Dr. Laura Lengnick – local author and gardener

Must See Links:  Presentation          Resources

Stories of heavy rainfalls, lingering drought, warmer winters, extreme temperature fluctuations and new pest and disease challenges abound these days at home and across the U.S.   How are all these events linked and what does this mean for your garden, your family, your community? How do we prepare for these and other changes already happening and expected to grow more intense in coming years? 

On Tuesday, November 15 at 7 pm until 8:30 pm,  at the Town of Weaverville Community Room, 30 S. Main Street, The Garden Club of Weaverville hosted a discussion open to the public for free with local author Laura Lengnick, climate resilient gardening and community resilience. 

Must See Links:  Presentation          Resources

 

Weaverville, NC— Changing weather patterns affect us all.  More heavy rainfall, warmer winters and springs, hotter summer nights, more dry periods and drought translate into changes in the timing of flowering, the success of pollination and fruiting, the challenges of managing fruit and vegetable crops in your garden.  Laura Lengnick, a local vegetable and fruit gardener, discusses all of these changes and more in her new book, Resilient Agriculture: Cultivating Food Systems for a Changing Climate (New Society Publishers 2015), and explains how they are all associated with our changing climate. http://cultivatingresilience.com/

To many, climate change might seem like a hotly debated and far-off thing, hard to see in everyday life. “Even I used to see it as a problem of tomorrow, not something that even the next generation of gardeners and farmers would need to worry much about,” Laura says.  Until last year, Laura was a faculty member in the Environmental Studies Department at Warren Wilson College where she directed the Sustainable Agriculture program.  “I taught classes the covering a range of topics from global warming and other earth system processes to local food, farming and gardening skills.  I lost my blueberry crop in the 2007 Easter freeze, new springs began running through my garden in the summer of 2013, and still I didn’t completely connect those experiences to the realities of climate change.”

That changed the fall of 2013, when Laura began gathering stories of adaptation to more variable weather and extremes from award-winning sustainable farmers and ranchers located across the U.S.  Her work with those producers and with the USDA on climate change effects in agriculture, opened her eyes to the way that climate changes impacts have been and continue to challenge our communities.

Laura Lengnick has explored agriculture and food system sustainability through more than 30 years of work as a researcher,  policy-maker, educator, and biointensive gardener.  She has grown vegetables and fruits in backyard gardens from central Pennsylvania to the Florida panhandle and many points in between.  Her research in soil quality and sustainable farming systems was nationally-recognized with a USDA Secretary’s Honor award in 2002 and she contributed to the 3rd National Climate Assessment as a lead author of the 2012 USDA report Climate Change and U.S. Agriculture: Effects and Adaptation. Laura led the academic program in sustainable agriculture at Warren Wilson College for more than a decade.  She left the college in 2014 to create Cultivating Resilience, LLC a private firm offering ecosystem-based climate risk management services to higher education, community organizations, business and government.  Her award-winning book, Resilient Agriculture: Cultivating Food Systems for a Changing Climate was released in June 2015 by New Society Publishers.