Tiny Gems Farm

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Tiny Gems Farm

Kelly Shank
Organic Urban Farmer

27/08/2024

Some days, the companion planting vibe is just sooo strong. 🙂 The flowers I planted with the cherry tomatoes are showing all the love today!

08/08/2024

Just some cute yellow squash hanging around with pepper friends and radish pods! I was out of town for a week, and the garden exploded (in a good, agricultural way 😄)! Yesterday, I picked about 10 pounds of green Tenderette and Mellow Yellow bush beans, the squash in the pic, and over seventy ears of corn. I am amazed and overwhelmed at the abundance provided in a tiny seed! From one packet, less than a quarter cup of bean seeds, I've already picked baskets and baskets of green beans. We are loved!

04/07/2024

Who minds weeding when the mornings look so beautiful?

10/06/2024

If you like peppermint or any mint, it's easy to never have to buy it at the store again! is one of the easiest plants to grow. Some say it's too easy 😅, so keep it in pots so it doesn't spread to your entire yard. In addition to the delicious taste, it's long been used as a safe anti-nausea treatment.

23/05/2024

One of the principles of permaculture, or ecological design, or sustainable agriculture, or whatever you call it 😄 is to integrate plants together instead of planting only a single species in a bed. This is a great tool to make a healthier soil and decrease the likelihood that a pest will damage the entire planting. This perennial bed is a mix of strawberries and asparagus.

20/05/2024

One of these is not like the others!
I've been testing the idea that if you put rocks painted to look like ripe strawberries in the bed a few weeks before the berries ripen, the critters will give them a try, decide there's nothing good happening there, and leave the fruit alone when it gets ripe. I've discovered that it may work for bird predation but the bunnies are not fooled! Still, a pint or two a day for us is pretty sweet!
You could have your own strawberry patch too! Strawberries are easy to grow. You can grab "bare root" starts at Walmart, Sam's Club, home improvement stores, and garden centers right now and have your own fresh berries next spring and for years to come.

07/03/2024

Tomato story: Early in the spring of 2023, I helped an older lady in the garden center where I worked. We had an enthusiastic discussion on the pros and cons of various tomato varieties. She told me about the large, pink tomatoes that her family had been growing for over three generations. Her grandfather had grown them, and she was in her eighties, so the cultivar has been growing here in the Miami County, Ohio, area for a lot of hot and humid summers. She left and went on her way to do the rest of her shopping. About an hour later, she came by my desk waving a tiny package of home-saved seeds harvested from her family's tomatoes! She'd discovered them down in the bottom of her purse and gave them to me. Those tiny blocks of soil you see in the second photo represent the start of our second year growing Grandpa's Pink Slicer Tomato! The first pic is my germination chamber AKA, an old food tray cart from Good Sam Hospital.

16/09/2023

It was so fun to take a team from Salem Church of God over the last two days to Dayton Urban Grown to help get them into good shape for winter growing. See that pile of weeds behind us? It's well over fifteen feet long and four feet high. We made a pretty good dent in the weeding! 😂 A huge thanks to Ty, Shirley, Robert, and Rosanna for their enthusiastic labor on this project and to Lisa Helm who has given years of work and scientific knowledge to help feed the Miami Valley. We're praying that Dayton Urban Grown will have a great growing season and be blessed!

08/06/2023

This week's project, or at least one of the projects, was to build, fill, and plant this permaculture bed with strawberries and asparagus. The mulch was kindly provided by a pine tree in the yard that drops about a third of her needles every fall. I'm grateful for the gift of mulch and for the seed that, hopefully, in the future, will give us spring shoots and berries.

28/05/2023

Among the veggies and pollinators flowers at our plant sale this Sunday, from 1-4, will be Artisan Blush, Sweet Cherry 100, Sungold, and Brandywine tomatoes. On the pepper front we have Peach Sugar Rush Peppers, Cubanbelle, Chocolate Bell, Wonder Bell, Habanero, and Aji Charipita as well as "Mystery Pepper" pots (compliments of me accidentally flipping over a tray of seedlings and mingling all the varieties). Also on hand: zucchini, cucumbers, yellow summer squash, and celery plants. We'll have Golden Hyssop, Butterfly W**d, and Bee Balm (Bergomot) to help attract and feed pollinators.

18/05/2023

The tomato 🍅 and pepper plants 🌶 had this lovely view this morning from inside the yet-to-have-soil raised bed. It makes a nice, snug house, especially when it's covered with a frost blanket, but I have to say I'm pretty well over having to move the plants back under cover! They might have been okay if I'd left them out, but I want the earliest tomato and pepper production that I can get, so back under the cover they went. Gotta protect the future salsa!

09/05/2023

It's SUNFLOWER time! Last night, I got to hang with a great group of 4-H kids in Miami County for one of my sunflower gardening classes. These new gardeners jumped right in with observations and questions. Everyone took home the seeds they planted, along with some extras to tuck in the soil at home. If you're in the greater Dayton, Ohio area, and you'd like info on garden classes for PreK-12, let me know! 🌱🦋💗

07/05/2023

This is Sylvie, who is an excellent chaser of squirrels and robins, meeting a few farm pigs yesterday. Fun was had.

27/03/2023

A small tragedy 😅 happened in my plant-world last night. As I pulled a tray seeded with various peppers out of the germination chamber, I dropped the entire tray upside down on the floor. A few were rescued, but there's no way to tell which seedlings are which variety, so the plant sale on May 6th may have a table with "Grab Bag" peppers!

22/03/2023

Yesterday was a beautiful day to work on making a space in the sun for new seedlings! Lots of veggies, flowers, and herbs are sprouted, and they'd appreciate a place to soak up the sun. I'll add a couple more layers of cardboard and top this off with agricultural landscape fabric so the grass doesn't grow up through the seed trays and pots. Also, I'm thinking through how to keep the doggo 🐶out... 🤷‍♀️

10/11/2022

After a looooong hiatus for moving, a new job, and all kinds of life changes I started my first trays of microgreens since April this past week. It's so refreshing to start a quick crop like these sunflower microgreens! They normally are under a light blocking cover for the first few days so they'd all be uniformly yellow at this stage but one side of the tray had slipped and there was just enough light to help them start to green up on the left. I kinda love the visual!

22/07/2022

A lovely nest of Crooked Neck Yellow Squash! 🤣

08/05/2022

My life story right here on a t-shirt! 😊

27/04/2022

There are many different kinds of basil and right now I'm growing five varieties in the nursery. As usual I'm the most excited about the Globe Basil because it's going to be so pretty in patio pot! Pretty food for the win!

26/04/2022

Since we're in the middle of a move I won't have a big home garden this summer BUT I'm still starting lots of plants for my daughter and son-in-law's farming co-op. One hundred tomato, and lots of other plants, are already hardening off at their space and I just started collards and several cucumber varieties. Long live the pickles! 😀

19/03/2022

Red Amaranth flowers are an amazing, tall, red spike of a flower. By the time they are mature they will be over my head! I'm a happy camper to see these lovelies popping up in the grow room!

09/03/2022

The little babies are up! Our family is moving a county over this spring so everything is in a state of change but the scent of thyme in the garden is a joy forever.

20/02/2022

Here's the crew of past and current interns from Dayton Urban Grown with the founder Lisa Helm (third from the left)! We all attended OEFFA's organic farming conference last week. It was great to meet some new people and reconnect with old friends. If you haven't followed Green Guerrilla yet, and you want to learn more about gardening, give Lisa Helm a follow. She is the founder of Dayton Urban Grown, Dayton Urban Green, and Green Guerrilla!

14/02/2022

Property hunt in progress and I'm hoping you can help. We're looking for a house with space to put up one of these lovely hoophouses so if you know of a home in town or in the country with at least 1/2 an acre in Montgomery, Clark, or Miami counties in Ohio let me know. I promise to keep you in delicious tomatoes for the summer! 😅

26/01/2022

I'm not gonna lie. I am super excited about getting these fresh-from-the-mail organic elderberry cuttings from BoulderBerry.com into the ground this spring!!

21/12/2021

Today's post is about tears in the checkout aisle - and why I had a choked up moment at Costco today. As I was waiting to check out today a baby in the next aisle over was crying the "It's past my nap time and I've had it with this place" kind of cry. Dad was trying to comfort her and put his groceries on the belt while she wailed in his ear.

Soon I could see that he was calm and doing a great job with both activities so I relaxed and glanced around. Almost every woman in the vicinity was focused on the babe, and to my mind, evaluating how to help. And they didn't just glance, they stayed focused even when their line moved.

How beautiful is it that a group of total strangers care about another stranger's little one?

How incredible is the nurturing instinct that will ignore everything else to focus on a child?

It was a bit of pure joy to see!

The pic is of my lovely dried Gomphrena.

17/12/2021

Wheatgrass! I've been experimenting with temperaure and length of grow time with our wheatgrass this month.
Check out the beautiful transition from dry grain to emerging nutrient-rich wheatgrass these pics show over a four day span!

Contact me for free living wheatgrass and microgreen samples for chefs and juice creators in the greater Dayton, Ohio area!

15/12/2021

I'm so happy with how doggo Sylvie's training is going! She is probably the most food motivated dog I've ever had but she is crushing learning the "Wait" command. We have her wait to get out of her crate, wait to go out a door to the outside, and even for her food. She is learning doggy self control and is coming along really well to be my companion in the fields next spring.

11/12/2021

Yum! I tried the Basic Green juice from today at 2nd St. Market and it is soo good. It's cold pressed, has no added sugar, and was delicious! Don't you love finding a Dayton biz makin' the good stuff!

26/11/2021

This little doggo is fast! It's hilarious to watch her loop the other dog three times before the older dog figures out where she went!

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https://www.tinygemsfarm.com/

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I am making, or trying to make, Nasturtium Jelly today to have at the Farmers Market at the Heights this Saturday but the bees do NOT want me to take the blossoms away. I mean, there are hundreds of blossoms still on the plants, but the ones I picked must be the best because the little guys won't leave them alone! #BeeFriends #pollinators #NasturtiumJelly&CocktailMix #TinyGemsFarm #FarmersMarketAtTheHeights #HuberHeightsOhio #daytonohio

Tiny Gems Farm Sunflower

One thing people are often curious about when they stop by the Tiny Gems Farm booth at farmer's markets is about the seed we use to grow Microgreens. They want to know if it's a different type of seed than the ones used to grow the "regular" size plant. The short answer is, No! We use varieties that are delicious at the Microgreen stage but, if planted and cared for, the seeds we use will produce a healthy adult plant. To show you what I mean, in the comments is a pic of a tray of ready-to-eat Sunflower 🌻 Microgreens, and a video of a fully-grown sunflower patch planted with the same seed. I ❤ them both! Farmers Market at The Heights - City of Huber Heights #HuberHeightYMCA #farmersmarketattheheights #sunflowermicrogreens🌻 #healthykidfood #PhillipsburgFarmersMarket #PhillipsburgOhio #HuberHeightsOhio #daytonohiochefs #daytonohio #organicseeds #organicpractic

We are STOCKED UP on super-healthy Microgreens for market this week! Grab some Pea Shoots and enjoy one our favorite recipes for 5-Minute Stir-Fried Garlic Pea Shoots! Farmers Market at The Heights - City of Huber Heights Phillipsburg Farm Market

Happy Chickens Eating Sunflower Microgreens

Sadly, we're not going to be at the Farmer's Market at the Heights this week but we'll see you there next week and we'll be at the Phillipsburg Farm Market this Wednesday from 4-7. Check out our daughter's chickens enjoying converting overgrown Sunflower Micros into eggs!

We'll be at a brand new market this week on Wednesday from 4-7 in the village of Phillipsburg, Ohio! Expect some delicious Microgreens and beautiful Sunflower bouquets. And don't worry 😄 that our bumblebee friends will go hungry, there are plenty more blooms to visit in the garden! The market is smack in the middle of Phillipsburg near the corner of Route 49 (also known as N. State St.) and Phillipsburg-Union (AKA W. Main or Baltimore-Phillipsburg Rd.).

Just a preview of what's coming to the Farmer's Market at the Heights this Saturday. Check out the spicy Purple Radish, our specialty Gem Sandwich Blend, Broccoli, the new Pet Grass, Pea, and crunchy Sunflower Microgreens! Dayton area chefs - contact us for free samples! #restaurants #instantsalad #DaytonOhio #petgrass #superfood #smoothies #localfood #snacks #TinyGemsFarm #microgreens🌱 #dogs #cats #birds #turtles🐢 #sunflowermicrogreens🌻 #easymeals #broccoli #peashoots

I'm taking the day off microgreen-ing to help my daughter build a new home for her growing-up-fast little flock and it's a wonderfully fun project! #growityourself #farmfresheggs🐓 #localfarming #farmgirl #chickensofinstagram #daytonohio #tinygemsfarm

Live2Lead:Dayton with Tyler Perry, John Maxwell and Daniel Pink

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Kelly Shank - Personal and Leadership Development Speaker, Trainer, Coach for Women, Children, and Teens

One of my great loves in life is to help women and kids to be confident, able to set and achieve goals, and to make healthy decisions that benefit themselves and their families. I’m a mom, a grandmother, and a former... well a lot of things! I spent a few years in the military as a public relations specialist, a number of years homeschooling my children (now my daughter is home educating her crew) and leading younger moms in how to teach their own little ones, a number of years volunteering at summer camps with teens, several in sales, about five years with a couple of energetic entrepreneurs, and a LOT of overlapping years in non-profit Christian radio. Gradually, as I networked with non-profits and businesses, and met many wonderful people it dawned on me there were only a handful who were achieving anywhere near what they could accomplish if their mindsets and habits changed. And it’s wasn't just organizations who weren’t stepping out into their potential but talented, smart individuals with a tremendous amount of promise who were at a standstill in their lives.

So, I left my job in radio, put on my study hat and gained my John Maxwell Certification as a Leadership and Personal Development Trainer, Coach, and Speaker so that I could come alongside individuals so they can more fully use their gifts, their energy, and live a life of joy.

I use variety of experiential formats for folks like you to find a way to connect, grow, and contribute. Combining the power of brainstorming, vibrant course material, accountability, and encouragement my Rapid Growth Groups propel sustainable, and powerful personal growth!

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