What’s a Master Gardener, or MG? A title to lord over your gardening friends? (oh, get a grip). An unpaid University of Maryland extension minion? Kinda.
The 12-week MG course, which eventually endows you with the lordly title Master Gardener (plus T-shirt), is the UMd Extension Service’s means of plugging the gardening public and other subsets into the wealth of research that would otherwise be locked up in the university’s ivied halls. It’s designed to spew out knowledgeable (or at least not clueless) garden missionaries, who go forth and advise others on environmentally responsible and sustainable gardening practices. (There’s lots more to it, but I’ve only got so much space here.).
I recently finished the course – for $225, which includes a doorstop of a ‘handbook’ — along with 13 people from Kent, Queen Anne’s, Caroline, and Talbot counties. For six hours every Thursday we were bombarded with data from specialists on soil, entomology, botany, plant nutrition, chemistry, and more.
I felt like I was in an info wind tunnel. Appalled at my own ignorance, I struggled frantically to collect all the bits of knowledge they were blasting us with. My classmates, an interesting group, comprised a wide range of gardening — and life — experience. I really enjoyed them. Good thing since we’ll see each other again and again while knocking off the volunteer and continuing education hours the program requires annually.
There are plenty of possibilities for volunteering. One is sitting in the farmer’s market every other Saturday armed with backup info and trying to help (or at least not look like a complete fool) when someone brings a question or a sick plant for diagnosis.
One of the great things about going through the Master Gardener course is it makes you look at the same old things with new eyes. I find myself not only looking at my own trees and shrubs with a new sense of curiosity – what the dickens is that dark spot on the trunk? why is the woodpecker in the middle of the ancient Yew? –but, as well, the plants and critters I’m barreling past along the highway.
These new eyes, coupled with some learning, make the entire landscape richer, and denser. Instead of it being a Gainesborough painting, all soft edges and pastoral blends, it looks more like a panoramic three-D movie, shot with plots and subplots in dialed-up multichrome. A new lease on gardening life.
–Nancy Robson
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