A Day on the Farm At Henderson Settlement ~ Jackie Waldroop

The day starts early here on the farm; the farm crew starts to arrive at 7:00 am.

David and Dulley are the full time staff for the farm. David is the Farm Manager and Dulley is his assistant. Matthew, Tyler and I are the Grow Appalachia crew. Linda is our director’s wife who has volunteered on the farm for a number of years. She grew up on a farm and is a valuable asset to the farm and Grow Appalachia. As a matter of fact she served as the volunteer Coordinator for Grow Appalachia last year. She left some mighty big shoes for me to fill.

Today the Grow Appalachia Crew is working in the Community Garden, Senior Citizen and the Food Pantry Gardens.

Welcome to the Farm!

As you drive through the entrance to the main buildings on the farm you will see the barn and four greenhouses.

The greenhouses provide most of the plants for the Grow Appalachia gardeners. The ability to buy homegrown plants is a big plus for our gardeners.

                                                            

This is one of our greenhouses. This is where Dulley spends most of her time when she's not in the gardens.
Whenever anyone comes to buy plants they always ask, "Where's Dulley?"

Matthew and Tyler standing in front of the barn. In July we will open our Farmers Market here in the barn.

We encourage our gardeners to take part in the Farmers Market. 

                                                                                                                                                            

Today we placed shredded paper around the plants to help keep out the weeds and staked the tomatoes. The Senior Citizens group are only here twice a week so we help them  with their garden.

                                                                                 

 Then we worked in the community garden, the community garden is surrounded by grass and weeds, we use the weed eater around the garden so that they can get to their garden without getting snake bit.

  

This is General and Tyler putting in Rain Barrels at the corner of the brick house. We plan to use these barrels to water the community garden as needed.

Tyler plowing in the Food Pantry Garden

Linda dropping seeds

Dulley and Jackie covering up the seeds

Working in the Food Pantry garden today felt a lot like making mud pies. All this week we kept saying, “we need to plant the Food Pantry garden”, but it seemed as if every time we thought about planting, it started to rain. However today Linda and Dulley decided that we would brave the mud and plant where we could, so off we went, Dulley, Linda, Tyler and I to plant corn, beans, tomatoes, and peppers. First thing that happened was Tyler was given a history lesson and the chance to use an old time push plow. He discovered that it was a lot of hard work. Then Dulley, Linda and I got to play in the mud. After Tyler had plowed the rows for us, Linda dropped the seeds and Dulley and I covered them up with dirt. We’re not sure if anything will come up but we can only do what every other gardener through out history has done, which is to pray to the good lord above to please let out plants grow. This garden will benefit those in the community who receive a food box from the Henderson Settlement Food Pantry.