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Tomatoes 2008
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Have you had your chuckle for today? Try this tongue in cheek Gardening Mantra NO NO’s 1) I must lime the lawn once a year whether it needs it or not because my neighbor is doing it and he is usually right about gardening to do’s. 2) I must lime the vegetable garden once a year whether it needs it or not! 3) A single grub in my lawn constitutes a problem and I must use the harshest chemical to eradicate it! 4) There are no good insects, just dead ones! 5) Too many earthworms cause my lawn to get invaded by starlings. 6) I have to use a fungicide to eradicate the insects and an insecticide to eradicate the fungus, either works well for both! 7) I must use the strongest weed killer to get rid of all my weeds in the lawn! 8) Any grass seed is good for my lawn, sun/shade, it’s all the same stuff. 9) I usually ignore the sun/shade tags on the plants because those are written for those who know nothing about gardening. 10) Watering my lawn when I come home from work for over 4 hours each day is a good thing. 11) When my lawn is dry, a little spritz is good for it because my neighbor does it too. 12) When I see a caterpillar, I must kill it because it might be a gypsy moth caterpillar. 13) Putting duct tape around my tree trunks as tight as I can and for over 3 years helps prevent the gypsy moth caterpillar from climbing up and eating the birch tree leaves. 14) Of course you don’t have to read the label if you know what you are doing. 15) If the pesticide bottle says to use 1 TSP., I say use 1 TBSP. because a little more won’t hurt. 16) All that small print on the pesticide bottle is for the legal department to have a job; it doesn’t pertain to me as a consumer. 17) Pruning of my shrubs and trees should be done at any time I get a chance to do so; besides the neighbor’s landscaper does it in the late summer and all the plants look fine. 18) You can prune any type of tree or shrub to fit any small space you have. It's a question of who is to be the master: you or the tree. Assert your authority! 19) My trees will look better with the mulch piled around the trunks; all the commercial buildings have their landscapes that way and now my yard looks like a landscaper did it too. Ruth wrote
And Christine replied. Our Master Gardener program from what I understand differs from county to county here too. Here where I live the emphasis is on plant diseases, insects, lawns and pruning. The county next to us deals mainly with farmers and agriculture. Many of the calls we get from the next county are from homeowners asking about their little slice of suburbia. The program I graduated from had Professors from Cornell University come down and give lectures about various topics from soils to fruits and vegetable gardening to botany to IPM and plant diseases along with insect ID. Our county's course runs every other year from mid September to early December from M-Th with classroom time on M and W and field trips on T and TH. Classroom time runs from 9:15AM to 3:15PM with a half hour to 45 min lunch. Homework is given and we have 2 large looseleaf binders. One contains all our county's fact sheets. Part of the homework is to familiarize oneself with them and the other is from the Master Gardener program from Cornell. Various textbook topics are discussed in that book. Quizzes were given weekly and the final was 10 essays-- writing about solving a person's problems by using the fact sheets and quoting which ones to use. For example Mr. Goodbar wants to know about how to put in a lawn. Discuss with him how it is done. The extension agent here in charge loves chocolate so all the essay people had candybar names. I added an old Italian neighbor by the name of Ghiardelli when I did the answering of the essays! Our field trips took us to 2 public gardens and 2 arboretums in Nassau County and we visited the Research Lab out in Riverhead (Suffolk County) to see what was the latest research out there. IPM was discussed by an arborist who handles Hofstra University's Arboretum. The entire campus is the arboretum. Our program only accepts 50 people from our county and no one is considered until an application and a letter are written to the ext. agent in charge stating why you want to take this course. In May of 2000 I was interviewed by 2 veteran MG's and by the end of June I found out I was accepted to take the course that September. This course cost $100 and with that money we received the 2 looseleaf binders, a nice large bag to carry them, a set of Felco shears and a rain gauge. We had 48 people in our class who all went thru the program without dropping out. My biggest surprise was I thought I was going to one of the youngest there and there would be mostly retirees. We had a good mix of people of all ages and we had 6 men in the class along with a husband/wife group. We were assigned mentors (veteran MG's) who gave a short talk on who we were when all of us met that 1st class. My Mentor told the class I had peonies and daylilies and had been a member of cooperative extension for over 15 yrs. I was a member since I moved into our home. I grew up with my family receiving the monthly newsletter about what's happening in the garden. I had a great time in the class; our time spent in the class was 150 hours and that payback hour time had to be completed in 2 years as part of our agreement with the cooperative. Twenty five of those hours had to be on the horticulture hotline with homeowners. The other time could be spent doing payback in the xeriscape garden, rose garden, compost area, beautification committee (landscape upkeep around the building), soil testing and AAS garden evaluation over the summer. Our extension office had to move to other quarters in 2002 due to the county selling the property to a developer who now owns the land. We are now in the county greenhouse located in the centrally located public county park. We now only have the AAS Gardens so all the new interns will have to either do a lot of phone hours or AAS garden evaluations. There is a large local family run nursery which has a good relationship with the cooperative and we man their diagnostic counter during their 2 week long Flower Show every March and we man their counter on W and F during April -June and if needed again in Sept. and Oct. I usually do that as I love diagnosing problems. I noticed your soil testing tests for salinity. Our testing is only the pH and determining thru the ribbon test what type of soil the homeowner has. The ext. agent dictates on the pH test sheet if lime is to be added or not. He reviews the sheets before they are sent back to the homeowner. Here is our link to our county fact sheets; feel free to 'borrow' the sheets for your use; many of them are general gardening information and most deal with plants that survive in zone 7. CCE: Nassau County Fact Sheets Index Chris
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