Your Small Kitchen Garden

Baskets of home-grown vegetables will be on display, as well as Christmas trees, nuts, fruits, honey, maple syrup, and, for those who confuse combine raising poutlry with gardening, chickens.

If you have a small kitchen garden, and you’re not a certified master gardener, here’s an opportunity to advance your skills: Penn State Master Gardeners will attend the Pennsylvania Farm Show in Harrisburg from January 10 through January 17. Get to the Farm Show, and you can probably bend the ear of at least one Certified Master Gardener. I’m planning to do just that.

If you can’t get to the Farm Show, but you’d still like to ask questions of a Certified Master Gardener, I offer my assistance: Toss me your questions in a comment, and I’ll take them with me to the Farm Show.

Small Kitchen Garden Doldrums

There’s nothing to do in the small kitchen garden I manage in my yard; it’s nearly a skating rink because of two days of freezing rain. My next outdoor gardening task will be to prune fruit trees in March, and to graft from my red apple tree onto my green apple tree. As well, I have my eye on a neighbor’s pear tree from which I hope to swipe a few tiny branches; I’ll graft those onto my own pear tree.

So, facing nearly two more months of indoor-only gardening, I seek gardening-related activities. As I explained in my last post, next up is The Pennsylvania Farm Show in Harrisburg.

This show celebrates all things agricultural in Pennsylvania. Because Pennsylvania is primarily rural, it hosts a huge variety of agricultural activity. The Farm Show presents many entertainment events such as rodeo competitions, livestock judging, cooking shows, sheep shearing and weaving, and honey and maple syrup production. As well, the show boasts several exhibition halls filled with vendors and displays having to do with agriculture.

The Penn State Master Gardeners appear on the Farm Show schedule every day of the show. I don’t know what they present, but I’ll attend on Saturday and find out. With a list of my own questions, questions gathered from this blog, and questions received on Twitter, I’ll respectfully request an interview with one or more of the master gardeners on-hand, and report back to you during or after the show (I’m attending 4 days of the 8 that the show is open to the public).

So, leave your questions. Let’s get enlightened by a master—or see whether we can stump one—and get a little gardening adrenalin flowing.

Technorati Tags: farm show, gardening, master gardener, winter