This summer our daughter Rain decided to raise the tamest Easter Egger hens and sell them once they were close to laying age. She is selling them for the excellent price of $20.00 each. They are now large and feathered enough to be housed in outdoor coops but young enough they haven’t started laying yet. They will start laying sometime…
It’s here. The garden classes are in gardens, the cooking classes are in kitchens, the nature study is in forests, the raspberries taste like raspberries, and the snozzberries taste like snozzberries! I worked for weeks on the lesson plans for these hands-on classes, workshops, and tours and am so excited to finally roll them out. Click here for my entire…
Our garden open house (rain or shine) is THIS coming Saturday! APPALACHIAN FEET GARDEN OPEN HOUSE DETAILS: Drop-in June 14th, 9:00am – 5:00pm Recommended donation of $2-$5 440 Summit Drive, Greenville, SC You may also want to catch Eliza’s TEDx presentation at Zen on Tuesday, June 17th at 5:30pm. Additionally, Eliza wrote the feature article (on pawpaws) in the latest…
Who else can’t wait until spring? I mean, besides our dog… We thoroughly enjoyed this week’s token snow of the year, but we’re just as excited about next week’s projected highs in the 60s! Spring fever has bit hard and we have so many plans for an urban farm open house, plant sale, workshops, classes, and more! You may already…
This month’s giveaway contest is over, congratulations to the winner, Christina Weit! Christina won four February classes. Today is gorgeous, has spring fever hit you? Eliza’s urban homesteading classes at the Swamp Rabbit Cafe and Grocery start next week! Come learn about edible landscaping, backyard chickens, beekeeping basics, composting, and more… now is the time to get prepared for your…
The best thing about winter salads is how easy it is to obtain a harvest. Cold months mean chores don’t have to be done in the heat, plus the pests and diseases are mostly dormant. You can’t beat the satisfaction of walking into the kitchen on a gray day carrying an armload of vibrant produce! Winter gardening at Appalachian Feet…
We have new classes available! Click here to see the list of topics. We have classes for beginners through experts on subjects like permaculture, soil, insects, beneficial wildlife habitats, plant propagation, fruits, vegetables, seeds, heirlooms, backyard chickens, beekeeping, winter growing, and preparing a garden for next season. We’re teaching small classes (limited to 12 students per class and available first…
Our posts have gotten increasingly photo intensive lately so I wanted to draw attention to the fact that we’ve started using expandable summaries on our blog. Hiding most the photos behind a cut makes it much easier to load the home page. Expandable summaries are pretty common on blogs, but not everyone is familiar with them. All it means is…
I often do or learn a heap of things at once and think I’m going to break it down into a series of bite-sized blog posts. It almost never happens — I post the first segment and then get too distracted to finish the rest. The orphaned contents of Appalachian Feet’s “drafts” folder is bursting at the seams. I don’t…
The key here is “when they become a problem.” In general, pillbugs, or roly polies as I grew up calling them, are quite nice little composters. The textbook “fact” is that pillbugs prefer to eat rotting organic matter and only graduate to other foods when they can’t find enough. That’s actually false. They’re opportunistic omnivores, and they’re going to eat…
Hey everyone, Appalachian Feet is getting an additional writer! From now on, some of the posts will be by me, and some will be by my husband, Nathaniel. I don’t know what he’ll be writing about… my guess is lots more urban homesteading/permaculture topics with an extra focus on cooking, mushrooms, soil building, backyard chickens, and fermented things. ~Eliza
We love the Organic Growers School in North Carolina and are delighted that we now have a similar version for South Carolina! This is the 2nd year for the annual SC Organic Growing Conference which occurs on March 2nd, 2013. It’s run by the SC Organization for Organic Living (SCOOL) which you can find on their website or on Facebook….
I wanted to share this free online “Introduction to Permaculture” course offered by NC State University. It’s a high-quality, 40 hour college course taught by Professor Will Hooker that really explains the fundamentals. Click here to watch the lectures. The first lecture mostly covers orientation for the live classroom students (introducing themselves, field trip carpooling, etc.). If you want to…
The Greenville Urban Farm Tour is over for this year and we hope our visitors went home inspired to make their own green paradise. During the UFT, we set up an “ask the site owner” table in our garden and one of the most frequent questions was, “do you consult and when are you going to offer classes?” How about…
It’s time for the Greenville Urban Farm Tour again! When? This coming Saturday, May 12th, from 9am – 5pm. Tickets are $8 per adult (children under 12 free) and there is a group rate available on the UFT website. This year there are 31 sites to visit, 16 free workshops at the UFT’s headquarters (Crescent Studios), and bicycle tours offered…
My daughter just wrote a detailed blog post about our broody cuckoo maran hen. If you’d like to read her description of Ol’ LaZertron’s exploits, here’s the link!
What’s Pecha Kucha, anyway? You could describe it as TED Talks for people with short attention spans or a good way to get presenters to keep it short. Every Pecha Kucha is 20 slides long, 20 seconds each slide. Pecha Kucha Greenville adds to the 20×20 theme by also scheduling their events at 20:20 (8:20pm). They have around 6 presenters…
We started an Appalachian Feet Market email list last year for people who want to know when our urban farm products are for sale or when we are giving talks the public can attend. Then we planned a wedding… and never used it. If you live in the Greenville, SC area and would like to be on the list, click…
I used to hate squirrels. Then my daughter raised and released some orphans and I began to recognize their charms and place in the ecosystem. They’re native and gardeners too — of forests. I can share my garden with them. But I still shake my fist in anguish when they forage through my newly planted beds, uprooting seeds and plants…
It’s chicken-mania at Appalachian Feet lately. We started with 27 chickens in early May with the goal of keeping 6 for our personal backyard flock. Yesterday, we said goodbye to 21 of them (they are destined for good, free-range farm homes with people we know). We’re glad to know these laying hens will be treated well, but that doesn’t make…