Rural Living Todayfounder and advocate, Marie James, told us about a Homesteading Education Montheventshe and her family hosted in Northeast Washington to teach gardeners how to grow vegetables in cold weather.
We had a great Homesteading Education Month event last Friday and talked about cold weather gardening with lots of visitors. Rural Living Today exists to encourage, educate, and share information, which is done mostly online via our website, blog, and emails. It was wonderful to expand our local involvement with this face-to-face event.
The event was fairly simple and inexpensive to carry out — we just arranged to set up a booth at a local farmers market, collected some information sheets to pass out, made some displays, and solicited donations for a free giveaway. The drawing entries included email subscriptions to our blog, so we got some new readers as well.
We met a lot of awesome people, gave out some printed information, and learned some new gardening tips from some of our visitors, including one unexpected question which was asked by several people:“What can you tell me about growing vegetables indoors during the winter?”
They shared their ideas from growing lettuce on windowsills to setting up a grow system under lights. We hadn’t thought much about indoor veggies before, but we’re sure going to look into it.
All visitors to our booth had the opportunity to enter a drawing for a free gardener’s bucket of goodies (shown in photo). At the end of the day, the market manager drew the winning entry. Ta-Da! Drum roll! Congrats to Celeste, who took home some awesome books, garden seeds and other items, including a beverage mug and chocolate bars for a well-deserved break time.
Photo by Marie James