Off to the Conference!

As you read this I'm in State College, attending a pre-conference, all-day workshop of PASA's Farming for the Future annual conference. Today it's Weed School: Managing Through Identification and Mechanical Methods, and tomorrow I'll have another all-day workshop on The 21st Century Victory Garden: Growing Your Food and Energizing Your Community. Meanwhile, my husband will be attending the Hands-On IPM (integrated pest management) and Bio-Controls workshop. Then on Friday and Saturday the PASA conference proper begins. (PASA: that's the Pennsylvania Association of Sustainable Agriculture.) One of the keynote addresses will be by Raj Patel, author of the book Stuffed and Starved, which discusses the paradox of a world with 850 million people starving alongside 1 billion overweight people. Should be infuriating, heartbreaking, and enlightening, all at the same time.

I'm looking forward to seeing people I've met at the conference in previous years. Oh! And the food at the conference is simply marvelous. I hardly need to think about packing food for the meals away from home. We get delicious breakfasts and lunches with each of our workshops, and the evening hors d'oeuvres tables, laden with products brought by member farmers, is always an incredible treat. Then there are the coupons and free samples from organic product companies that sponsor the event. I got a coupon for free shipping from Johnny's Seeds last year which I used when buying my broadfork; saved me a tidy sum. This conference has the best schwag! The benefit auction of all sorts of interesting gardening tools, and value-added products from member farms is always fun to browse through. Free live music on Thursday night. Networking opportunities with farmers and gardeners who live near me and follow sustainable crop management and humane animal husbandry. I enjoy seeing Pennsylvania's plain folk who mingle freely with us "English," but speak their Pennsylvania German among themselves. There will be a Pennsylvania cheese tasting by member farms on Friday night. Early morning yoga classes if I can get up in time for them. I'll probably meet a farmer who produces something sustainably that I'll want to start buying on a regular basis. I've arranged a meeting with an attending fellow member who will barter some of her compost worms for my bread. And these are all just the extras!

The hour-and-twenty-minute seminars of the conference itself are consistently informative and fascinating. I always play it somewhat by ear, but these are the seminars that I'm likely to attend:

Rural Pennsylvania's Energy Future
Using Organic Nutrient Sources & Interpreting Soil and Compost Analysis
How to Grow, Harvest, Manage, and Market Nut Crops
Specialized Techniques for Early Harvest of Field Grown Crops
Why and How to Create a Forest Buffer on Your Land to Protect Our Streams
Solar Electric Systems 201: Basics and Beyond
The Versatility of Small Grains: Food, Feed, Forage, Seed and Cover Crops
Pollinators, Predators & Plants: Building Landscapes to Attract Beneficial Insects
The Plight of the Honey Bees & How to Help Them Thrive
Year-Round Backyard Mini-Farming: Food with the Least Fossil Fuel and Footprint

I'll have to pick and choose among these, as some of them are scheduled concurrently. But don't these sound interesting? There are several dozen other choices that are less appealing to me that will no doubt be full of other attendees with different interests.

I always come home from the frozen wastes of State College in early February with a burning passion for the year's gardening and homesteading projects. It's like being able to swallow a motivation pill, once a year. It's all just SO exciting! Worth the money and the driving every year. This is definitely a garden-geek vacation.

I'll try to take some pictures that capture the wonderfulness of it all, to post when I return. Have a wonderful week everyone.

Staycation Report

We got back from our visit to our land on Thursday afternoon. As with most vacation aftermaths, we now feel like we need a recovery period from our vacation before picking up again with our normal routine. Unfortunately, fall chores are upon us. There is now raking to be done, the garden beds to be prepared, and apples to be harvested and washed in preparation for cider making.

I cannot forbear, however, to share some pictures from our week spent not too far from home. We semi-roughed it for a week in a rented RV, learning to stretch fresh water even farther than when we lived in a drought-prone environment. We flew kites, mulched some of the fruit and nut trees we've planted up there, and had some minor adventures. I started a knitting project which looks like it will turn out well. Along the bank of our dirt access road I planted daffodil and crocus bulbs that had been thinned from plantings in our backyard. We went to sleep when it got dark and woke up with the Canada geese or the dawn, whichever came first.

Just to start off with, this is the view to the southeast. On several mornings, there were light mists over this way, due to the creek just to the right of this picture.

Here's the autumn view, near sunset, to the southwest.

Here's our northward view. Along this ridge line runs the Appalachian Trail.

And this is what we got to look at every evening around sunset.

We took a ride on a bona fide steam train...

...and admired the many historic details, such as the coal that feeds the furnace to create the steam.

We had a couple of weenie roasts around a little campfire, which we built in a huge habachi grill we picked up for nothing after it failed to sell at a local yardsale.

Because we're goofy, we started painting the shipping container we use for storage Holstein. We hope the farmers and horse folk in the area will think we're crazy city folk, but essentially harmless. Even with good weather, it takes quite a lot of time to prep and paint the corrugated surface of a shipping container. Thus, the unfinished state of this little art project. We covered the areas most damaged by rust though.

We couldn't resist a little cooing over the neighborhood's newest resident: tiny Coral, the four-week-old miniature Mediterranean donkey, shown here with her dam, Dorrie. We were tickled to hear that this didn't immediately mark us out as sentimental types. Even the farmers around here apparently stop to gawk at such unrestrained cuteness.

Is it obvious yet why we bought land in this area, and why we want to move there as soon as we can get a house built? The rolling hills of Pennsylvania, particularly in the fall, are just drop dead gorgeous. The fact that we can practice dry agriculture here is the icing on the cake.

We came home to an unexpected late harvest of beefsteak tomatoes. They'll never be great, but they're good candidates for the smoked tomato trick. I was glad I hadn't found the time to rip out the plants before we went away. The mild days and lack of rain made them as good as can be expected for fall tomatoes. They're in the garbage can smoker as I write this.

Staycation Time

We're going to our nearby parcel of farmland, situated just a stone's throw from the Appalachian Trail. We'll be there for several days, hanging out and mulling the possibilities for building our dream home there. I'll be planting some daffodil bulbs, which I dug out of our backyard, on the bank along the dirt road access. We have a few dayhikes scheduled on at least a couple different days. I imagine we'll see the fall colors begin to come in too, now that we've had a few nights of frost. I'm packing Euell Gibbons' Stalking the Wild Asparagus, and another wild food oriented book, so that I can poke about the environs and see what turns up.

I've made a dinner reservation for my husband's birthday at a nice restaurant near the land. I was given a gift certificate to this restaurant as a thank you gift for some volunteer work I did over the summer. (It was a case of volunteer creep, where I ended up being responsible for much more than I signed up for, and more than any volunteer should really be expected to contribute. The gift certificate is the happy result of the coordinator recognizing that.) So dinner at a nice restaurant without spending much money at all: it warms my frugal heart. I also have another something special lined up for him, but I'm going to have to discuss the details later, lest he check my blog and spoil the surprise. But I think there will be pictures featured here, eventually.

The rest of October is looking increasingly scheduled with events, daytrips, and chores, chores, chores. We got all the garlic planted yesterday, so that's one essential fall task crossed off the list. I may talk more about that when we get back. By that time the leaf raking will have begun and will probably go on for a month. The mid-winter doldrums are starting to sound pretty good!

Off to Maine!

I'm taking a brief but genuine vacation this week. I'll be meeting my husband in Maine when his current business trip ends. I have close family up there, so it's a great excuse for me to see more of this wonderful state. I've only been there twice, and fairly briefly. Our chickens will be tended during our absence by a friend who also has hens. So I'll be taking care of her girls later this month when she goes away. It's a chicken-sitting barter arrangement. I've picked the tomato plants as clean as I can, so not too much should go to waste while I'm gone. We have a few special plans for our four-day Maine getaway, some of which I hope to share here when I return early next week. Lobster rolls, here I come!