From The President. In This Issues. The Bridge to Knowledge Volume 86, Issue 5

Transcription

1 20 16 The Bridge to Knowledge Volume 86, Issue 5 In This Issues 1 President s Message 2-10 MCMG Corner Upcoming Events MG Member articles 11 Meeting Notes From The President Thank you all for coming out to Liberty High School for our April meeting. What an amazing job they do with their agricultural program. I was really amazed and heard many of you comment that you felt the same and, of course, many of us came home with plants we had purchased from their greenhouse. A special thanks to Jack Baudo for sharing his fabulous gardens with us. The azaleas were breathtaking and the dogwoods were in bloom overhead. Forty two gardeners were able to get out to visit his gardens even though it rained off and on during the afternoon. Our Spring Plant Sale is fast approaching. I hope you all have potted up everything you have available to sell at the show. We have a big room to fill up and we need lots of common and native plants this year since we are stressing pollinator friendly plants. This, of course, is our big fund raiser for the year and it is always so wonderful to see what everyone has to share. Because the plant sale will be set up at the WTREC auditorium where we would normally meet on Thursday, May 5th, we will be meeting downtown at the First United Methodist church that night at 6:30. Our speaker will be our own wonderful Carol Reese. As always, bring a dish to share! See you there! Mary Nenarella President Madison County Master Gardeners 1

2 It is hard to believe that our MG Plant Sale is almost upon us. First, let me thank all of you that have been digging, potting, grooming, and readying plants for the plant sale on May 7th whether you ve been helping Jason, Dr. Sams, or tending plants from your own gardens. You are what make the Plant Sale happen and we appreciate the work and time you give. Hopefully the weather will be good but we don t have to worry about that so much when we are at UTREC. As always, there are a few reminders to help make this sale a success. Here is a list of DO s to remember: 1. Bring healthy plants. 2. Make sure that your pots are clean. 3. Remove any weeds or dead leaves, freshen the soil if necessary. 4. Save and bring boxes sturdy boxes like the kind strawberries and other fruit are packed in 5. Wear your name tag every work day but especially on Plant Sale Day. (Name tags help us get to know one another when we are working) 6. Be friendly and helpful to our customers. 7. Be sure to park in the designated MG parking area on the day of the sale. On work days you will park in the regular parking lot. 8. Please notify Judy, Mary Kay or Tharon if for some reason you will not be able to work but signed up to work. 9. Be sure to get your labels printed or if you cannot print your own, let Mary Kay know and provide her a list of your plants. 10. Come and work if you signed up to work. We are counting on you. If you are not signed up, come and shop. There are also just a few DON Ts that you need to keep in mind as well. These include the following DON Ts: 1. Do not leave your assigned post. 2. Do not shop while on duty. 3. Do not enter the Hold Area unless assigned to that job. 4. Do not use wagons inside the building. 5. Do not bring items for sale on Saturday. All items need to be delivered prior to 5 pm on Thursday afternoon. 6. Do not bring pets into the building. We are looking forward to seeing the wonderful specimens that you are bringing for sale and to working with you. You are the best, Madison County Master Gardeners! It will be a wonderful day! See you there! From Tharon 2

3 Here are some tips on how to label plants for the sale!! Instructions for Labeling Plants Go to the Madison County Master Gardener website Right above the calendar on the home page are two items: -Blank Template -Alphabetical Catalog of Plant Tags Click on the Alphabetical Catalog to check if there is already a label listed for your plant(s). If not, close it out and go to the Blank Template, open and type in the information that you find when you research the description for your plant(s). There are several websites you can check: Wikipedia Missouri Botanical Garden David's Green House or just Google the name of your plant. Insert a sheet of labels (Avery 8160 is the one that we are using; it's already formatted to fit the necessary information.) I am giving Celeste 2000 sheets; you can pick up what you need from the Ext Office. There are ten 2x4 inch labels on each sheet so you can calculate how many sheets you will need. Print your label(s) and put them on the cards provided at the office. If you are unable to print your own labels, please bring a handwritten description when you drop of your plants and we will print them on-site. We really need your help to alleviate the time it takes to research and print individual labels. The printed labels are necessary for our customers to be able to learn and decide what plants will work for their particular gardens/containers. Thank you for helping make our 2016 Madison County Master Gardener Spring Plant Sale a success! If you have any questions feel free to call me, Mary Kay Havranek at ! Call for Wagons If you have a wagon that we might borrow to use to transport plants during plant sale set-up and during the plant sale, please let Judy Rice ( ) or Tharon Kirk ( ) know. Thank you. We need to have the wagons there on Wednesday by 1pm to help with hauling plants as MGs deliver them and then to help us get our customers plants from the building to their vehicles. Make sure you label them with your name so that they are returned to their rightful owner after the sale!! Many thanks. TKirk *W e are emphasizing pollinator plants at the sale this year. There has been so much emphasis in the media about the declining bee/pollinator population recently. The best pollinators are our native plants, the common ones that we have in our gardens so please bring to the sale the plants that attract the bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds in your garden. Plants good for pollinators: Asters, coneflowers, butterfly bush, butterfly weed Bee Balm, most herbs, Penstemon, Salvia, Rudbeckia, Solidago, Verbena, Zinnia, Hyssop, Joe Pye Weed to name just a few What plants do you have that attract the pollinators? 3

4 Celeste Luckey Scott May 2016 Projects I would like to give a BIG THANK YOU to all of the project leaders who organized and held project work days during the month of April. We literally did not have enough weekends in the month! Many Saturdays were host to multiple events. The 2015 Interns held 2 workdays at the Extension Office and have really done a wonderful job on the beds here at the Ag Complex. The Master Gardener Workday at the WTREC was also a success. Jason always has plenty of jobs, and it is great to be able to knock out several projects for him in one day. Downtown planters and Hypertufa workshop were also productive and fun! I will update you on Earthday, Liberty Park, and Library workdays next month. So far, we don t have any projects scheduled for May aside from the Plant Sale. After this busy April and always busy Plant Sale, we may be in for a few weeks of rest and work in our own gardens. However, if you do have a workday that you would like the group to know about, please let Glenn Fesmire project coordinator know and he will announce it at the meeting and make sure we have sign-up sheets available. You can reach Glenn at or glennfes@aol.com Membership Directory With the help of Jason Bunch, Carol Bearden, Yvonne Hale, and several other volunteers, we were able to complete this year s Membership Directory. The printed version will be available for you to pick up at the meeting in May. We also an excel version that will be able to save on your computer. This will make it much easier for you send notifications of Master Gardener events to the whole group. We are considering putting it on the Madison County Master Gardener website as well I would appreciate any feedback members may have about this. I have still had several requests for a Directory with pictures. This will be a huge undertaking. I am not sure how we will go about getting everyone s photo taken, but it is being taken into consideration. Please let me know if you any suggestions Regional Planning Meeting This year s first ever Regional Planning Meeting is scheduled to take place Thursday morning July 14 th at 8:00-8:45 am at the WTREC in Room 150. This will be BEFORE Summer Celebration Events begin on the same day at 9:00. We will be electing a Regional Representative who will organize future Regional Planning Meetings and 4

5 serve on the Master Gardener Workgroup which consists of our Director Natalie Bumgarner, Extension Agent MG Coordinators and the Regional Representatives. All members are invited to come and each MG organization will have 2 votes in elections. The Presidents are strongly encouraged to be in attendance. I would like to have at least 10 members from our group present. We will likely have a sign-up sheet for attendance to this meeting that will be part of the Summer Celebration volunteer sign-up. We are going to treat it like all of the other volunteer opportunities involved with Summer Celebration. If you are interested in running for Regional Representative or know someone who would be a good candidate, please notify me or Mary Nenarella. Interested parties must fill out an application. This candidate application will streamline the election process by having candidates identified, and ensure a timely meeting. We will also be discussing the upcoming Fall Regional MG Workshop which will be hosted here in Jackson again this year. What is the Role of Regional Representative? These elected positions require a three-year term of service. Regional representatives will serve as the connection between the Regional Planning Meetings and the TN Extension Master Gardener (TEMG) Workgroup. They will interact with TEMG organizations in their region throughout the year. Twice per year, all three regional representatives will meet with the TEMG Workgroup to discuss the program and assist in setting goals. Additionally, one Regional Representative will participate as a full member of the Master Gardener Workgroup each year. The Regional Representatives are charged with the following tasks: Serve as a communication connection between TEMG workgroup and TEMG volunteers across the region. Deliver ideas from their region to the TEMG workgroup. Assist with planning and carrying out two Regional Planning Meetings each year. Assist with regional meetings and events (such as tours or regional workshops) Work with the Tennessee Extension Master Gardener workgroup and State TEMG Coordinator to identify and achieve residential and consumer horticulture educational goals in Tennessee. 5

6 David W. Sams May 2016 Last Meeting: The horticulture program at Liberty High School continues to amaze me both with its high quality and with respect to the number of young people involved. My life would have been very different had I had the opportunities these students have to consider horticulture as a career! I feel strongly that we need to educate our youth for jobs which exist and I personally will do anything I can to help educators such as Ms. Teresa Crouse including purchasing her plants and donating to her cause. Plant Sale: Once again the plant sale is upon us. Some of us will soon have several hundred fewer plants to care for and will be able to turn our attention to our own plantings. That day can t come too soon. We are tired of caring for these plants. We will have only about plants to donate this year rather than 600. Do now: Cool season vegetable harvests should be well underway now. Some cool season vegetables such as English peas will cease growth and die shortly due to high temperatures and spinach is already bolting in the long days of late spring. Plant any remaining warm season vegetables and turn your attention to irrigation and pest control. Who knows which we will need first? The very best care one can give plants begins with frequent observation to detect problems before they become severe. Walk through your gardens and look at your plantings frequently. I found asparagus beetles in my garden last week! Draped Hypertufa: Carol, I, Havranek s and Tommy Crews did a draped hypertufa workshop at our home Saturday, April 16. Draped hypertufa require little material and are easy to make. They look good filled with plants which drape from them. They will survive overwinter outdoors. I can t wait to see how they sell. Enthusiastic Master Gardeners left 47 draped hypertufa drying at the end of the day Saturdasy. Do we need a second workshop this summer? Product Corner: We live in a society obsessed with maximizing profit! There is no thought of what is a fair profit but only of how to make a larger profit than last year. This leaves members of our society with considerable opportunity to save money if they are adaptable. I intend to begin looking at one such opportunity in this column occasionally. Consider, for example, the herbicide, roundup (glyphosate) which slowly kills growing green plants over a period of a couple of weeks. One can buy it locally in a ready to use container of a little more than 5 quarts for about $24 or nearly $20 per gallon. Refills are available a bit cheaper bringing the price down to around $16 a gallon. Now it should be cheaper to purchase a concentrated form and mix it with water in your own sprayer. My wife recently came home with 80 ounces of 17% glyphosate which cost about $50. The recommendation is to use 6 ounces of 17% glyphosate per gallon or 1 ounce of actual product so this amount would make about 13 gallons costing a bit less than $4 a gallon. I began wondering how farmers afforded even this and soon discovered a 2 ½ gallon or 320 ounce container of 41% product for $54 which went on sale for $44 the next week. This will make 128 gallons of spray at a cost of a bit less than 35 cents a gallon. It should keep several years if it is kept in a warm, dry spot and will be used in edging our numerous flower beds and killing weeds on the trails in the woods. The practicality is in the size of the job! Keep this stuff off of your skin as some believe that it is a carcinogen (can cause cancer). 6

7 Mother Earth News magazine began publication in the 1960s and has grown to be one of the most widely read magazines in the US and around the world. My husband and I had a chance to attend one of the many Fairs they hold throughout the US annually. The one we attended this year is held outside of Asheville, NC every April. The total entrance fee is only $20 if purchased in advance or $30 if purchased on site. There are two days of hour long talks on everything from composting to tanning a deer hide and the instructors are experts from around the country. The absolute best part of the weekend is sitting down next to a complete stranger and getting so involved in how they propagate blueberries that one is sorry that the speaker is about to start! Everyone there is a gardener (among other skills) and more than happy to share their experiences with anyone who asks. I was listening to a speaker on Free Ranging Chickens and met a guy in front of me who is planning to start his flock soon. Following the talk he turned to me and bombarded me with questions when he found out we had been raising chickens for several years. It was wonderful to see how excited he was about a new venture and to be able to share my little bit of knowledge with him. The whole weekend was like that, plus they had hundreds of vendors with some really excellent products. I encourage all of you to pick up a copy of Mother Earth News if you are not already a reader and maybe take advantage of one of the fairs they put on each year. There are at least ten classes to choose from every hour and it is so hard to choose herbal remedies or cheese making. mushroom growing or fantastic heirloom tomatoes.the choices were endless! Did you know that Longhorn cattle use their horns to cool their bodies? The things one can learn while wandering by the animals at the fair! One more great thing about going to Asheville at this time of year is that the tulips were in full bloom at the Biltmore Estate. Contributed by Mary Nenarella 7

8 During the Spring Festival the Wilson County Master Gardeners will be having a plant sale. Available at the sale will be natives, heirlooms, herbs and vegetables (subject to change depending on availability ). All profits from the sale will be going towards the materials needed to finish the Master Gardener's building in Fiddlers Grove. Be sure to get there early. For more information Marianne Pelletier attrees@fiddlersgrove.org. Lawrence County Master Gardener Spring Plant Sale Saturday, April 30, am-12 noon Our Schedule of Speakers: - 9:00 am Life of the Honey Bee with Harry Voss - 10:00 am Extracting Honey with Charley Adams - 11:00 am Cooking with Honey with Michelle Lewis We have an abundance of herbs, tomatoes, coral and yellow roses, pepper plants, bedding flowers and ground covers. Free admission and parking. At the Lawrence County Extension Office 2385 Buffalo Rd. Lawrenceburg, TN

9 Williamson County Master Gardeners Association Garden Fair 2016 Ag-Expo Park, 4215 Long Ln. Franklin, TN June 4, a.m.- 2 p.m. Join us for our annual Garden Fair. This one day event features beautiful perennials, annuals, container gardens, bamboo, herbs, daylilies, plant diagnostics center, and much more. There are native plants and those grown by our own Master Gardeners. The Master Gardener Potting shed features new and gently used items for your home and garden. Don t miss the artisan crafts and unique gifts. For more information, visit wcmga.net Dee Proctor Director of Public Relations Williamson County Master Gardener Association bbhillarts@gmail.com 9

10 MEMPHIS AREA MASTER GARDENERS Our 7th annual tour is shaping up to be the best. Our host gardens are within a 7 mile radius, making it easy for visitors to drop in at all six gardens. Mark your calendars now for Saturday June 6th from 9 AM - 4 PM for this fun event. Garden 1: This typical sized suburban lot is only 5 years old and is being transformed into a woodland garden and wildlife habitat. See how they deal with sharing the garden with a dog and manage run-off from neighboring homes Garden 2: An estate sized 5 acre garden featuring a deer proof vegetable garden, terraced gardens, ponds and outdoor entertainment area. Tropical plants are featured along with perennial flowers and shrubs. This location will also host our speakers and demonstration tent. Garden 3: This compact property is a study in gardening in small spaces. A serene garden where you can enjoy birds, butterflies, a variety of plant life and trees. Organized into various "rooms" of sun, shade, a moss area, statuary and a wonderful patio from which to view them all. Garden 4: The 311 acre family farm was sold off in parcels leaving this 4 acre homestead with 70 flower beds maintained exclusively by the homeowner! Garden beds are laid out in both sun and shade areas. The garden features distinct rooms in both formal and informal design. Garden 5: A suburban garden that demonstrates how to effectively integrate potted plants into the garden. Featuring multiple garden rooms, a water garden and integration of a "borrowed" view in its design. Collierville Victory Garden: Everything you want to know about gardening vegetables and then some. This demonstration garden produces nearly two tons of produce each year. CVG is a sustainable garden, making informed decisions on plants, crop rotation, water conservation, composting, weeding, and pest prevention. Gardens in Jackson TN Visit Summer Celebration, July 14 Master Gardeners' Plant Sale begins at 9 a.m. Garden Lectures begin at 10 a.m. Admission is $5 for adults, free for children 17 and under. Admission to UT Kitchen Divas Cooking Demo additional $5. 10

11 Wanted!! Articles for the Newsletter You can earn volunteer hours by writing about some garden you visited, some technique you tried which worked (or did not), or share your enthusiasm for some special plant, or condensing a gardening article you read. May Meeting May 5th First United Methodist Church 6:30 pm Keep contributing. Keep reading. Keep sharing. Please send your contributions to: Liz Whitsitt lizv@tds.net Pam Stanfield pamstanfield@gmail.com LIBERTY HIGH SCHOOL TOUR Board of Directors Check Out UT Gardens Jackson On Facebook! Lots of great info being shared there, and you don t have to wait for a monthly newsletter! The Bridge to Knowledge The University of Tennessee Extension Madison County 309-C North Parkway Jackson, TN Phone Fax cscott52@utk.edu (Celeste Scott) Mary Nenarella, President Wayne Gerler, 1st Vice President Glenn Fesmire, 2nd Vice President Mary Kay Havranek, Secretary Tammy Overby, Treasurer Board Members: Elizabeth Edwards, John Havranek, Susan Luckey, Bill Wyatt Non-voting members : Pam Stanfield, Newsletter Liz Whitsitt, Newsletter Master Gardener financial standing information is available upon request.