My beekeeping article from the summer 2013 issue of edible Upcountry magazine is now available online. Many thanks to Carolina Honey Bee Company for hosting such fantastic classes. Our three hives are still doing great! Click here or on the image below to see the article: You can pick up hardcopies of edible Upcountry at locations all over the Upstate,…
One thing that I have really come to love about living in upstate South Carolina is the sheer diversity of fruits and vegetables that we can grow. Having come from Vermont, where the short summers and extremely cold winters put a major limit on what can be grown each year, South Carolina has struck me as an Eden of sorts….
We wanted to let everyone know that the 2013 Greenville Urban Farm Tour website has some misinformation that we hope will be fixed soon. In spite of the detailed listing under their “Tour Sites” link, Appalachian Feet is not one of the sites on the fall UFT. Please do not stop by our house that day. If you want to…
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…
Touring, photographing, and sharing permaculture gardens in my area seems like I task I will never get tired of. With that in mind, welcome to my new blog series. I will be showcasing “official” tours as well as informal visits to existing and aspiring permaculture sites in the region. Learning from the ingenious little ways people connect to their ecosystem…
When I started signing up for more permaculture classes this year, my friends and family made fun of me. The thing is, permaculture is more like an artist’s palette than an exact formula. Anyone can use it, but the more you learn and practice, the more likely you are to make a masterpiece. Plus, I just love taking classes. In…
With all of this week’s heavy upstate rains, microbiological processes are kicking into full gear and bacteria and fungi are actively working on the process of decay. Many species of mushrooms are popping up in yards, lawns, mulch, and on almost any other damp substrate. Mushrooms are rarely an eyesore — most of them are quite attractive. They simply indicate…
For me, guilty pleasure isn’t buying a bag of Doritos or reading People magazine (especially since I have no idea who most celebrities are these days). Instead, I feel sheepish when I grow plants without being able to explain what they’re good for. “Useless” plants is how I got in to gardening in the first place. Around the age of…
While in Asheville, I found these cherries behind a building in a residential neighborhood I frequent. I hadn’t noticed them before which made me wonder if I wasn’t being observant or if this past winter was ideal for cherries. Many fruits need the perfect quantity of chill hours followed by a period without snap freezes to produce. I collect black…
Since my daughter is really into wild skills her grandma enrolled her in some classes as a Christmas present — including a full day of hearth cooking at the Hagood Mill in Pickens, SC. This class is taught by Carol Bozarth through the Pickens County Museum of Art and History. We booked 2 slots for the April 13th class (yes,…
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…
April heralded my first (epic) case of writer’s block. I’ve never run so close on a deadline before, but fortunately my brain clicked into place at the last minute and you can read the result in this season’s summer “honey” issue of Edible Upcountry magazine. Let me also emphatically recommend The Carolina Honeybee Company in Travelers Rest, SC for excellent…
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…
One of the things we found when searching for permaculture materials online is that there is a lot of chaff to sift through to find the viable seeds. If you click on a “permaculture” video that shows nothing but dancing hippies or tells you to buy lots of drip irrigation and soil amendments, you’re in the wrong place. In order…
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…
In 2011, I wrote about White Nose Syndrome, and what people can do to help. We knew then it was only a matter of time before the deadly bat disease turned up in South Carolina. On March 11th, 2013, DNR reported that Table Rock State Park near Pickens is the location of South Carolina’s first confirmed WNS case. We feel…