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Showing posts with label farming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label farming. Show all posts

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Ben Lomond, CA: Class: How To Start a Winter Vegetable Garden

Tuesday, Aug 18 9:00a to 3:00p at Love Apple Farm, Ben Lomond, CA

Learn how to start and tend a winter vegetable garden. Growing a garden in winter is possible with our mild California climate. Winter gardens are not just limited to greens and cabbage. We will discuss over 20 different kinds of winter vegetables, and sow a flat to take home to tend and transplant. read more

Price: Tuition: $55 Materials: $20
Phone: (831) 588-3801
Age Suitability: Teens and up

Learn how to start and tend a winter vegetable garden. Growing a garden in winter is possible with our mild California climate. Winter gardens are not just limited to greens and cabbage. We will discuss over 20 different kinds of winter vegetables, and sow a flat to take home to tend and transplant.

Friday, July 31, 2009

Reaping from high value vegetables

By OTUSHABIRE TIBYANGYE

Ruth Nashaba has grown vegetables for 15 years. This has been on a small scale, using basic methods and poor seeds until the intervention of the district agricultural department.

In 1992, Nashaba and her village mates formed a group, Kyabaiba Abamwe Women Group in Nyabikungu Parish Rwampara, to escape poverty by pooling resources together and using proceeds from their small gardens of vegetables. However the income was not sufficient because of poor farming methods. “We were using poor seedlings and poor farming methods of draining the wetland without adding manure to the soils.

Whenever it rained, we would lose some of our crops because of cultivating in the middle of the wetland until the intervention of extension workers,” she recalls. They were taught how to use the wetland sustainably by using the periphery of the wetland. They were also taught the use of the existing rivulets to irrigate their crops using watering cans and taking water to their gardens without draining the water away.

Nashaba and her group proved good students and have started reaping big from their plots of land using high value seeds provided by the project. “We have been given high yield seeds of carrots, egg plants, tomatoes, green pepper, cauliflower and radish among others which have done very well in the first harvest,” she says.

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Monday, July 6, 2009

Farming gets a new, female face

Women are leaving jobs in fashion and science to grow vegetables and tend to livestock

Sunday, July 05, 2009
By Lori Aratani, The Washington Post

WASHINGTON -- Julie Stinar once worked with some of the top names in fashion: Donna Karan, Giorgio Armani, Tracy Reese.

Now she works with some completely different brand names: Cornish and Poulet Rouge chickens and Red Devon cattle.

Ms. Stinar is the owner of Evensong Farm in Sharpsburg, Md., and an example of the changing face of American farming.

Women always played important roles on the family farm. They kept the books, milked the cows and fed the children, often juggling another part-time job while the men worked the fields. Sometimes, they ran the farm after their husbands or fathers died.

But increasingly, women such as Ms. Stinar are turning to farming on their own. According to the 2007 U.S. Census of Agriculture released this year, more than one in every 10 U.S. farms is run by a woman.

"Just as we've seen the numbers of women increasing in the workplace, we are seeing more women" in farming, said Stefphanie Gambrell, a domestic policy economist with the American Farm Bureau.

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