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About the grower

Farming background of Megan Riley of

M R Gardens

While Megan's extended family are farmers, her inherited love of gardening and fascination with soil didn't emerge until graduate school. She designed her curriculum for her M.S. in Environmental Education from Lesley University to focus on sustainable agriculture. From 2001 to 2003, she visited influential farms such as Eliot Coleman's Four Season Farm in Maine as well as several permaculture farms across the nation. She learned from growers trained in John Jeavons' Biointensive farming method, and then put theory into practice at a 7-month apprenticeship at a Community Supported Agriculture venture.

Megan continues to practice what she preaches in her own backyard, where she produces quality vegetables, herbs and native flowers. She sells seedlings in the community of Oakley in Asheville, North Carolina and has influenced neighbors and friends to grow their own food. Megan coaches customers on how to set up and manage weed-free, low-maintenance systems that make use of natural systems rather than a machine to do the tilling.

Read more.

Contact Megan

gardens@wncmretc.com

828.333.4151

Blog: http://mretcllc-mrgardens.blogspot.com/

On Facebook: M R Gardens

Time to request 2012 plant list

Pre-ordering encourages planning - not impulse buying

Send orders for early spring crops by Feb. 17 and summer crops by March 15.

By Megan Riley

When shopping for your garden starts, how many times have you felt so enticed to buy a plant that you couldn't resist, but then once you got it home, you didn't have the space for it or the time to plant it? (I admit, that's happened to me more than once).

Or were you so overwhelmed by the hundreds of choices at the market or retail store that you couldn't decide which ones to take home?

Pre-ordering alleviates some of the stress and impulsiveness of buying and saves you money.  It helps you in purchasing plants specific to your body's requirements as you have time to think about the nutrients you need and, correspondingly, the vitamins and minerals in the vegetables. You can also thoughtfully purchase the proper plant companions so that the vegetables are growing in the right garden community and appropriate for your garden environment.

M R Gardens encourages gardeners to be thoughtful in their garden planning by offering customers the option of ordering them ahead of time. The list of plants that M R Gardens is offering for sale in 2012 is now available.

When you request a list — by emailing me at gardens@wncmretc.com — you'll see which varieties I have on-hand, read their descriptions and see who collected the seed. You'll then make a notation of the number of plants you want on the spreadsheet. Please return the completed order by February 17 for spring crops and by March 15 for summer crops. If I don't have a variety that you are hoping to grow, let me know and I may be able to find it for you.

My spring crops include broccoli, cabbage, chard, kale, spinach, mustard, lettuce, celeriac and leeks.  Summer crops include eggplant, sweet peppers, summer and winter squash, tomatoes and watermelon.  I also have culinary herbs—five types of basil, catmint, dill, fennel, parsley— and beneficial flowers such as borage, calendula, cosmos, nasturtium, scarlet runner bean, sunflowers and Sweet Annie.

I'm especially excited about trying heirloom varieties from Nancy Long, a seed collector from the Cherokee Indian Reservation. I have seed for Black Seeded Simpson lettuce, Giant Curled mustard, Early Prolific Straightneck squash and Moon and Stars watermelon. Slow Food USA describes this variety of watermelon as a "magical" melon: "The dark green and yellow speckled skin of the Moon and Stars watermelon evokes a living galaxy while its happenstance return suggests a storybook ending."

I hope pre-ordering helps you have a magical 2012 in the garden. Contact me today!

Read more about M R Gardens seedling sales.

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Email M R Gardens at gardens@wncmretc.com or call 828.333.4151 to request a plant list. M R Gardens sells on a sliding scale so that all people in the community can enjoy healthily grown plants.

The gift of books: For winter reading

The gardening energy starts to sprout soon after the New Year. We've had some downtime after the holidays and have reflected on how we want our garden to improve. A few sunny days get us excited for spring, although we can't break into the soil for another three months. So what can we do with that energy? We curl up beside the fireplace with a cup of tea in one hand and a book in the other, and plan next year's garden.

On the M R Gardens blog, Megan has listed her favorite gardening resources, including Weedless Gardening, The Soul of Soil, and Great Garden Companions.

Read more.

Garden coach services

Some activities require someone by your side for you to really grasp them, and gardening is one of those. When someone has physically shown you how to set up a bed, plant the crops and harvest them, you are much more likely to remember how to do so the next time than if you just read how-to articles.

Since planting and harvesting techniques vary depending on which crops you're growing, you'll be pulling from your memory quite often. It's best if those memories are ingrained in your body rather than just in your brain

Plus, if you've read about ecological gardening, the complexities can feel overwhelming. There are hundreds of variables, microclimates and plant interactions to keep in mind when planning a garden. Yet once a good system is set up, the work can become quite simple as it almost manages itself.

Perhaps the most significant variable is you! It's important that you set up a system that fits your lifestyle, schedule, goals, personality and work style. If you don't, you'll grow frustrated and stop gardening.

When you hire Megan as a garden coach, she will help you set up a system that addresses these variables.

Read more.

No machine needed: Worms do the tilling

Setting up your garden for the first time? Megan shares in the M R Gardens blog her method for starting beds -- and letting nature take care of the tilling.

"I'm never going back to my old way of gardening!" My neighbor recently said to me. "Building the soil the top down makes much mores sense. My garden was so much more productive and easier to maintain. I did almost no weeding this year!" She thanked me profusely for showing her my method of gardening, which requires no mechanical tilling.... Read more.

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M R Gardens posts gardening, cooking and nutritional tips appropriate to the season. Megan would love to hear from you!