Love Your Planet!

My table at the Love Your Planet Day at Flagler College
in St. Augustine on Feb. 11th.

While my book tour doesn't officially get underway until April, I took the opportunity to participate in the "Love Your Planet Day" at Flagler College in St. Augustine. I brought my books and a sample harvest from my garden. I talked to a lot of people and even sold a few books.

First Coast Slow Food table

There were 12 or 14 tables with various "green" displays and someone playing wooden flutes for atmosphere. First Coast* Slow Food had a table there. I found out that they are having a big event, which I will now be a participating vendor: First Coast Slow Down on May 3rd, which will take place at Intuition Ale 720 King Street Jacksonville, FL 32204.

"The Slow Down is a unique opportunity for local Snail of Approval recipients - chefs, farmers, producers and artisans - to come together in the spirit of collaboration and share their talents, products and expertise with those who are interested in a food system that is good, clean and fair. Each participating restaurant, farm, producer or artisan will have a table where they can display food, produce or food products."A limited number of tickets will be sold for this event.

See the events page on the "Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida" website for my other events so far.

Flagler College has a beautiful campus.

It was a beautiful 80-degree day, if a little too breezy for good table management. Flagler is a small college with a lovely campus right in the center of St. Augustine.

*First Coast: Florida has divided itself into various coastal regions. The northeast region is call the First Coast because St. Augustine is the oldest city and Ponce deLeon landed here 500 years ago. Some of the other coasts are Space Coast, Treasure Coast, Palm Coast, Emerald Coast, and Nature Coast.

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FNPS board members working through the exercise.

I went to the Florida Native Plant Society retreat in Haines City last weekend. We worked through some interesting exercises with the help of two facilitators to help the Society reorganize itself so that it (we) can grow.

Each of the five groups were drawing diagrams, thinking of contingencies, assumptions, and solutions for one topic. It was exhausting work because we were on our feet throughout most of the day. 

FNPS board members are always ready for a hike.  Even after a full day of work on Saturday from 8:30am to 4:30pm, a dozen members still had energy to spend the hour and a half before dinner out hiking in the scrub.

Even after all that work, I love that about half of the group (myself included, of course) went for a hike on a scrub habitat trail near the conference center for an hour and a half before dinner.  Most are quite knowledgeable about Florida's flora and habitats. Fun. We had a campfire that evening and then worked our butts off until almost 1pm on Sunday.

Now back to writing as much of my third book as possible before the book tour starts in April. Please come out to one of my events. I'd love to talk to you!

Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt