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Trip to Home Sweet Farm

by Cody Marx Bailey on December 7, 2008

Sunday, December 14th, a group of folks will be carpooling from Brazos Natural Foods at 11am and returning at 5PM. We will be visiting Sweet Home Farm just outside of Brenham, TX. The group last time was about 12 people and we had a wonderful time. This is our second trip and should be a lot of fun. Here’s a little info about Home Sweet Farm:

From the website:

Our small family farm is located off the Bluebonnet Trail in Washington County “the birth place of Texas”.  These rolling hills provide the setting that the earliest pioneers admired: sufficient rainfall, diverse soils, hardwood forests, abundant wildlife, and a scenic landscape.

We grow over 100 varieties of vegetables and herbs for our committed CSA farm members.  We are Certified Naturally Grown, and use ONLY natural techniques (NO synthetic chemical fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides).  We care about our environment and the quality of our food, because our family lives here, and we eat everything we grow.

We work full time as a family on our 22 acre farm with a 110 acre lease.  We hope that our work is an encouragement to others as we share the harvest with our community and promote small family farms everywhere.

More info:
http://www.homesweetfarm.com/

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Last Minute Rulemaking by Bush USDA Threatens Organic Farmers

by Cody Marx Bailey on December 5, 2008

From CommonDreams.org:

CORNUCOPIA, Wisconsin - December 3 - Many media outlets, from the New York Times to the blogosphere, have tracked what has been dubbed the “corporate takeover” of organic farming. One of the hottest controversies in this rapidly growing $20 billion industry has been giant factory farms milking thousands of cows each in feedlots and masquerading as organic. Some of these industrial dairies are controlled by the nation’s largest agribusinesses.

Read the rest at http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2008/12/03-5

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A Word from Joe Novak

by Cody Marx Bailey on November 7, 2008

I would like to announce three activities that are happening here at the end of the semester:

TAMU Horticulture Club Poinsettia Sale
Holistic Teaching Garden Open House
Holistic Teaching Garden Holiday Plant Sale

The TAMU Horticulture Club is holding a poinsettia sale.  Plants must be pre-ordered by Nov. 19 for pickup Dec. 1 and 2 at the Horticulture/Forest Science Building (HFSB), Rm 112.  The Club will have five cultivars available as 6 or 6.5 inch pots.  To see the cultivars available and to copy an order form to send your order in, please visit the Club’s internet site: http://hortclub.tamu.edu/fallsale.  The plants will be of very high quality and to get the cultivars and quantities that you want, it would be best to pre-order them but the Club will have a few extra to sell at the site on the days of the sale.

The Holistic Teaching Garden will hold its Fall Open House on Saturday, Nov. 15 from 11:00-3:00. All activities will be in the Holistic Teaching Garden behind the HFSB.  There will be interactive activities for children, such as plant projects, story telling and tours of the Rainforest, Discovery Trail and other garden areas.  For older gardeners there will be demonstrations of key garden techniques such as plant propagation and composting, tours of all parts of the Holistic Teaching Garden and an opportunity to learn about the new Community Garden that has been developed in association with the Holistic Garden.  Please visit our internet site to learn more about the garden and some of the areas that you can visit.  We will have refreshments made with some of the plant materials harvested from the garden.  If you have questions, please contact Louis Castillo at 979-845-3915 or lcastillo@ag.tamu.edu
http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/holisticgarden .

The Holiday Plant and Bulb Sale for the Holistic Teaching Garden will be held Nov. 20, 21 and 22, Thur, Fri and Sat, from 9:00 a.m. -3:00 p.m. each day here at the Horticulture Forest Science Building.  I will send more information about this in a week or so.  We will have a good selection of high quality amaryllis bulbs, special gift items such as decorated gourd bird houses and seedy characters, landscape plants, strawberry plants, herbs and a huge array of attractive houseplants.  Many will make attractive gifts and some will include instructions in their use, such as the rose geranium that I use to make a pound cake or flavor tea, Stevia for sweetener and others.  We will not have poinsettias as this is a fund raising project for the Horticulture Club and so the poinsettias should be ordered in advance as mentioned above.

Please help us publicize these activities to any persons you think may be interested.

Thanks for supporting the Holistic Teaching Garden.  Your support is helping us to increase the number of students hired to work in the gardens, expand the number of university activities taking place in the gardens and multiply the many ways in which we can use the garden for the benefit of all of the gardeners in our local communities.

Joe Novak

Joseph R. Novak, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer
Sociohorticulture, Garden Science,
Organic Crop Production
Holistic Garden
Department of Horticultural Sciences
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX 77843-2133
979-845-3915
979-845-0627 fax
j-novak@tamu.edu

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