Goat Lady CSA

Goat Lady Dairy in Grays Chapel, North Carolina started a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) garden in 2010 and it was a great success. They are beginning to get ready for the 2011 season, but in the meantime Daniel Woodham (farm manager) has been harvesting winter carry over vegetables which the dairy sells at the local farmer’s market. He is assisted regularly by Chram Rode and his wife Broih Fnu, a Montagnard couple originally from Viet Nam who are training to help run the day to day gardening operations.

(Photographs copyright 2011 by Dan Routh)

Bee Keeping


Bees have been under a lot of pressure over the past few years, and their numbers have dropped, but they are beginning to make a comeback in our area. More people are keeping hives for honey and to help pollinate their gardens. My son Tristan checks his hive at our home in Grays Chapel, North Carolina, and the bees are starting to fill out the racks with honey. Tristan’s hive is a commercial type. Below, an older style top bar hive stands in the garden at Goat Lady Dairy.



(Photographs copyright 2010 by Dan Routh)

Monticello Vegetable Garden


My wife and I went on a rare pleasure trip this past weekend to Monticello, the home of President Thomas Jefferson near Charlottesville, Virginia. It was a gorgeous day and while we did take a short tour of Jefferson’s wonderful house, the focus of the trip was a harvest festival that featured Monticello’s extensive two acre vegetable garden and adjacent orchards. Jefferson was an innovative gardener and was without a doubt a forerunner in what has become today’s local sustainable agriculture movement. While the gardens were a little past their prime, their scope and variety were still amazing.