Gathering at Michelle's

Hi Everyone-
This message is to update everyone on our meeting, potluck, seed swap and beginning plans for the coming growing season.



Who came?
Bob (ManyNames), Brandon, Bridget, Danny, David, Kevin, Kimberly, Kurt, Lily, Marcia, Michelle, Naomi, Sarah, Star, & Weston.

Newcomers
Kimberly and Kevin Polk joined us. They have just moved to Vore Ridge (on Friday) from Bloomington IN, where they were part of a Permaculture Guild which includes two teachers who taught at Greenfire a few years back--Peter Bane & Rhonda Baird. We welcome them to our circle.
Kurt Belser and Sarah Fick came over. Kurt is part of a budding community with Brandon, Sasha, Ross, and me. He is going to be teaching a weekend design course in May in Meigs County. Sarah is part of Casa Nueva, where she works on Human Resources.

We ate well, as usual, with special enjoyment of Marcia & David's sweet potatoes from last season.
Kurt is teaching a weekend design course in May. He's awaiting news about whether there is room left in the course and will let us know.

Lots of seed exchanged hands

Discussion
We had a short discussion about the coming year and started divvying up the growing season for work days.
We agreed that we want to identify areas of knowledge we want to enhance, Here's what we heard--
Pruning
Forestry
Greenhouse Design
Guilds
Building

Some of us want to use our list serve which is just an email list now, to share resources.  Weston sent out a request for old blankets, for example.
So what do you need, what do you know about, and what do you have to share? Let's flood our email list with this sort of thing.

We agreed that work projects on our work days can be income generating to the host.  An example is working on getting starts going with Marcia, who will sell at the market this year. Some of us might think about contracting with her or trading for starts of varieties we like. Thoughts?

We started laying out the calendar for the next season--If it says TBA, let us know if you can lead a work party for three hours and host a potluck afterwards. We didn't talk about time of day, but we agreed on Sundays. I suggest 3-6 for work unless we are in the hottest months with longer days, then we may want to eat early and work in the evening. What do others think? 

Here's the list of what we said for the coming year thus far.
March 28-Marcia's seed start project
April-Danny's for pruning?
May-Bridget & Weston--tree planting
June-TBA
July-Kimberly & Kevin Polk
August-
Late September Brandon & Michelle's (planting garlic.. & TBA)
October-
November-Harvest Dinner?
December-February-Potlucks and knowledge skill sharing

We agreed that given spring is a time of many needs, we can call upon each other for a "Work Burst" to get something done quickly with many hands at other times. This will be a good test of our ability to be spontaneous and our goal of not being too busy to be helpful with shorter notice.

Please update your email list to include all here (some of whom never come, but let's keep them on the list b/c they came at one time, or are in a nearby location to our original group.) I'd like to suggest we invite Jessica Fox and Ronda Clarke to join our group.

A suggestion:
Might we graduate from the email realm to a listserv? Here are a few ideas-
1. We start a list of our own
2. We make a FB group
3. We use Athens grow (it has about 50 members right now)
4. We use ohiofoodshed (a rural action ning that is all about food in our region)

Peace to all,

Michelle