I love living and working in Western New York!

The growing season is just amazing in Western New York; it is such beautiful and edible time of year. Our season starts in about May and ends around early November. We live in zone 5 for growing flowers and vegetables. April is a great time to start planting the cold weather crops such as radishes, lettuce, peas and spinach. I am very lucky to have a job takes me all over Erie County which is marvelous county that has a large urban, suburban and rural areas. Today, I went to North Collins to do some Food Stamp Outreach. North Collins is about 30 miles outside the city of Buffalo a town over from the Eden. Eden is another rural town that has many growers and many of the growers are part of a business called Eden Valley Growers. They are a co-op of farmers who started came together so they could pool their fruits and vegetables to sell grocers like Wegmans and ship throughout Eastern States. The Co-op started just over 50 years and is made up of 10 Farmers which are third and fourth generation farms. They start their lettuce early using row covers protecting from bugs and frost and they hope to have lettuce in local grocery stores like Wegamns by the second – third week of May. Fresh local produce at our finger tips! In addition to providing Food Stamp Assistance I have a little job of finding big pine nugget mulch for our community garden. I am not sure if this is a great job for me since every place I have I go to I always buy something. I love going to the garden stores they are always so pretty. I think now is a really cool time to go because everything is ready for sale and the greenhouses are full because it is early to plant many annuls. While I was there I saw the perfect Mother’s Day gift for my mom and I wasn’t even looking. I bought her a climbing Clematis plant. The funny thing is she is has the trellis and a spot to grow the plant but no plant, I bet she knew I was going to buy her one. Then I saw these really cute strawberries plants in a planter, they were so cute I had to buy the plant for myself.  Then of course on my way home I stopped to buy fresh brown eggs from a road side stand. It truly lovely day for a county drive!

Missing in Action... I am back

I am so long overdue for a posting. Life has been busy plus I have been dealing with a three week old cold that seems to be taking all my energy. Although I do believe the cold is my fault, if I would of slowed down and took better care of myself- I feel I would of never caught this cold. Oh yes, by the way I caught the cold from my boss and I am sure there was a bit of karma there as well, every time when he comes back from visiting his grandkids he always gets sick and well I laughed- when I saw him sick on the first day back from his vacation. So you see any way I look at this cold- it is my fault. So hopefully I will learn a lesson from this… but I doubt it- I am pretty hardheaded. At any rate—spring is in the air and it is the start of the outdoor growing season. So many great things to do, feel, eat and see! April is really a good time to start your cold weather crops. I did buy a few things to plant in the garden in April like phlox, pansies, and a flat of perennials, lettuce and onions. I have planted almost everything I bought so for far.  

I went to the whole sale place where I buy all our plants for the Food Bank a few weeks ago- everything was just beautiful. Flowers and plants everywhere and it just puts you in a great mood. Nurseries in general are such fun places to be. Ok, so maybe I didn’t plant almost everything I bought because I keep going to nurseries and buying more, I forgot about the nasturtium I just bought yesterday. This is such an exciting time of year.