Join the Town of Halifax on Friday night, July 30, from 6-9pm for Friday Night Jams at the Halifax Farmers Market.

Bring your lawn chairs for lots of fun!

The Southside Master Gardeners’ Spring Plant Sale will be held at the Halifax Extension Office/Halifax Public Library parking area on Saturday, May 1 from 7:30 a.m. to noon, rain or shine.  Shiitake mushroom logs and rain barrels will be on display. 

Shiitake mushrooms, flavorful and nutritious, are also known for their medicinal qualities. The exciting news is that they can be grown right here in Southside Virginia.  The mushrooms are cultivated using a process that basically imitates Nature.  Recently felled hardwood trees, cut into 40 inch logs, are used as the growing medium. A fresh White Oak log, for example, cut to length and inoculated with viable spores called mushroom spawn is all that is needed to grow Shiitakes.

The Southside Master Gardeners' Spring Plant Sale will be held at the Halifax Extension Office and Public Library parking area on Saturday, May 1 from 7:30 a.m. to noon, rain or shine. Among the educational exhibits will be a demonstration on the use of herbs, and many herbs and some herbal vinegars will be on sale.

Herbs are well adapted to Southside Virginia and very easy to grow. Generally they require two things "lots of sunshine and good drainage. Herbs can be incorporated right into your landscape beds, as they get along well with shrubs including roses, perennials and annuals. Herbs to try are oregano, rosemary, basil, parsley, sage and thyme. Thyme will often just die back in the hot months and reappear when temperatures cool down.

The Town of Halifax recently launched a new website, featuring old photos of the town ranging from the 1910's to the 1930's, details of the downtown revitalization program, and a documents repository that will make forms and documents available for download.  A few news and revitalization documents are currently available in the repository, but the town is in the process of adding a number of forms for the citizens' convenience.  Click here to visit the new website.

The town also has a new Events Coordinator, Erin Throckmorton Shaughnessy, and the first event she has announced is an Earth Day Extravaganza planned for April 24; the event will include a Community Walk/Fun Run, live music, food, educational displays, and Convergence Art Guild will create a masterpiece from recycled materials found within our community. For more information about the event, visit the town's new calendar.

We always see a lot of wildlife around our property on Banister Lake in the town of Halifax, and this winter is no exception; we usually don't get good photos because of the distance and not being ready with a camera, but here are a few recent fuzzy ones. 

About 15 turkeys have been showing up, including a tom and a jake; the pictures show 5 of them (the rest had moved over the knoll by the time I found a camera), and 2 of them flying away over the lake.  There's also a fuzzy photo of a red cardinal in a sweetgum tree, and a great blue heron on our dock.  Sorry for the poor photos, but I wanted to share how much wildlife we have on the lake; others we see include:  beaver, river otter, hawks, a bald eagle, and an osprey.  Last summer an osprey visited our back yard almost every day and many days we would spot a bald eagle sitting in the top of the tall tree, scanning the lake for prey.