Because our farm has a community focus, we like to offer educational opportunities at the farm and involve local community members in our breeding work (what we call “community vegetable breeding”). In the spring, we offer two workshops about seed saving. The first is called “Planning Your Seed Garden,” which introduces the basics of seed saving and provides tips for organizing your garden to allow you to save true seed. The second is called “Seed Saving in East TN” and provides a more in-depth look at how to save and produce seed in our region. Both of these workshops are also available as Power Point presentations. In late June, we offer a field day so that community members can help us hand-pollinate winter squash as part of our breeding work and learn all the ins and outs in the process. In the fall, we offer a field day on our breeding work, where we share information about the importance of regional, on-farm vegetable breeding (also available as a Power Point), display our current breeding projects, and provide an opportunity for community members to take part in the breeding process through taste-testing and feedback on visual appeal/marketing, taste, and texture.

In addition to these annual opportunities, we also work with a local school to develop projects for grades 5-8 that are part of their hands-on or applied science curriculum. We are just wrapping up their fall project, in which they planted, evaluated, processed and marketed several “Breaking Vegetable Boundaries” cabbage varieties that are currently in the breeding process at Cornell University.