Garden tour provides great educational opportunity

 

Gardeners walking through one of the gardens

The Sonoma County Master Gardener volunteers sought to offer hands-on, practical information to county gardeners by demonstrating specific practices, such as proper plant selection, alternative pest control, home composting and water conservation. Multiple problems in managing previous public demonstration gardens, along with Sonoma County’s size and population distribution, led to the idea of showing home gardeners how science-based concepts were being effectively implemented within Master Gardener’s own gardens. Thus began a series of "Bloomin' Backyard Garden Tours."

 

 
The Master Gardeners have held three educational tours over a six-year period. The project coordinators started each tour project two years in advance by selecting gardens within a small geographic region of the county that had an appropriate educational theme, and would work logistically for parking and easy access. The selected gardens were designed and maintained by Master Gardeners themselves, which provided a practical example to visiting home gardeners of something they could do themselves without the unreasonable expectation often displayed by commercial gardens maintained by multiple hired workers.

Care was taken to find gardens of different sizes and styles, along with a variety of features and educational opportunities. Each of the gardens demonstrated at least one concept, such as composting, less toxic pest management, shade habitat, native plant species, water-wise management, vegetables, fruit trees, berries and vertebrate pest control. Key plants at each garden were numbered and tour attendees were provided with a reference list indicating the botanical and common names of the plants.

On tour day, about 120 volunteers controlled parking and traffic, greeted attendees, took tickets, worked as docents and managed educational demonstration stations. The Bloomin' Backyards garden tours have grown from 300 attendees in 2001 to more than 900 in 2006. Home gardeners, landscapers, garden designers and other professionals attend.
 

 
Thousands of people have been provided with a unique ‘hands-on’ learning opportunity through the collective efforts of the Sonoma County Master Gardener volunteers. Home gardeners have learned how to recycle garden wastes and reduce landfill inputs through home composting. Water has been conserved by showing people how to develop beautiful gardens using drought tolerant and native plant species. Conventional pesticide usage has been reduced thereby helping to protect our water resources from contaminated runoff by demonstrating proper plant selection and the appropriate use of low toxicity or non-toxic alternative materials.
 

 
“The diversity of the gardens was very good.” . . . “I got SO many ideas!” . . . “The plant ID system was excellent.” . . . “The handouts were great and very helpful for making notes.” . . . “Seeing these gardens makes me think I can do this too.”
 

Supporting Unit: Sonoma County
 
Sonoma County Master Gardeners, mgsonoma@ucdavis.edu, http://groups.ucanr.org/sonomamg