Grow Appalachia Project: Pine Mountain Settlement School

Pine Mountain Settlement School facilitated a successful 2011 Grow Appalachia project, with participants harvesting 723 bushels of food, weighing in at over 28,200 lbs! As PMSS continues to work with Grow Appalachia we are beginning to see this project become a powerful community strengthening system. Over the course of the season, PMSS hosted weekly community garden work days, six gardening workshops, and three local food potluck dinners. In conjunction with the Flex-E-Grant funded project (Grow a Gardener), Pine Mountain Grow Appalachia staff and participants led weekly gardening lessons at Green Hill Elementary School during the spring, hosted three seed swap events, distributed gardening information at four community festivals, and launched a new Farmer’s Market in Harlan County. Pine Mountain also made two guest appearances on “What’s Cookin’ Now!”, a live radio cooking show on WMMT-FM in Whitesburg, KY. Grow Appalachia staff and participants have also begun to work on hosting skill shares in the community, the first of which was held in September and was led by Grow Appalachia participants to teach the craft of making homemade laundry detergent and lye soap.

PMSS is happy to announce that it will participate as a site for Grow Appalachia again in 2012! The program will expand to work with families in an extended service area. Grow Appalachia staff hope to find more families to join the program who are interested in starting gardens and are passionate about real food. PMSS is excited to try new crops and gardening techniques and consistently work towards building a local foods community in Southeast Kentucky. Contact us for more information about joining the project.

Workshops that will be offered in 2012 include garden planning, healthy cooking, food processing, seed saving, chicken pen construction, and more! .