Mary and the Master Gardener

Learn about Liz, the Master Gardener. How she got into gardening and what inspired her to help other gardeners. You can find us on Facebook, and also join the Facebook group.

If you have a gardening question, please email Mary at [e-mail] or Liz at [e-mail]

00:00 Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? Well, that all depends, but that's not really what this podcast is about. We're here to help you grow your garden. Welcome to Mary and the Master Gardener. Today is the inaugural episode of Mary and the Master Gardener and the Master Gardener is Liz. Good morning, Liz. Good morning, Mary. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thank you for wanting to do this with me. I'm so excited.

00:29 So you are a master gardener. How did that happen? How did you get into it? Well, I learned about it from my mother who herself was a master gardener. And I didn't have a green thumb when I was younger to save my life. But as I watched her, I was always very envious of what she could grow and how beautiful she made it. And she always did all of this incredible.

00:58 giant work for such a little woman. And I kind of, once I moved out to a farm, decided that I wanted to be able to do something like that as well. And there were plants here that I couldn't identify. And so I think the idea may have been a little selfish in my own understanding, but it was also to be able to become good at what I do now.

01:27 So the process is going through your, in Minnesota, going through your county, your U of M extension office, and every county has one. You can sign up online. They, at the time when I did it, which is almost 10 years ago, you could do an in-person course. They had some courses over the weekend up at the Arboretum. And then you also get a free.

01:56 membership to the Arboretum as a master gardener, but you do your training. You learn everything from basic seeding to how to manage grass to managing deer coming in. It's pretty extensive in a short amount of time. And then you get to group up with these wonderful people within your gardening programs through

02:26 County Extension Office. And I was definitely the youngest one there. And I learned so much, so much. I learned how to graft plants. I learned how to judge at different county fairs, which was interesting.

02:44 Okay, so it's everything. Mm-hmm. You're volunteering your time. The first year that you do it, they want you to put in 50 hours. And that's people calling the Extension office asking for help with some problems that they have. You can go out there and you can consult. And you could have community gardens and kind of volunteer in ways like that.

03:13 And that's kind of what I ended up doing through actually my therapy practice was doing a lot of a lot of gardening teaching to people who were incarcerated.

03:31 Okay, cool. So I don't know how to ask this question right. Is it mostly learning by reading or is there a lot of hands-on as well? Yeah, so I did the online portion and that's a lot of reading, a lot of studying. You get this lovely book and you have all the resources. It provides you with

04:01 I suppose a semester or two of coursework in a short amount of time. But the goal is really that you're able to help find a resource to solve any problem or to learn something that you need to learn. All righty. So you've been doing this for eight years or 10 years? About nine. Nine. Okay. So in those nine years.

04:30 have you actually gotten phone calls from people and they're asking about, I don't know, the freaking potato bugs that eat potato plants? I got that more through the volunteering piece. I think I got maybe one call because I mostl