The Columbus Urban Farm Tour Series starts Saturday, July 30, from 2 to 4 p.m. at Franklinton Gardens, a nonprofit, 2.5-acre, “high-output” fruit and vegetable farm whose goal is to demonstrate that “urban agriculture can be a cornerstone of a healthy urban food system.” Admission is free and open to the public. The Franklin County office of OSU Extension, CFAES’s outreach arm, is a co-sponsor of the series. Read more here and here.
Month: July 2016
Good to manage horse manure, too
Good manure management — practices that enrich the soil, keep water clean and save money — is for more than cows, more than pigs, more than chickens, but for horses too. So says CFAES’s Les Ober, who will speak on the topic at the Aug. 3-4 North American Manure Expo in Ohio.
Get the 411 on QGIS
Learn the ABCs of using QGIS — in this case, to map tree cover, land use and similar data — in an Aug. 17 workshop in Mansfield. QGIS is a free and open-source geographic information system, or GIS. It works on operating systems including Mac OS X, Linux, Unix and Microsoft Windows. Sponsoring the event is CFAES’s Ohio Woodland Stewards program. Read more.
Make your yard your happy place
What can be greener than grass? The speaker at the Aug. 9 breakfast of the CFAES-based Environmental Professionals Network will show you some options…
How to do triage on trees
Check it out if your work involves trees or landscaping: CFAES’s Ohio Woodland Stewards Program is holding a workshop on diagnosing tree problems — from holes in leaves to galls on twigs, thinning crowns to dying branches — on Aug. 5 in Mansfield…
New study on pipelines and farming
A study of how natural gas pipeline installations affect Ohio cropland productivity begins this fall thanks to a $200,000 gift from Kinder Morgan Inc. to Ohio State…
See unusual herbs, berries in Columbus
Take a Unique Kitchen Herb and Berry Farm Tour from 2-4 p.m. Sunday, July 17. It’s at Foraged & Sown in Columbus and is part of the ongoing Ohio Sustainable Farm Tour and Workshop Series. Foraged & Sown is a growing and foraging operation that sells at the Clintonville Farmers Market and select retail outlets. See herb seedlings, culinary herbs, alpine strawberries, other specialty berries, a backyard-scale greenhouse and high tunnel, and more. Get details here on p. 34.
Grow your own quality dairy forage
The Ohio Sustainable Farm Tour and Workshop Series continues at 10 a.m. Friday, July 15, with the Quality Forages for Dairy Operations Farm Tour. It’s at the Heckman Family Dairy in Yorkshire in western Ohio. The Heckmans milk 80 cows, raise replacements and rotationally graze them on 340 certified organic acres. They also grow all their own feed. Learn more here on pp. 11-12.
No waste left behind; or, big doings soon in London
The 2016 North American Manure Expo is about to land in Ohio. The big event, covering the serious business of using livestock leavings to help grow crops, while doing it safely and greenly, is Aug. 3-4 at CFAES’s Molly Caren Agricultural Center in London, about 25 miles west of Columbus. Read the story…
The changing state of algal blooms in Oregon
Harmful algal blooms are on the upswing in Oregon — in part due to climate change, Beaver State experts say — and CFAES scientist Jay Martin, head of the college’s Field to Faucet initiative, spoke on Ohio’s bloom background in a June 30 story in the Bend (Oregon) Bulletin.