Winter Dreams Summer Gardens 2025

We just completed our 2025 Winter Dreams Summer Gardens workshops and are happy with this year’s outcome.  We are gradually growing back from the COVID days. There were 147 registered participants this year. We have always appreciated our gardening enthusiasts and want to help them keep up to date with the science that can improve their yields and the quality of food they grow.

Four years ago, the three co-chairs Barbara Low, Susan Koenig and myself were brainstorming how JCMGA could offer more of our science-based education to the public. We considered the professionals who worked with the public on their gardens. In an Aha moment, it came to us: landscapers!

I contacted the Oregon State Landscapers Board and determined what the process would be to get our WDSG program approved for the Landscapers Continuing Education Hours (CEH). Thankfully, it was not a hard task. There was a new director, and she could not have been more helpful. She told me exactly how to submit a proposal, gave me a list of must haves, and then explained how to submit the proposal for the fastest approval turn around. I did exactly what she said. It took 10 days to get WDSG approved for CEH that first year. This year, it took only four days. (I love it when we build trust with the organizations we work with.)

Next, we needed to find a way to more effectively inform the landscaping community about our workshops. Our first year, four landscapers participated.  In the second year, there were 15.  After sharing with Blake Elliot (our newest co-chair member) our desire to expand our reach, Blake found what we had been seeking for 2 years: a public listing of landscapers. We have started our own list of landscapers to contact each year, and our number of participants just grew to 35!

Improvements have evolved, and that is one of the joys of education: you continue to learn from others, as they learn from you. We have gotten some wonderful feedback that our workshops are very useful.  The Director of the Landscape Contractors Board (LCB) thanked us for making these workshops available and at such an affordable price. We have gotten letters of thanks for creating a venue for landscapers to get most of their CEH credits in one place. One landscaper said that it was refreshing to hear new material across a wide range of subjects. We are also receiving good ideas for future classes. This has been a very rewarding part of the process.

I now ask all of our members, friends, colleagues and students: Please help us spread the word! Tell any landscaper you know about WDSG. If you have their permission, please send their contact information to Colet (Coletallen1@gmail.com ).

As our attendance grows, so does the amount of work for our WDSG team.  We welcome your participation.

One last thing: We owe a big THANK YOU to the first team who used Zoom after COVID. They left a well-documented process that made it easy for the three of us to step in and carry WDSG forward to where we are today. Without their pioneering footsteps, we would not be this far.  THANK YOU, first WDSG Zoom team.