On Tuesday evening we created the brand new SC Upstate Permaculture Society. Barely three days later we already have 80 members! Here’s the description of our group: Free & beginners welcome! Permaculture is an agriculture/garden movement that tries to be sustainable and self-sufficient. It incorporates the home and community as well. We’re planning to have meetings where members can talk…
Eliza makes a conscious effort to illustrate her blog topics with at least one photograph and I, in turn, am trying to uphold that goal. Why? Because we all love eye candy (plus many of us are visual learners). While neither Eliza nor I have had much in the way of professional photography training we both greatly enjoy documenting the…
This past weekend the weather in our little corner of South Carolina got quite pleasant, reaching up into the mid 70s and all around feeling very spring-ish. It was great. The whole greater Greenville area seemed to decide that with such delightful weather at hand, it was only appropriate to spend some time out of doors. By the end of…
While I think that there is a wide variety of reasons why we garden, arguably the biggest one is to have fresh homegrown food. I really enjoy cooking, and the appeal of growing my own quality ingredients was what got me started on the path to being a gardener. We didn’t keep a garden this winter so our own ingredients have…
Hi, I’m Nathaniel, and I will be occasionally writing here now (I believe my lovely wife was kind enough to introduce me). So anyway, nice to meet everybody. I hope you all find what I write about interesting and valuable. In an effort to get our seed trays out of the house earlier last year, Eliza and I decided to…
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
Consider this article “Sustainable Pest Control 101.” Once you’ve read this, you’ll be an expert at dealing with insects on the farm or in the garden. One of the classes I taught at Saturday’s SC Organic Growers Conference was Insect Garden Ecology. This is a topic that overwhelms growers everywhere… people often tell me they just aren’t good at remembering…
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…
That may be the wordiest title I ever came up with on this blog. The short of it is, “can poke sallet be highly desirable in the garden?” Poke sallet (as in pokeweed, pokeberries, polk salad, or any of the other myriad common names and spellings you want to label Phytolacca americana) is a plant native to the southeastern US….
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…
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…
If you’ve never eaten a salad turnip, and you probably haven’t, it’s unlikely you think they sound very exciting. Back when the Organic Growers School was Saturday only, they did an experimental Sunday session in Burnsville, NC. Among skills like how to build hoop houses and grow through the winter, I mostly remember taste-testing the ‘Hakurei’ turnips that Patryk Battle…
Today’s blog post was inspired by the karma-themed TV show My Name Is Earl. I know some people would rather pay their taxes twice than be nice to snakes, but I owe this mundanely-named brown snake family some good publicity on account of I killed their brother. Or sister. Or both. Specifically, a couple little specimens of Storeria dekayi. It…
You’re probably having the initial reaction that I did, “Why would I want to control kudzu bugs? Just have at it!” But kudzu bugs (Megacopta cribraria) also attack other legumes. Especially soybeans, wisteria, and hyacinth beans (Lablab pupureus). The idea of something that successfully retards the growth of kudzu having a picnic on my soybeans is not appealing. It’s possible…
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…
For over ten years I have grown my own garden transplants by carrying the seed trays out into the sun on warm days and bringing them in every evening. In the last 3 years, I was juggling over 20 trays in and out of the house. This method uses natural light to produce strong, non-leggy transplants — but if you’re…
Guess what? You may be in a different planting zone now and not know it. With little fanfare and scarcely a blip in the news, the USDA recently updated their hardiness zone map. You can visit their website to check if the changes affect you. The last time the USDA updated was in 1990. What does it mean? Well, climate…