Have you ever wondered when the best time to plant strawberries is? Why your oak tree didn’t drop its leaves this year? Whether that basil you planted last year is going to come back this year? There’s a group of volunteers in Calaveras County dedicated to answering the public’s gardening questions and teaching the best planting practices and how to make a garden thrive in foothill climates. They are the Master Gardeners, and their green thumbs are always at the ready, prepared to assist even the most amateur gardener.
The Calaveras Master Gardeners are unique in the Sierra, as they have a volunteer-maintained demonstration garden, which lies on two-thirds of an acre near the Red Barn Museum, at the Government Center in San Andreas. From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. the fourth Saturday of every month except December and January, the garden is open to the public to peruse the plants, enjoy programs and demonstrations put on by the gardeners and meet some of the 70 Master Gardeners who are on hand to answer questions.
To see a photo gallery of the demonstration garden, click here.
The idea for the garden was planted in 2001, when the Master Gardeners petitioned the Board of Supervisors to allow them to use government land for a demonstration garden. Initially planned to be planted between the Red Barn Museum and library, the garden was moved to the site of an ancient riverbed next door to the museum. While the riverbed – which still moves, albeit ever so slowly – isn’t stable enough for a building, it’s the perfect situation for a garden. In 2005, after years of labor, the Master Gardeners opened their garden to the public.
“We wanted to have a place where we could have the public come in and educate them on gardening, which is our mission,” said Carol Manley. “We wanted a place where we could invite people in and demonstrate how to grow different things that the home gardener would be interested in.”
The Master Gardeners include volunteers from Amador, El Dorado, Calaveras and Tuolumne counties. They are agents of the University of California Cooperative Extension, and have all gone through the Master Gardener training program, in addition to putting in hundreds of hours of work in the demonstration garden.
Novella Springer is a newly certified Master Gardener – she took the training in Amador this year. For nearly three months, she and about 40 other people took training from UC professionals running the gamut from organic gardening to pest management and composting.
Beverly Vierra Pennington is the garden coordinator, and has been since its inception – she designed the garden, which she said then “morphed by itself.” She said the UC training for Master Gardeners comes in handy, as does the knowledge gained by years of home gardening. At the August Open Garden Day, she assisted a young couple from Sheep Ranch in confronting some gardening challenges and helped answer some questions they had about their trees, which they had pictures of.
“If you do this long enough, all of a sudden you look at things differently,” Pennington said. “I can look at a tree and the diagnostic part of my brain is kicking in.”While not every question can be answered right away, Pennington said, the Master Gardeners have an array of UC resources to use for research, and will start looking for the answer immediately.
Home gardeners who can’t make it to an Open Garden Day can call the Master Gardeners Help Line at 754-2880. Leave a message any time, and a Master Gardener can check it via his or her home phone or email and will answer as soon as possible. The help desk is open from 10 to noon Wednesdays at the Master Gardeners’ new headquarters at the Government Center. When the help desk is not open, questions can be dropped off (as can samples for research) from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays.
But to fully appreciate what the Master Gardeners have accomplished, a tour of the demonstration garden is a must. What is in reality a small plot of land is perfect for hours of exploration, from flowers and vegetables to succulents, berries and a fruit tree orchard.
“We’re always trying to introduce something new,” Penning-ton said. “Master Gardeners come in and we never know what talents and enthusiasm they’re going to have, and we change the garden based on that.”
Those enthusiasms have included an interest in wine grapes, so now the garden has a mini-vineyard. A former schoolteacher designed the children’s garden, which consists of numerous small, playfully decorated demonstration areas where children learn all about gardening. A husband-and-wife team constructed raised beds at the garden, and in the orchard a slanted bed demonstrates what plants thrive in the different elevations of Calaveras County.
The vegetable garden in-cludes eggplant, artichokes, herbs, squash, tomatoes and beans. Odile Morrison said the Master Gardeners save the seeds each year to encourage sustainable gardening. She added with a laugh that not all plantings are successes, pointing out a pint-sized melon from a batch that didn’t do so well this year.
All of the harvested produce is donated to the Resource Connection Food Bank and the Calaveras County Senior Center. In the orchard, Master Gardeners grow apples, pears, apricots, nectarines, persimmons, peaches and more.
The financial arm of the Master Gardeners is plant sales, coordinated by Dolores Ransom. The goal is to provide plants that normally wouldn’t be found at a local nursery, so as not to compete with them. “We really emphasize the natives and the water-wise plants, to get people to use less water,” she said.
Pricing is 50 to 60 percent of what the retail price would be, to keep it affordable, Ransom said, and when fruits and vegetables are sold, the prices go even lower. “Anything that’s edible, we want people to have access to that. Yes, we need to make money to support our program, but at the same time we want to benefit people who couldn’t maybe ordinarily afford it.”
Plant sales include trees, shrubs, grasses and flowers, and Master Gardeners are able to tell purchasers everything they need to know about the care of their new plants. September’s plant sale, held during Open Garden Day Saturday, Sept. 24, will feature plants that attract birds, bees and butterflies, in keeping with the theme of the day.
The demonstration garden isn’t the only place the handiwork of Calaveras County Master Gardeners can be found – Morrison heads up the new Junior Master Gardeners program at Valley Springs Elementary School. There, students have maintained raised beds and grown produce and a shade garden, and have planted trees around the school.
“We’re not just a bunch of plant people who do this,” Springer said, pointing to a group of Master Gardeners at work in the garden. “We’re sending food to the Senior Center, we’re doing a Master Gardener junior program for the kids – our fingers are in a lot of different things.”