have heard the peaches were about wiped out entirely, at least from the triangle west. i know hendersonville area where the bulk are grown was. the blues; i don't know. we covered our 4 bushes up well and it looks like we'll have at least 1/2 of our normal crop. but i don't know if any of the commercial farms would have done that. maybe closer to the mountains. we were up in the asheville area last weekend and the blues hadn't even leafed out up on craggy gardens (which admittedly is at the top of a mountain). but i'm thinking even halfway down, they would have been protected enough just by virtue of being in tight bud when the freeze hit. worth checking into if you're desperate. could you can frozen blues? you could buy them in bulk that way. i know the agrisupply places used to sell fruit like that and there's one company who does fundraisers for churches that sells bulk frozen fruit. sorry, i don't know the name anymore- just that they're out there. seems like they're based in the pnw. try snooping around on the web. personally, i like frozen fruit better than canned in most cases anyhow (though i like canned peaches better). good luck! tam

Pat, We eat all we can while it is fresh. We freeze, we dehydrate, we can. We give away fresh produce (not as much as you'd think, though, because I like canning it) to family and friends. We send lots of produce to work with our son, who is a professional firefighter. Since they work 24 hours shifts, they cook a lot of their meals while working and always appreciate a few fresh veggies (plus, it helps them stretch their food budget). Last year I filled up 3 freezers, the root cellar (aka the tornado shelter), and the "jelly closet" (which originally started out as a coat closet, but is much better used for food storage of home-preserved food). I canned a little over 700 jars, but that's because it was the best fruit year ever and I had 350 lbs. of plums and peaches to process in a fairly short period of time. Most years it is more like 200 or 300 or 400 jars. What does a small family do with all those jars of jams, jellies, salsas and hot peppers? We eat some of it, but give away a lot more than we eat. My DH is a police officer and every year at Christmas he gives gifts of our home-grown and home-preserved goodies to about 80 or 90 co-workers at the PD. We give the same sort of gifts to our friends, including all the members of our vounteer fire dept, and to family members. We donate jars of jellies, jams, salsa and candied jalapenos to local fundraisers for some of our county's volunteer fire departments and oter causes. I think that last year, each gift bag at Christmas had 1 jar each of jelly, jam, peppers and salsa. Of course, the ones for family members had more---maybe 8 jars. I figure if I am going to put all the time into the veggie garden, I want it to be as productive as possible. So, of course, I'm happiest with big harvests. However, in some years you have to be happy with any harvest at all and this is one of those years. We love eating fresh food from our garden and appreciate the fact that we know how it was raised and that it wasn't sprayed with a lot of pesticides. Now that we have become so used to eating from our own garden, it would be hard to go back to eating only grocery store produce because the quality of the fresh grocery store produce just is not the same as that of what we grow. I garden biointensively with very close spacing so I can get the most out of the space I have. I do a lot of succession planting. My favorite way to do succession planting is to start the succession crop indoors 7-12 days before I expect to plant it into the ground. I often start beans and peas in in 3-oz. bathroom cups filled with potting soil. I cut a big "X" in the bottom of each cup for drainage, and for the roots to grow down through later after I transplant them into the ground. I use the paper cups as plantable pots to reduce transplant shock. I germinate the seeds indoors where I can control the temps and light, them immediately move the seedlings outdoors to grow in natural light as soon as they germinate. (This eliminates the need to harden them off.) At the time I'm removing a finished crop like, let's say, the mid-season corn that will be coming out of the bed in a few days, I'll harvest the corn in the morning and replant that bed the same day. In the afternoon I'll likely use my little Mantis cultivator to work the existing mulch into the soil in the early afternoon. In the cool evening hours, I'll transplant the started bean or pea plants, cups and all, into the soil and water it in. Then I'll mulch it. So, if you were at my house early that morning, you might see a raised bed of ready-to-harvest corn. Then, if you came by at 8 o'clock that evening, the corn will have been picked and processed, the bed cleaned out, the corn stalks on the compost pile, and rows of small southern pea or bush bean plants freshly transplanted into the former corn bed. It surprises our friends and neighbors sometimes when they stop by on a day I've harvested/replanted. I'll get a funny look and a question like "weren't your corn plants there this morning...?). Doing a quick turnaround like that speeds up the harvest cycle. For example, in beds from which I harvested onions the first week in June, I'm already harvesting okra from transplants that went into the bed the same day the onions came out. The watermelon plants I put into the ground that day have melons that are the size of softballs, and those plants have been in the ground for only about 5 or 6 weeks. I have a lot of trouble with good seed germination in early spring when soil temps are too cold or soil is too wet or when the cutworms are too active. That's one reason I prefer transplants as much as possible. It is a lot more work and a lot more time-consuming, but you get more consistent germination, and there's not any gaps in a row caused by poor germination since I don't transplant any cups with ungerminated seeds. For something like southern peas that germinate easily in warm soil, it isn't so much that I get better germination in paper cups indoors, but that I get a head start by growing the plants in cups. If I start seeds of southern peas in cups and transplant them into the ground about 10-14 days after I first planted the seeds in the cups, then those plants will produce 1.5 to 2 weeks earlier than plants that would be direct-seeded on the same day. I've grown the crops here so long in that mnner, that it is easy for me to look at the spring plantings and know when it is time to start seed of the follow-on crop. I even start seeds in cups sometimes of veggies that don't like to be transplanted, like carrots. Since a lot of things don't like to be transplanted, I just plant the cups and all right into the ground. The paper cups break down pretty quickly. If every succession crop I put into the ground is already a week or two "old" when I plant it, I get a faster harvest, which allows me to get the next succession crop into the ground quickly too....and so it goes until I run out of space, water, or time. Fall beans are the best! It is nice to be picking them in October when the temperatures are milder. We just called them "October beans" when I was a kid because that's when you picked them. I probably was a teenager before I figured out that "October beans" was a general name for all fall-harvested beans and not a specific variety of bean like "Lazy Housewife" or "McCasland". The older I get the more I like pole beans because it isn't fun bending over to pick bush beans, but I always plant bush beans in spring for the early harvest, and pole beans for fall, and more bush beans for fall in a good rainfall year. I'm not sure if I'll plant fall bush beans or not. In order for me to do that, I want to see some good rain falling first. About the only succession plantings I'm making this summer are additional sowings of lima beans, southern peas (I'm growing pinkeye purplehull, crowder, zipper and cream types), okra and squash. They can take the heat when nothing else can. I'd never, ever, ever sell my veggies at a Farmer's Market. I've been to Farmer's Markets, I've witnessed idiot customers trying to bargain with the grower/seller and convince them to sell their fresh veggies for next to nothing. and it is a pet peeve of mine. It is unreasonable for consumers to expect sellers at the Farmer's Markets to sell their produce for lower prices than they'd pay at Wal-Mart and it just infuriates me. Knowing all the blood, sweat and tears, and time and effort, and worry and sleepless nights on a "frost watch" that go into growing fresh produce, I feel like the growers at Farmer's Markets ought to be able to sell their produce for more, not less, than the price local grocery stores charge. Raising veggies well is labor-intensive and time-consuming and to me it implies a certain lack of respect for the farmer's or market grower's time and effort to try to bargain them down to a "cheap" price. To me, their work and the quality of their produce is deserving of the price they ask, and sometimes I think they sell too cheaply because they feel they have to in order to compete. So, it will be a cold day in Oklahoma in July before you'll see me selling at a Farmer's Market. A friend of a friend of ours sold produce at a local farmer's market for several years and finally gave it up to get "a real job" with a guaranteed income and I can't say I blame her one bit. Our produce is too precious to us to sell it to unappreciative people for whom the only thing that matters is the price they pay. Dawn

Thanks, Bob. I'll bear that in mind. *********************** Bboy, thank you for your nice post. Yes, no-till farming relies heavily on herbicides. For awhile, that was all the rage but don't hear that much about it anymore. I was an organic home gardener for many years and I've heard all the arguments on both sides. I am now part of a group project with several other growers who have chosen to adopt policies that rely on conventional methods approved by the TX A&M University Extension Service. I have come to trust our academic people and no longer (I once did) garden by rules based more on ideology than practical reality. I have an open mind on the subject, and choose organic pesticides (bt, Spinosad, copper hydroxide) whenever feasible - as do our other growers. We plant genetically modified cultivars when available, such as Attribute corn, to minimize insecticides. We always choose the least toxic product that will do the job, wait double the labelled days to harvest and thoroughly wash all produce under sanitary conditions. I've accepted chemical weed control and fertilizers, though, as an unavoidable reality and avoid products that are known to have direct health risks - such as Vydate nematacide for example. Most importantly, we "religiously" (it is a church project LOL) follow label instructions to the letter and use nothing that's not approved first by our extension agent and tech adviser. It seems to me that most certified organic producers cater to an upscale market clientele that is willing to pay extra for organically produced vegetables. It's just a business decision and our customers are not oriented that way at all. It's mostly an upscale suburban market and we are in a very rural area with a lot of poverty. They won't pay us anymore than WalMart prices - except for tomatoes, that is. Our tomatoes taste like tomatoes! :-) Jack

I would be sure that I attend all meetings and that decisions are made as a group or at least at the board level by a quorum of that board. I agree that the driver tip is excessive. I also agree that you need to be honest with the public from whom you are asking donations and let them know you are at goal and what you intend to do with any excess. I can see rolling it forward to help next year's trip, but I do not see continuing to fund raise this year. And I too look at the situation from the perspective of a schoolboard member, but remember this is a private organization too. Hope they are following their bylaws.