January News

Berea Gardens Agriculture Center

January Newsletter Winter arrived late this year and we have been blessed with abnormally good growing conditions.  We are still operating our weekly Wednesday market here at the farm, selling both our produce and Lynnita's fabulous bread to a number of dedicated and satisfied customers. We have also had good conditions for rooting cuttings and currently have hundreds of new blueberry, blackberry, raspberry, lignonberry, elderberry and rose plants rooted and growing in the greenhouse.  The berries will be for our own planting here (for at least this year) and the roses are intended for sales on Mother's Day.  It is such a blessing to be back in the greenhouse making new plants on these cold, dark days. In late Fall we planted the first 30 trees of what will become a large diversified fruit orchard.  The varieties I selected of apples, peaches, pears, cherries, nectarines, plums, apricots and selected rootstocks are adapted to this area and are varieties that I can freely propagate myself so that we will have no additional cost in acquiring more trees.  We eventually plan to have about 200 trees growing to supply both ourselves and local markets with fruit. Another recent acquisition was an old, tractor pulled grain harvester.  A neighbor and dear friend of ours travelled up to Amish country in Ohio and brought back this wonderfully useful piece of equipment.    He has told us that we can keep it here and make use of it as we can.  This will allow us to efficiently grow and harvest small grains and dried beans.  We will be planting some barley, hulless oats and black beans this year to put it to work. We were richly rewarded this year with our seedbanking activities.  A neighbor of ours brought us some seed for a speckled lima, similar to the Chritmas Lima variety.  He gave me a handfull of the seed two years ago that had been in his family for generations and stored in his freezer for twelve years.  We grew them out and at the end of this season harvested over 100 pounds of the dry lima beans.  We have shared seed freely with neighbors and visitors here and are grateful for the opportunity to help preserve this wonderful variety.  It is also nice to have enough on hand to feed our guests and ourselves through the year.  To date we have received a dozen varieties of seed that are truly indigenous "heirlooms" from our neighbors in this area. As we continue to develop our farm, meet wonderful new people in our training programs and grow true and abiding friendships in our community, we are ever mindful of the blessings God has bestowed.  May we be counted as faithful in His sight. Bob, Lynnita and Jordyn

Free, Limited Time Replay of our September Agriculture Webinar done in association with Dave Westbrook and his Country Living University Many of my contacts have requested an opportunity to review the Webinar that I presented last September with Dave Westbrook and Country Living University.  Until the end of this month I will again make the presentation available to those of you that receive this newsletter.  The only access to the Webinar will be through the link on this page. My prayer is that you will find encouragement and motivation from this presentation to grow at least a portion of your own food in the coming season.  Again, the link is only accesible in this email so if you know of others that can benefit from the presentation please feel free to forward this on to them.  The Webinar is available here. Agriculture Training Programs for 2012 Our training program schedule through April 2012 is now posted on our website.  We are currently assessing what our priorities should be for the coming growing season and how best to make use of our time and resources.  We have a number of opportunities to increase our farm's productivity and grow more food for our local markets. Frankly, interest in our Training Programs for the next few months has been relatively weak.  Unless we see an increased interest in our monthly Training Programs we may reduce the offerings to a bi-monthly or even a quarterly schedule in order to allow us more time for actual farming.  Difficult economic times are impacting us all, and we want to make a decision that will give us the best opportunity for the balance of farm production and the demands of the Training Center. Drop us an email with your comments, and please keep us in prayer as we come to a decision about our future scheduling. Horses! For the past three years Jordyn has been working with us on the farm, serving customers, baking bread and muffins for sale at the Farmer's Market, and saving diligently to realize her dream of owning a horse. Her dream was realized in December when we took possesion of this fine team of young Haflinger mares. This small, rugged Austrian breed is ideal for our conditions and we anticipate that they will serve us well as both work animals and will also be used for riding.  Meet Cedar and Sawdust. True Education Conference The True Education/Agriculture Conferences hosted at the end of November and early December were once again a great blessing to the many that participated. We want to express our sincere thanks to the many speakers that made this year's event very special.  Audio and video recordings of any and all of the meetings will be available soon from Bob Jorgensen at  Medical Missionary Press.