Training Gardeners Who Want to Grow : Expertise: The master- gardener program provides opportunities to work with veteran gardeners and learn their time-earned secrets.
Even though Kathy Leiser’s father is a horticulturist and she was raised around plants, she wanted more of that special knowledge that comes from years of hands-on gardening.
“I was a pretty experienced gardener . . . but it was always kind of by the seat of my pants,” Leiser said. Her gardening was also confined to small perimeter plots around her Manhattan Beach home.
So Leiser volunteered for the master gardener program, which is run out of a dilapidated Los Angeles County building at the corner of Grand Avenue and Adams Boulevard, just south of downtown.
The nine-week training course is part of the Common Ground Urban Gardening program, a joint endeavor of Los Angeles County, the UC Cooperative Extension and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Other Southland counties also run master-gardener programs.
“Master gardening has allowed me to put a lot more technology into it . . . why you do a certain thing, what works and what doesn’t,” she said. “It makes you a lot more efficient.”
The Common Ground master-gardener program is one of several volunteer opportunities that make it possible to work directly with veteran gardeners so that outsiders can pick up their time-earned secrets. The programs are usually free or inexpensive.
Offered at sites ranging from county-sponsored public gardens to university research facilities, the programs are as diverse as the reasons people have for seeking them out. Training can run from an informal few hours to 15-week courses.
Under the Common Ground master-gardener program, participants pay $16 for an intensive series of classes that last for three to four hours each over the nine-week period. Experts from the UC Cooperative Extension and Common Ground staff members lecture on subjects ranging from from basic botany to special handling of citrus crops to community organizing.
The master-gardener trainees are then asked to donate a number of hours equal to their classroom training to educate more gardeners in the local community. After this, they are awarded their Master Gardener certificates.
Most of the trainees’ donated time is spent teaching neighborhood residents how to cultivate fruit and vegetable crops in community gardens in the economically distressed areas of Los Angeles, where liquor stores abound and grocery stores are scarce.
Because the produce available in these areas is expensive and of low quality, the vegetables and fruit grown in the community gardens are a vital source of nutrition to the gardeners and their families.
According to Yvonne Freeman, urban agriculture coordinator for the program, a family that intensively gardens a typical 15-by-10-foot plot can save $500 a year on groceries while boosting their nutrition and their senses of accomplishment and independence.
The master-gardener trainees also distribute brochures in English and Spanish on mulching, safe use of garden chemicals, irrigation techniques, pest and disease control, intensive gardening techniques, composting and choosing seed varieties.
The trainees working in the community gardens not only give and gain gardening expertise, but earn a sense of satisfaction.
“I love it,” Leiser said. “We have the little kids come over once a week and put in gardens. We had a staff nutritionist come speak about snacks they could make with their cucumbers after school, because a lot of them are latchkey kids.
“I haven’t found it hard at all to put my time in; it’s been very enjoyable,” she said.
Deborah Rose, another recent master-gardener graduate, had been one of the community gardeners herself and was approached by Rachel Mabe of the Common Ground staff to join the Master Gardener program.
Long work hours had prevented Rose from gardening and the master-gardener program revived an old love.
“A few years ago, I had dropped out of gardening and this let me know that I was giving up something that I really enjoyed.
“I picked up a lot of knowledge through the course . . . to the point where I can honestly say I do feel like a master gardener now,” Rose said.
Struggling on the same $250,000 annual federal grant for the entire 12 years it has been in existence, the Common Ground program has dwindled from an original staff of 28 to its present staff of seven while juggling the same general workload.
Because the community gardens are located on land briefly “loaned” by individuals, companies or government agencies, they frequently appear and disappear as the owners reclaim them for more profitable uses.
One such site was the Irolo Street garden, where Crenshaw resident Gladys Mosley and program coordinator Freeman maintained an exotic-fruit tree orchard that included banana trees, a pineapple/guava hybrid and a Japanese persimmon tree--all thriving within the cold urban landscape south of Koreatown.
The owner of the Irolo site plans to build an apartment house there and the garden was closed in December. As the season wound down, no new annuals were planted and the rare trees were moved to other locations.
Although the sites come and go and the remaining staff takes up whatever work is needed to keep the program going, the spirit remains undaunted.
“I really enjoy working outdoors, I like the garden and I enjoy meeting and working with people,” said Mosley, who came to the Common Ground program 11 years ago, and has worked at the Crenshaw community garden and with handicapped children at the 20th Street and Normandie garden.
A larger variety of horticultural experiences can be found at public botanical gardens and research facilities, which have an additional advantage of being in one location.
A common theme among gardening volunteers is the chance to practice in a garden setting larger than their own and to work with a wider range of plants than they would typically find in their local nursery, increasing their already extensive knowledge and exploring the unusual.
The Los Angeles State and County Arboretum in Arcadia has one of the most extensive horticultural volunteerism programs, with 30,000 volunteer hours a year, according to Takao Niiya, chief of the special services division.
Although the majority of those volunteers work as docents or in the many historical buildings there, there are several hands-on gardening opportunities available.
Betty Cassidy volunteers in the Arboretum’s Garden for All Seasons, run by retired nurseryman Bill Hagar, and feels the experience has subtly amplified her gardening skills.
“I was just an average gardener, and with Bill’s teaching I learned how to pot seedlings, make slips. . . . I’m more aware of when to plant something, when to cut it back.
“I’ve learned that there’s more than just putting a plant in the ground,” she explained. The Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in Claremont is a combination of public garden and private research facility. There, the special requirements of Los Angeles geography, including drought tolerance and low maintenance techniques of planting, are stressed.
Jim Werner volunteers in the greenhouse at Rancho Santa Ana, and admits his own home garden is not quite on a par with the water-conserving goals strived for at the facility.
However, he is gradually redoing his garden, using the drought-tolerant Mediterranean and native California plants in which Rancho Santa specializes.
The Garden Growers, another volunteer group at Santa Ana, propagate plants from seeds, cuttings and divisions in the lath house and cultivate them for the annual plant sale the garden uses to supplement its income.
Another research facility is the UC Irvine Arboretum, which houses special collections that volunteers can explore and work with.
“Our volunteers enjoy working with more unusual kinds of stuff. We don’t do petunias and marigolds,” said Charles O’Neill, museum scientist at the UCI Arboretum.
The UCI Arboretum specializes in the bulbs of southern Africa, a climate similar to California. Most of their plants are wild-collected true species that are kept in bee-proof greenhouses and which require hand pollination to prevent cross-breeding.
Volunteers do most of the pollination on the thousands of samples in the greenhouses--flower by flower.
Botanical gardens and programs in California rely heavily on volunteers and the paid staff members are well aware of the symbiotic relationship that keeps this legion of free workers happy.
“We have a really good volunteer program,” O’Neill says. “There are only two (paid staff) people here . . . and without the volunteers, the garden wouldn’t be what it is.”
