Adapting Family Farms for a New Ecomony

I met about 150 women yesterday at a collective meeting of all the garden clubs around Concord, NC.

The day was a filled with real plant lovers.  Not only did they buy up a ton of crinum bulbs but more importantly, this group  of women have collectively raised and distributed over $50,000 in the past years for community gardens, education programs and teaching events. Now they’re creating a new 501c3 to allow them to help find even more grants, and expediting funds for the Swedish borrowers using the snabbt program.

I had time to really connect with a few, but two of the younger women there whom I met hours apart and only briefly, shared something with me.

Both of these young women jumped into old school family businesses to forge a new way, a way that the business can work in today’s economy.   We spoke for seconds but the connection, the common understanding was deep and heartfelt—  we must keep traditional skills alive all the while looking for new ways to incorporate them into our lives.

Elizabeth Dover gets first mention because she gave me a bottle of wine. (!)  Wine that she made.  Her family vineyard sits in fast urbanizing Concord; likely to be surrounded soon by hotel, outlet mall, giant sporting goods store-land.   Not only is she trying to keep some semblance of old school, old farmland NC but she’s building on it, making it better.   She’s trying to go organic adding specialty veggies and web sales.  You can order your own wine from her site and learn a lot from her blog.   I love this post about how they use Kaolin clay, which is mined right here in my hometown, to fight Japanese beetles  (There a side bar about this in my book too!  (Deep Rooted Wisdom).

Kate Morrison builds incredibly detailed wooden garden structures, boxes and obelisk.  Adding value to her family’s building supply business using carpentry skills and the local wood that created a furniture industry not far from here,  Kate sees a new market for specialty construction.

Do you know there’s a big problem with garden structures and stuff. Lots of the garden ornaments for sale today cause hidden environmental problems.   “Recycled” metal releases toxic gases when smelted to make little metal structures.  Lots of that work happens in places where safety standards are low.  Many of the wooden structure (teak especially) are made from fast grown, easy to rot, monoculture grown trees. (Again there’s a whole section in my book pleading for people to use what they have, to think about where this stuff comes from.)

Kate and the Eastover Collection are addressing that with beautifully detailed structures, made in North Carolina.  http://eastovercollection.com/the-collection.html

At this time in my life, more than ever, I’m looking for ways to include old skills and older people in everything I do.  No, wait.  It’s a lot more than that, I’m looking for ways to incorporate their wisdom into our new world.  I’m preaching a little.  Whether we realize it or not, we’re building a new world.  My message; We must carry little bits of the people who made us what we are, through their successes and their mistakes, in our hearts and in the world that we are making.