March
May
Community Outreach Working Group
Chair, Ronnie Budge
Fundraising Working Group
Chair, Jane Moyer
Garden Working Group
Chair, Janine Salvatti
Marketing and Technology Working Group
Co-Chairs – Barbara Low and Keltie Nelson
We will be focusing on updating our JCMGA Marketing Plan.
Member Services Working Group
Chair, Barbara Low
We are continuing to work on the JCMGA Chapter (Membership) Directory, which we plan on having sent out the end of March.
We are continuing to work on the details for the Friends of the Gardens program – which will start in April.
Program Support Working Group
Chair is Grace Florjancic
The Plants for Gramps grant proposal has been submitted! We would know in the middle of March if we received funding to initiate this program. Thank you to everyone for helping support this idea and getting us closer to making it a reality.
Spring Garden Fair Working Group
co-Chairs – Marcie Katz and Lucy Pylkki
Plans are underway for the 2024 Spring Garden Fair which will be May 4 and 5 at the SOREC grounds.
Mark your calendars.
Winter Dreams Summer Gardens Working Group
chairs are Colet Allen, Susan Koenig, and Barbara Low
We have started meeting to plan for the 2024 WDSG!
The Jackson County Master Gardeners Association is a part of the Oregon Master Gardeners Association.
Our mission is: Cultivating resilient and healthy communities through sustainable horticulture education and gardening projects that are rooted in science and that are supported by Oregon State University Extension volunteers.
We have been able to accomplish this mission with our working groups, main events, community education classes, OSU Master Gardener Class Practicum – to name a few.
I want to thank all who have been involved in helping JCMGA stay active in Jackson County!
You have been amazing in helping us get the word out about responsible, productive gardening and to encourage others in our community to get involved.
We are a volunteer organization, and we need many volunteers to help us maintain and grow our organization.
We are looking for VOLUNTEERS!
There are Demonstration Gardens to work – in alongside of our experiences GEMS. Contact Janine Salvatti – our Gardens Working Group Chair.
Please consider being a Board member. The JCMGA Board is the governing body of our organization. It is a required element for our organization to continue. Without it, we wouldn’t be allowed to exist. We would provide support and be there to help guide you.
We are looking for —
I hope that you will seriously consider becoming a part of our wonderful JCMGA Board.
If you are interested in either position,
please contact Barbara Low barbaralow@msn.com or call 541.840.1516,
Hello Gardeners,
This winter has been milder in the valley than last winter. You may be thinking, “Spring has sprung!” like the groundhogs have said. That gardening itch may be starting to tickle you into getting outside and prepping your beds! But you may want to hold off for a little bit longer for more consistent warm weather.
We hear the phrase “Leave the leaves” in the fall, but what does it mean for us gardeners in the spring? The purpose of leaving our leaves in garden beds is to provide habitat for our gardens’ insect friends to survive the winter months. Tall stalks from flowers are also used as overwintering habitat for insects. Many native beneficial insects need these to remain in gardens to help them maintain healthy population levels. If we remove our leaves and tall stems too early into spring, we are removing some of these insects that haven’t had a chance to emerge into the warm weather, thus depriving our gardens of their benefits.
When is it late enough to remove your garden leaves? In a perfect world for the beneficial insects, the leaves would be able to stay year-round; however, that is not realistic for many gardens. Dried leaves close to houses or trapped under shrubs could be tinder for summer fires. Wait as long as you can to let the most insects develop and emerge from overwintering. This could be well into April or even into the beginning of May!
Leaving the leaves is great for our insect friends but there are some circumstances where removing the leaves in fall could be a good idea. Orchards and vineyards often face disease issues spread by their fallen leaves. When the spring rains come, they splash up fungal spores onto the newly budding leaves. Removing leaves in your orchards and vineyards can help prevent diseases spreading this way. If you want to put those leaves to good use, you can add them to an ornamental garden bed away from your crop area.
Let us leave the leaves for a little length longer!
Spring is on its way!
Trees are budding and flowers are starting to bloom.
What a great time of year!
We started 2024 off with a bang. Jackson County Master Gardeners Association has been busy! We’ve embarked on many activities:
One of the things that I truly enjoy about working with people at JCMGA is their focus on gardening and all its aspects. We all have so much knowledge to share, and can all continue to learn. But also, we enjoy each other’s company and provide support in the tasks we do.
Thank you again for all that you do for JCMGA.
Last year the JCMGA Board approved this programming expansion to help us reach more gardeners who are either unable or uninterested in going through the full Master Gardener Program but still want to learn and volunteer. We are happy to announce the Garden Friends is kicking off this spring!
What is a Garden Friend? Garden Friends are volunteers who are not Master Gardeners but want to get hands-on learning by maintaining the demonstration gardens alongside our GEMs (Garden Education Mentors). In the past, MGs have brought their spouses, children, and close friends to work together and help in the demo gardens. With the official launch of the Friends of the Gardens program, we are opening this opportunity to everyone in our community.
This expansion will bring more community involvement and awareness to our demonstration gardens. These gardens take many hands to maintain and can feel quite large when working in them. Not many people know these gardens are here to view unless they have already visited the Extension Office for an event or class. Inviting more people to volunteer builds a wider community while splitting the load of work for everyone. It gives our organization another fun opportunity to interact with and educate the public with hands-on practice.
Last year we had a handful of people interested in doing this type of volunteering instead of going through the entire Master Gardener Program. With advertising this opportunity, we hope to get even more people excited and involved in the Garden Friends initiative. Hope to see you out in the demonstration gardens this year!
It’s not too early to think about planting a spring garden! In fact, now is the best time to begin preparing your soil. After all, plants derive their nutrients from the soil. Right?!
So, what to do first?
Enriching soil via COVER CROPPING is a good start. Some cover crops draw (fix) nitrogen form the air and deposit it in the soil. What could be better than free nitrogen? Cover crops provide biomass as well. They sustain life in the soil and provide roots for mycorrhizae to attach to. Cover crops also help protect against soil erosion. Weeds and other unwanted plants may take hold if one leaves ground bare for any length of time. Cover crops provide a positive ground cover to help stifle otherwise unwanted plants. Just simply dig in the cover crop when spring finally arrives. How about that! Free nitrogen and biomass for small creatures to feed on. Some cover crops are even winter hardy, like hairy vetch and Austrian field peas. Hairy vetch is my go-to favorite because it does what is described above, and also bees and other pollinators love its beautiful purple flowers if one leaves it to grow in the spring. And seed once, and then harvest the next season’s seeds – how’s that for economy?
SOIL is the most important part of growing a garden. It goes without saying that healthy soil needs to be maintained from year to year. Remember that plants need nutrients and those nutrients come from the soil, so it makes sense that the healthier the soil, the healthier your plants will be. A HEALTHY SOIL MEANS HEALTHY PLANTS. And healthy plants mean a healthy you.
Now, let us talk about NO-TILL gardening, an approach that emulates the natural environment. Ever see a torn-up, tilled forest floor? And yet, things grow quite nicely without tilling. When you walk on a forest floor, the ground feels spongy. What you are noticing is the decomposition process in action. Materials are decomposing underneath newer litter that has fallen on the forest floor. Leaves of all sorts are decaying and providing nutrients to living trees and plants. What you do in your garden should emulate what happens in nature. No one is tilling up the forest floor. The next best thing to using a cover crop to cover bare ground is to use leaves. Leaves provide compostable materials, feeding the little soil-dwelling critters and nourishing the soil naturally.
Here’s a new term for you: SOIL HORIZONS. Think of soil horizons as different layers of soil. Without going into too much “science”, each horizon supports different life forms. And these life forms live quite nicely within their horizon and have relationships with the creatures the live above and below them. When one tills the soil, disturbing the soil horizons, the creatures that call the soil home get all jumbled up. How would you like to come home one day to a leveled house in a barren landscape with nowhere to go to get dinner? That’s what tilling the soil does to those tiny creatures who should be our garden friends.
POOP. Okay let’s talk about poop. All those little creatures that call the soil home live, poop and die. They turn soil into life sustaining material that plants love. Yup, soil is alive with not just earthworms. Think ecosystem. There’s a myriad of life below our feet. All the little creatures feeding on live and decaying matter just out of sight, below our feet. A tablespoon of healthy soil can contain 10 billion microbes, and countless living creatures. Gardeners have been involved with this original World Wide Web for a long time – much longer than the Internet has been in existence.
So, what is the take-away? Well, it’s really simple. Emulate nature as closely as possible. Practice no-till gardening. Don’t allow the soil to be bare (cover crops or leaves/mulch to the rescue). When it comes time to plant seeds or seedlings next spring, simply brush aside the ground cover, and plant right through it. Allow the matter to decay in place to provide nutrients for the soil-dwelling creatures that are mutually beneficial to both you and your plants.
Despite being named Oregon State Gardener of the Year last year in 2023, my front yard is a constant embarrassment to me. It is NOT like the other, “well-tended” yards in my neighborhood. It is weedy and rangy and has dead stems and flower stalks all over it. Dry leaves are piled up under all the shrubs and trees. I even have what we refer to as a ‘dragon nest’- a structure I made from with woody debris from coppicing my hazelnuts, red twig dogwood, and serviceberry. I wove these materials into a wattle compost container. This holds other woody debris and leaves in a brush pile. All of these have been deliberately left – as messy as they are – to support insect life and the birds that come to feed upon them.
Leaving the leaves, as the Xerces Society advocates, has much to recommend it. Leaves provide winter cover for small invertebrates and insects who help break down the carbon in the leaf mulch and return nutrients to the soil in the form of their waste. Soil bacteria break down those waste products further to provide nutrients that plants and mycorrhizal fungi can then access. Soil under leaves is rich in carbon, nutrients, soil life, and holds moisture longer, allowing plants to access all. Winter birds forage in this rich mix and find critical food during the coldest months.
While I am not above feeling guilty about how my yard appears, I still persist. Because I know that neatly mown, raked and leaf blown yards provide none of this forage and none of these soil services. So, while my neighbors think they are being good citizens, they are merely addressing the eye candy that humans have been trained to look for in our managed landscapes. Nature is never considered. And nature pays the price.
I have 39 species of birds that visit my pitifully small corner lot in Medford. There they find winter seed heads to feed from, leaves to dig through to find isopods, overwintering fly, moth and butterfly larvae, earthworms, centipedes, millipedes, and other winter food. I do not see this activity in or on any of the other yards in my neighborhood. The flower stems and stalks of the perennials, though blackened and bent from winter storms, are home to stem nesting native bees, which can also provide larvae to birds who drill into the stems for food. Lizards and snakes can safely shed their skins and find winter hibernation spots under the wood chips, pine bark and small logs I place under my shrubs. Toads and salamanders will often find homes under decomposing wood piles and logs placed strategically under shrubbery.
As I went to collect the mail yesterday, I thought, “I had better do some clean-up along the sidewalk and the gutter.” But then I realized that all along the edge of my yard, the leaves had been scraped hectically onto the sidewalk as robins and flickers foraged through them. Each small dark scrape in the leaf litter represented a bird that had been fed by my yard. I resolutely left the leaves where they were in the gutter and on the sidewalk and came inside to write this article instead.
Leaves are not LITTER. Leaves are HABITAT.
Change your view of gardening, and GARDEN FOR LIFE!
For more resources and information visit the Xerces site listed here: Leave the Leaves!
Oregon State University Extension
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