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!