I will be announcing the start of the UVM Fruit Program’s Vermont Beginning Fruit Grower Program (VBFG). This project is funded for eighteen months through a Vermont Specialty Crops Block Grant through the Vermont Agency of Agriculture.
There are two primary deliverables for this project. First is an interactive email list that will provide a forum for beginning growers to interact with one another and with experienced growers. This peer-to-peer learning will greatly enhance the knowledge base among beginning fruit growers and address the bottleneck of having one person (me) who is only able to devote partial time to answering individual questions from beginning and prospective growers. Please let me know if you wish to join the list. I can add you directly, or, better yet, you can follow the subscription instructions at: http://www.uvm.edu/~fruit/beginner/bg_listserv.html. If you ever find that it is not useful, taking up too much inbox space, or anything else, let me know that too. I can remove addresses easily, and can also set the delivery of the list to collate messages into daily digests, but for now, I’d like to see how much traffic we get.
The next deliverable will be a series of on-farm workshops to help address knowledge gaps through experiential education. This winter, we will hold a number of apple and grape pruning workshops around the state. Each workshop will be limited to twelve people so that we may provide time and attention to each participant. I’ll be announcing the first of them shortly, please keep your eyes on your inboxes if interested.
Keep those shovels ready,
Terry
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The UVM Tree Fruit and Viticulture Program is supported by the
University of Vermont Agriculture Experiment Station, a USDA NIFA E-IPM
Grant, and USDA Risk Management Agency Funds.