and answer and once we get started the time just flies by! After a while someone will look at their watch and say, “Oh my gosh, it’s already been two hours!” and that seems to be how it goes. It’s great fun for me because I get energy from the folks and I have as much fun as you guys! The back and forth is a lot of fun.
On Saturday I was at the Family Farmed Expo at the UIC Forum in Chicago where I moderated a panel discussion on Permaculture and large scale gardening with Bill Wilson from Midwest Permaculture, Angie Mason from Chicago Botanic Garden and Vicki Nowicki of Liberty Gardens in Downers Grove.
Angie and Bill prepared powerpoint and photos to explain their work and it was fascinating. They are doing great stuff and I learned a lot.
Great crowd! I made everyone keep their presentations short so we could take questions from the audience and community gardens was a hot topic, more than I expected!
Farm Report
Seeds that I ordered are now mostly here and the long growing season has started with plants that are ok in the cool weather. Lots of greens are starting and today sugar snap peas go in the ground. Tomorrow I will have a camera and I’ll be able to post photos which should be fun.
Last Sunday I attended the Fruit Tree Grafting Seminar at Catigny greenhouses in Winfield which was hosted by the Midwest Fruit Explorers and we fruit geeks could compare notes and I heard about a ‘Taylor” raspberry that has exceptional flavor but gets a disease that kills it off. I will be working with one member where will share a dozen plants and I will help him take care of them in a way to encourage the good microbes and discourage the diseases. This should be a fun experiment. Nutrition can do a lot but it cannot overcome weak DNA. Maybe with some good nutrition we can repair or build up the DNA. Who knows what will happen, but this will be a fun try and the fruits sound delicious! I’ll post pictures and let you know what I do and even post some results from soil tests so you can see how nutritional agriculture works. Ok, that’s it for today… Take care! Bill