Is Gardening Bugging You? Talk to the Masters
Along the Front Range of Colorado, the queries concern beetles on the pinon pine, what to do about the scale on aspen and what happened to very expensive sod laid down over all that backyard clay.
In Seattle, hot topics are fruit trees, begonias and “those terrible slimy slugs.”
In Hamburg, N.Y., homeowners line up during the country’s largest county fair to figure out which bug is doing what.
In each case, the answers come courtesy of the 13-year-old Master Gardener program, a nationwide volunteer effort that calls on the green thumbs of America to help out those who don’t know a begonia from a bougainvillea.
Its roots go back to 1972 and King County, Wash., when two Cooperative Extension Service employees decided that they were answering too many homeowners’ questions from April through October. They noticed that the questions were usually the sort of things a lot of amateur gardeners could answer. So why not give that part of the job to amateur gardeners?
They did, asking only that the volunteers give back a like amount of time for the training they received from Washington State University professors.
‘Plant Clinics’
Today about 250 Master Gardeners rotate volunteer hours at 22 neighborhood “plant clinics” and on a horticultural hot line.
Denver County Extension Agent Carl Wilson says the Colorado program provided the equivalent of 8.6 full-time employees throughout the state in 1984. That’s a savings of $154,800 statewide.
In many places, including Arapahoe County, Colo., the work primarily is phone work.
“Good morning. Master Gardener. May I help you?”
“Hi. Something’s eating my tomatoes. . . . My lilacs are dying. . . . What can I spray for. . . . “
“When we first moved out here, nobody was into gardening the way they are now,” recalls Marcia Nelson, a Master Gardener in Arapahoe County for six years. “You didn’t know why things failed. It was just trial and error. It would have been nice to have had something like this when I started gardening 20 years ago.”
