PASA Day Three

Saturday we woke up and peeked out the windows at SNOWMAGEDDEON2010. The truck was barely visible under a mountain of snow. Hotel maintenance guys were making valiant attempts to shovel and plow so the guests could get around. I went to check out while rebby dug out the truck.
Lots of people were advocating just staying another night, and apparently that's what lots of people did. We had a dicey situation however because rebby was scheduled to fly to Atlanta out of Pittsburgh at 12:15 Sunday. So unless she got the OK from her boss to stay, we were headed home one way or another. Just about everyone we talked to or head or texted with had a different opinion. Our final call was to attend the morning workshops we wanted to attend, get our lunch, do some last minute shopping, and then head home on the highway. (adding about an hour to the trip but eliminating a lot of scary twisty mountain roads)
So we had our continental picnic and then headed to our first workshops of the day: beekeeping for me, and shiitake mushroom cultivation for rebby. I am absolutely convinced that beekeeping is the right thing to do and especially after the workshop, absolutely fascinated by the social organization of bees, but. SO paranoid about beestings. I am not allergic and honestly, the last bee sting I got I barely even felt. But still. Scary. The fellow that gave the talk was very encouraging though and I think I am really going to pursue it. I'll start with going to a Burgh Bees apiary visit and see what happens. Woo!
Rebby was all about the mushroom cultivation. We're going to have so much going on this year!
Our next workshops were directly across from each other, and coincidentally, pretty much diametrically opposed. I went to a talk by Lee Reich called "My Weedless Garden" and she went to a talk about year round backyard food production. My talk was extremely entertaining and pretty much everything he said made good sense to me. When rebby and I met up to compare notes, it turned out that the people talking to her advocated double digging while Lee advocated no tilling at all! Funny. It makes good sense to me that flip tossing the dirt around activates the weed seeds and if you disturb the earth as little as possible they will be less likely to germinate. I'm on his side.
His method is similar to Lasagna Gardening which is kinda what we did with our raised beds, so it's pretty much what we've been doing. He got me really excited about drip irrigation, though. That's a big project for this year.
Next was lunch time, and it was awesome and delicious. We ended up sitting at a table with a couple who have a few acres in Export, PA, where they have apple and chestnut trees. The woman had gone to a talk about biochar and told us some about that. Also at the table was a Mexican family who were farming in upstate NY, a PASA staffer from the Pittsburgh office, and a really awesome Mennonite man who told us some things about canning and recommended dwarf apple trees. Even over lunch we were learning!
I ran out of the lunch room to get my last minute purchases before the market closed, and then rebby and I packed up some snacks and hit the road.
I'm going to be thinking about this stuff for a long, long time. And definitely planning to go again next year!