Grow Appalachia: Bringing gardens and fresh food to Appalachian families

[theHandpuppet]

This is a wonderful project from the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center of Berea College (Berea, Kentucky). For more information on how you can participate/contribute, please visit their website: http://www.berea.edu/grow-appalachia/

(from their website)
Grow Appalachia is planting the seeds for a sustainable future. Despite a rich agricultural history, family farming and gardening have become less popular and less profitable in Appalachia, limiting access to healthy, affordable food. Grow Appalachia seeks to solve pervasive food insecurity issues by restoring the relationship between the people and the land.

When food grows, communities and families grow too.

Through funding and technical assistance, Grow Appalachia has supported thousands of gardens through hundreds of community partnerships in five states; from backyard gardens to community gardens to school and summer camp gardens to greenhouses to mini-farms; producing more than 1,151,000 pounds of healthy, organic food for thousands of people in its first four years. The gardens are worked by nonprofits, farmers’ market entrepreneurs, the elderly, the Girl Scouts, inmates, the disabled, and others who believe a better food system equals better lives. Some participants garden to save money. Others garden to make money.

The program seeks both to educate communities and to learn from communities. It works to preserve the past, build hope for the future, and empower Appalachians to live healthy, productive lives. Grow Appalachia is proud to be a part of the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center of Berea College.

[theHandpuppet]

1. Here's another wonderful project

This one comes to us via the Georgia Appalachian Studies Center at the University of North Georgia.

Welcome to Appalachia—Home of the Original Locavores
A university program sustains the rich tradition of gardening and preserving in the Southeast.
September 26, 2014
By Sarah McColl

People living in Appalachia, said Dr. Rosann Kent, "have a long history of displacement.” Kent, director of the Georgia Appalachian Studies Center at the University of North Georgia, told me how “these large corporations have come into areas of Appalachia to extract things from the earth—coal, gold, copper, marble, forest—but not to the benefit of the local people.”

Despite the successive and sometimes simultaneous waves, the residents of America’s oldest mountains have developed a rich agricultural tradition over the centuries. When the mining company or the logging firm came to town, Kent said, sometimes “people had to move, they had to migrate, they were displaced. But what they could take with them were their seeds.”

Her students have been collecting heirloom seeds—defined, in this case, as seeds at least 50 years old that have never been bought or sold—for the past two years as part of the interdisciplinary program Saving Appalachian Gardens and Stories. The project recently received a $4,000 grant from the Appalachian Teaching Project to fund its work....

“You can teach anything through a seed,” Kent said. “The seed is just the lens through which we look at, examine, and hopefully become a part of this community.” Through interviews with “seedkeepers” in UNG's mountain community of Dahlonega, Ga., and surrounding Lumpkin County, 65 miles northeast of Atlanta, students are preserving stories of self-reliance and political resistance and turning them into art....

MORE at http://www.takepart.com/articles/2014/09/26/appalachian-gardens-and-stories

[A Little Weird]

2. Neat project

It seems that not only are people losing their connection to the land (myself included) but they are settling for a much lower diversity of vegetables and fruits. One of my co-workers grows beautiful heirloom tomatoes (among other things) that taste almost nothing like the predominant varieties available at the grocery store.

[theHandpuppet]

3. Totally agree with you about the lack of variety

What does a person find at the store? One type of tomato, one type of green bean, etc. That's one reason I love to garden with heirloom seeds. I can plant some of the veggies I often used to have in my youth, like pole beans and spotted limas.

[theHandpuppet]

4. ‘Grow Appalachia’ gears up for 2015 season

Independent Herald • Oneida, TN
‘Grow Appalachia’ gears up for 2015 season
September 23, 2014
By IH Staff

With a successful 2014 growing season in the rearview mirror, Grow Appalachia has begun accepting applications for its 2015 program.

The brainchild of Paul Mitchell founder John Paul Dejoria, Grow Appalachia is managed by Berea College. The Scott County Grow Appalachia program is one of 40 across five states.

According to local program director Lisa Cotton, the purpose of Grow Appalachia is to teach people to grow vegetables and fruit in their back yard, while also instilling better attitudes towards healthy eating and giving local residents a means through which they can sell their produce and farm-made products at farmers markets to supplement their families’ income.

After growing into McCreary County in 2012, the Scott County Grow Appalachia program became the largest program in the system. In 2014, local gardeners produced 53 tons of food from 90 gardens. Seventy-eight of those gardens were family gardens, while 12 were community gardens....

MORE at http://www.ihoneida.com/?p=7707