Thursday, December 8, 2011

Once upon a Groupon


We recently featured a Groupon deal for an in-depth tour of our farm, hands-on gardening session, a fresh lunch, and a Q&A with Gabriele, founder of our beautiful farm. Our excitement only grew as guests began arriving armed with pen and paper, comfortable clothes (i.e. were ready for some hands on experience!), and an eagerness to learn and converse about organic gardening.
We love utilizing our farm as a setting for which to learn about organic gardening. We don’t teach in a sterile classroom setting; our “classroom” teems with the life forces we teach about. It is this live interaction with the subtleties of nature that inspires both questions and amazement.
…And so we started our guests off with a tour of the farm.
There is much to learn about our subtropical climate, one that is unique to the rest of the continental United States. Our summers are quite long and it is rare for our winters to see temperatures below freezing, a breaking point for many plants. We do not take for granted our location and work in harmony with nature to ensure year round fruit and vegetable growth and year round floral beauty.
Above we have Will Dukes discussing oyster mushrooms. To learn more about oyster mushrooms, please visit our blog post titled “The Fun Guy who grows the fungi”. There were a lot of great questions and a lot of great insights as we toured the farm and by the time we concluded the farm tour, everyone was super excited to apply all that we learned! We got our soil ready by giving a final sift to the nutrient rich compost, and then we dug in! We had seeds at the ready, some of which were harvested from our own plants, a very sustainable way to garden indeed! With seeds all planted, smiles were stretched ear to ear. Anyone who’s ever planted a seed knows how great it feels! Things could only get happier as lunch was served.
A meal at Paradise Farms always brings the whole experience wonderfully full circle as guests dine on plants they’ve seen, touched, and smelled. We had a great time and were so glad we were able to connect and reach out to an even greater audience interested in organic gardening philosophies and knowledge. Though the tour started with a sprinkling of rain, it was short lived and the day turned out to have beautiful weather, a beautiful sun, and a really great group(on) of guests!