The long awaited Camden Garden Club Inagural Garden Expo takes place this Thursday, July 17 at 9AM. Detailed information can be found on the web site and tickets can be purchased at camdengardenclub.org/2025-garden-expo

In these final days of preparation, guest speaker, Nancy Jenkins toured,  Old Souls, David Kibbe's micro farm, to see for herself this unique and beautiful transformation from a wasteland to a flourishing micro farm.

Nancy wrote in her Sub-Stack,  On the Kitchen Porch,  "I had this pointed out to me this morning, one of those sticky summer mornings on the coast of Maine when the temperature is not too high but the humidity (“the humdiddy,” oldtimers call it) makes it seem almost tropical. Standing in the garden of my friend David Kibbe, I had to marvel at what he has achieved in just three short years. 

The site, around three-quarters of an acre, was barren when David bought it, more like an abandoned dump for piles of junk, dirt, broken asphalt, dead stuff removed from other places. Beneath all that lay rocky, gravelly, severely damaged and virtually lifeless soil. Today the mini-estate, which David has named Old Souls Farm, is terraced, subdivided, walled, and portioned into lush growing areas, topped by his own small house from which he can survey his domain: peach trees displaying an abundance of not-quite-ripe fruits; potatoes hilled up comfortably with rich black soil; tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, zucchini, and pumpkins, all reaching toward ripeness; and in the center a small meadow of native perennials--baptisia, monarda, liatris among them--to welcome the neighborhood butterflies, dragonflies, hummingbirds, and other useful critters.

Rows of green corn rise above elegantly curved raised beds that are edged with ditches filled with woodchips. This whole construction, which both controls run-off and adds valuable nutrients to the soil, is based on a thoughtful combination of bioswales (the ditches, filled with plant debris and slowly decaying rotted wood, topped with chips) and hügelkultur (a similarly layered construction, like a mounded compost heap that slowly fertilizes the upper level in which the corn is planted). The corn, by the way, is supposed to be “knee-high by the Fourth of July,” according to local mythology, but David’s corn is already hip-high and going strong."

Nancy has been writing about food, how to grow it, cook it beautifully and enjoy it for many decades. Clearly, being immersed in this "Garden of Eden" impressed her, a world-wide traveler. 

Kibbe's Chestnut St. neighborhood 3/4 quarter transformation is the featured tour this Thursday. David will be on hand to answer questions and discuss the variables of this lovely hillside micro-farm. The tour will be the adternoon culmination of a morning of delightful speakers and demonstrators, local talents gathered to share their humor and wisdom in many aspects of creating beautiful tables from edible gardens.