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Rooted in Research: The UC Master Gardener Program · In the Garden with UC Master Gardeners

0:00
SPEAKER_00: When you have a question about a tomato plant, a mysterious insect, a dying tree, or what plant to plant in your backyard, where do you turn?
0:11
SPEAKER_00: You might be surprised to learn that the answer could begin at the University of California.
0:16
SPEAKER_00: I'm Bill, your host on today's edition of In the Garden with UC Master Gardeners on KUCI 88.9 Irvine.
0:25
SPEAKER_00: We've never taken the opportunity to talk about what exactly is a UC Master Gardener.
0:41
SPEAKER_00: Today we're going to explore the connection between the University of California, UC Agriculture, and Natural Resources, a cooperative extension, and one of the most popular volunteer programs in the UC system, the UC Master Gardener Program.
0:58
SPEAKER_00: Welcome, Randy.
0:59
SPEAKER_00: Tell us a little bit about your position as program coordinator of the Master Gardener program in Orange County.
1:08
SPEAKER_01: I work to help coordinate all the many, many things that we do in Orange County and work with all of our volunteers.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: And uh it's a great job.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: I love it.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: It's my dream job.
1:19
SPEAKER_00: And we're certainly going to talk about all that Orange County does.
1:22
SPEAKER_00: And you're also a Master Gardener.
1:24
SPEAKER_01: I I I wouldn't call myself a Master Gardener right now because I haven't really maintained the learning about all the different topics, but I did start as a Master Gardener in 2011.
1:36
SPEAKER_01: I went through our training class.
1:38
SPEAKER_01: And uh then when this position, there's one one paid position that's the coordinator in the program.
1:44
SPEAKER_01: And when this came open eight years ago, I leaked at the chance.
1:48
SPEAKER_00: And so And we're certainly glad to have you here.
1:52
SPEAKER_00: So what exactly is the University of California agriculture and natural resources?
1:58
SPEAKER_00: I have to say that slowly.
1:59
SPEAKER_00: So we're going to refer to that as UCANR from now on.
2:02
SPEAKER_00: So what is that?
2:04
SPEAKER_01: Uh UCANR is kind of a statewide network of researchers, educators, and volunteers that takes the unit the learning from the University of California out into the communities all across California.
2:19
SPEAKER_01: Uh, we we connect the learning from UC to communities.
2:24
SPEAKER_01: And so we're not the same as the campuses.
2:27
SPEAKER_01: I like to say we're we are a division of the parent company, I like to say, in air quotes there, of the university.
2:36
SPEAKER_01: And instead of being a one location of a campus, we're a county-based thing.
2:41
SPEAKER_01: We actually do two things.
2:42
SPEAKER_01: Uh, we do cooperative extension, and then we do research centers.
2:47
SPEAKER_01: So uh we have a network of 10 research centers across the state.
2:51
SPEAKER_01: We're lucky to have one here in Orange County, the South Coast Research and Extension Center.
2:56
SPEAKER_01: And then we have cooperative extension offices in every county in the state.
3:02
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and we also have some statewide programs.
3:04
SPEAKER_01: I believe it's 10 statewide programs.
3:07
SPEAKER_01: Don't quote me on that.
3:09
SPEAKER_01: There's different statewide programs that you see uh agriculture and natural resources that we use as um resources at Master Gardeners.
3:18
SPEAKER_00: To the average person, UCANR's work in agriculture, how does it affect them?
3:25
SPEAKER_01: We extend the research-based information into the community.
3:29
SPEAKER_01: So, say a good example might be that we can help people to uh manage their citrus trees to minimize the chances that they'll it'll get their citrus trees will get the uh Huanglong Bing uh disease that's carried by the Asian citrus silate.
3:46
SPEAKER_01: This is something that we've we've had in our in the state of California for several years now.
3:51
SPEAKER_01: We have quarantine here in Southern California, and you know, we're very concerned about this incurable disease taking out backyard citrus in California, or even, you know, more broadly, it could really damage the citrus industry here in California.
4:08
SPEAKER_01: We have lots of researchers at the University of California that are working on this problem, and at Agriculture and Natural Resources with the Master Gardener program, our volunteers are out there in the community uh answering questions about this, taking the research, what we learned from the researchers at the University of California and Agriculture and Natural Resources, and taking them, taking that information out to the public and kind of like boiling it down for people, right?
4:35
SPEAKER_00: And explaining it because the average person is not going to read uh read a uh peer-reviewed research paper.
4:43
SPEAKER_00: So the research that master gardeners get to share breaks it down and it's a way of sharing out and saying, okay, this is what you look for if you have HLB, this is what you can do, this is what you can do.
4:57
SPEAKER_00: So that all makes perfect sense.
4:58
SPEAKER_00: What other things did you see in our do they research?
5:01
SPEAKER_00: What are some other examples?
5:03
SPEAKER_01: Oh, there's UC Agriculture and Natural Resources does just an immense amount of things across California.
5:11
SPEAKER_01: When I go on our website, and the website is easy to find, you can uh search, it's actually the website is ucanr.edu.
5:19
SPEAKER_01: And when you go in there, it's just you can follow all kinds of wonderful little breadcrumbs to all kinds of things we do.
5:26
SPEAKER_01: We uh work with gardening and agriculture, of course.
5:29
SPEAKER_01: That includes things like rangelands and forestry management, wildfire, uh wildfire preparedness and management.
5:38
SPEAKER_01: We have youth development programs like 4-H.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: It's endless, isn't it?
5:44
SPEAKER_01: All I can think of off the top of my head.
5:46
SPEAKER_00: No, you you gave us a lot of information.
5:48
SPEAKER_00: So all states in the union have an agriculture and natural resources program, and the history of that is fascinating.
5:58
SPEAKER_01: It is across the 50 states, etc., the land grant university uh system was established in I think it was 1860s, 64.
6:09
SPEAKER_01: The oh the Merrill Act actually established the land grant university system in 1862.
6:15
SPEAKER_01: So President Lincoln actually signed it into law.
6:18
SPEAKER_01: And that essentially created the system of universities to extend learning across the country to to bring practical learning on like mechanics and agriculture to the whole country instead of being based in some, you know, some exclusive uh universities, uh more centrally located, perhaps on the East Coast.
6:40
SPEAKER_01: Created the land grant university system.
6:43
SPEAKER_01: And then later on in 1914, they extend created the cooperative extension program.
6:50
SPEAKER_01: And the cooperative extension is the way that the universities extend research-based information to the public in all 50 states, DC, Puerto Rico.
7:01
SPEAKER_01: Uh now we have cooperative extension at uh similar university systems in Canada and South Korea is the other area in the world, etc.
7:11
SPEAKER_01: There are very similar programs or similar ways that uh university learning is extended to the public in other parts of the world too.
7:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and the idea behind this that President Lincoln had, which was awesome, was to make sure that everybody in every state could be fed.
7:28
SPEAKER_00: And so by researching the best way to grow a crop, the best way to combat the insect that's going to come after that crop, and it to disseminate that information to farmers, is kind of how it started.
7:42
SPEAKER_00: And you think about land grant universities.
7:44
SPEAKER_00: If you're a college football fan and you watch Saturday football, just about all those teams playing are land grant universities.
7:53
SPEAKER_00: That's their original origin.
7:55
SPEAKER_00: And so that's kind of another interesting way to look at it.
7:57
SPEAKER_00: So even we connect into football here.
8:01
SPEAKER_00: So cooperative extension, we you you touched on this a little bit.
8:07
SPEAKER_00: It was created, and I believe it was the Smith Lever Act of 1914.
8:11
SPEAKER_00: And so this so tell us a little more about what this cooperative extension does.
8:18
SPEAKER_01: The way I it's two strange words put together, and people don't really understand it, but the way I like to say it is that it's the way that the universities cooperate with the counties to extend research-based information.
8:29
SPEAKER_01: And that's the whole idea of uh agriculture and natural resources here in California and the cooperative extension programs across the country is to like take practical information from the universities and reach it out to the farmers originally, the main target.
8:48
SPEAKER_01: The main goal, obviously.
8:50
SPEAKER_01: Right.
8:51
SPEAKER_01: The take it out to the farmers and actually show them practical things how to do the things rather than just uh lecture to them about it or have them read things.
9:00
SPEAKER_01: They went out into the communities at to the farmers and showed them how to do things.
9:05
SPEAKER_01: So that's that's essentially what we do at agriculture and natural resources.
9:08
SPEAKER_01: We go out into communities and teach people.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: And so that makes perfect sense to me.
9:14
SPEAKER_00: And that's why the UC Master Gardener program is part of the UC Cooperative Extension program, is because we are extending.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: We're out in the community, we're teachers, we're educators, if you will, uh, showing people exactly uh what to do.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: So why is this cooperative extension uh model an important one?
9:38
SPEAKER_01: I think it's important because not everybody's gonna, like you said you mentioned earlier, not everybody's gonna go find a paper on, you know, like I was talking about, uh the Guanglong Bing or citrus greening disease, and learn about all about how it works and how uh pests work.
9:59
SPEAKER_01: You uh you you need to have somebody you know there's only a lot of people do a lot of great research on um and there's you know, of course online, there's all kinds of things.
10:10
SPEAKER_01: But the having somebody to actually explain it to folks and to actually be out in the communities, I think that's the most important thing.
10:18
SPEAKER_01: We have some tree pests here in Southern California, some invasive tree pests that we are hoping will wipe out great swaths of our forests.
10:27
SPEAKER_01: So we have our researcher, one of the researchers we work with here, scientist, is Dr.
10:32
SPEAKER_01: Bea Nobor Berman.
10:35
SPEAKER_01: And she has a program to help uh count combat some of these tree pests.
10:40
SPEAKER_01: And the Master Gardeners, we work with her to learn about these tree pests and then ex go to information booths that we put on in different places.
10:48
SPEAKER_01: Like uh right now we have the uh we're have a booth at the fair grounds here at Orange County Fair.
10:54
SPEAKER_01: We can teach people about the threat of this these tree pests and explain why it's important not to move firewood from California that somebody cut down their tree and you don't know what happened to that tree, but now you've got the wood and you're gonna take it on a camping trip to Northern California or Washington State or something, and you could be taking that pest to a place where it doesn't exist already, it doesn't have any natural enemies, and you uh, you know, you don't you want to we want to teach you not to do something that could potentially cause problems.
11:30
SPEAKER_01: There's so many different ways that the different research that's going on with agriculture and natural resources kind of filters down and out into the public, and you know, we can answer questions.
11:40
SPEAKER_01: We know what we're talking about at UC Master Gardeners when you're talking about gardening.
11:44
SPEAKER_01: So we can come to us and and ask things and we can kind of boil it down for them and tell them what we're gonna do.
11:50
SPEAKER_00: We can, and it's even the simple problems too.
11:52
SPEAKER_00: Like you you talk about citrus, and one of the common things everybody gets on their citrus, it's fortunately not fatal to the tree, your aphids.
11:59
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
12:00
SPEAKER_00: And so we'll tell you how to take care of those aphids, and uh, that's what what we do and tell you in a way where you're not going to then harm the environment and maybe even harm the area around for your pets and your children.
12:15
SPEAKER_00: So, what makes cooperative extension different from simply looking up gardening information online?
12:21
SPEAKER_00: You mentioned that a little bit.
12:23
SPEAKER_01: Our task is to uh extend the research-based, science-based research uh information to the public.
12:30
SPEAKER_01: We're not telling you just what grandma told you to do your to our tomatoes, right?
12:35
SPEAKER_01: My grandma did tell me told me about something to do with tomatoes.
12:38
SPEAKER_01: That's not the kind of thing we're gonna talk about.
12:40
SPEAKER_01: We're gonna have learned from uh, say, entomologists about pests.
12:46
SPEAKER_01: We know uh that sometimes pests are different insects are affected by there's effective ways of managing a pest or a disease, and we know more about that.
12:58
SPEAKER_01: We have access to information that is out there, we know where to go look, and we can find that research-based information rather than something that's kind of based on ideas that somebody has.
13:11
SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of different examples of how people need to learn the right way of doing something instead of just kind of guessing and trying things out.
13:20
SPEAKER_00: And that would make perfect sense that we do that because there is a lot of misinformation out there.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: You want something tested.
13:28
SPEAKER_00: So, for those of you that live in another part of the United States or even in another country, if you go to your agricultural natural resources website, you're gonna get information for the insects and the things particular to your climate.
13:44
SPEAKER_00: And just like Randy said, just about every county in the United States, I believe, has cooperative extension along with a Master Gardener program.
13:53
SPEAKER_00: I know some of the smaller counties that may be combined.
13:56
SPEAKER_00: So, what is exactly is a UC master gardener?
14:01
SPEAKER_00: And this is probably going to be the same for other counties again across the country.
14:06
SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
14:06
SPEAKER_01: So the uh more broadly, we it in across the country, we call ourselves the extension master gardeners.
14:13
SPEAKER_01: Probably a lot of people have heard of Master Gardeners.
14:16
SPEAKER_01: There's been movies, all kinds of things.
14:18
SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of people out there that call themselves Master Gardeners, but that's kind of it's not a uh trademarked term.
14:25
SPEAKER_01: So anybody can decide that they're a Master Gardener.
14:27
SPEAKER_01: But here in Orange County, especially and in California, we want to make sure that we call ourselves the UC Master Gardeners, the University of California Master Gardeners.
14:35
SPEAKER_01: And uh more broadly, we call ourselves uh the Extension Master Gardener programs in different places.
14:41
SPEAKER_01: So you can search up your local Extension Master Gardener program to get more information about us.
14:48
SPEAKER_01: But what we are is we are a volunteer program.
14:52
SPEAKER_01: The university trains the volunteers, uh, people that come to us.
14:56
SPEAKER_01: We it's not a the UC Master Gardener training program, it's not about just telling you how to garden, and then you take that home and you garden in your backyard.
15:05
SPEAKER_01: It's about training you on gardening and sustainable landscape practices and pest management.
15:11
SPEAKER_01: And then our folks that have that training, they go out into the community as volunteers to spread that information.
15:18
SPEAKER_01: It happens across in all the uh, I expect it's in all land grant universities, and it can be very different from place to place.
15:26
SPEAKER_01: Here in California, you know, we have a real structured way we do this sort of thing.
15:31
SPEAKER_01: We people come to us, they learn, and then they go out into volunteer.
15:35
SPEAKER_01: In other places, you might come and learn from Master Gardeners and just learn for your own backyard.
15:40
SPEAKER_01: And then if you're interested, you might take a few more classes about extend being a volunteer to extend the information.
15:47
SPEAKER_01: But it's a great resource for people to go to wherever they are to learn all about garbage.
15:52
SPEAKER_00: Just basically university of and your state, and you're and you're probably going to find that connected to their cooperative extension program and find out more, or even within the country in which you live.
16:06
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
16:06
SPEAKER_00: So tell us a little bit about when this program began and what was the idea behind it.
16:11
SPEAKER_01: Washington State University actually is the land grant university up in Washington State.
16:16
SPEAKER_01: I'm a proud alumni from Washington State University.
16:19
SPEAKER_00: We know that.
16:20
SPEAKER_00: You tell us all the time.
16:21
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
16:22
SPEAKER_01: And so the Master Gardener program started in 1972, started in King and Pierce counties.
16:29
SPEAKER_01: We at uh Cooperative Extension and uh well, at Cooperative Extension, we have people who are called advisors here in California.
16:37
SPEAKER_01: In other states, they call them agents, and those are the people that are doing research and learning and or to other organizations.
16:45
SPEAKER_01: Uh it's not just farmers, of course, nowadays.
16:47
SPEAKER_01: We work with all kinds of community partners, but the advisors are the ones that are doing the extension to uh entities like you know, companies and and growers and that that sort of thing.
16:59
SPEAKER_01: And then Master Gardeners uh are we are we're tasked with reaching out to the residents of California.
17:07
SPEAKER_00: We reach out to the residents of uh in the counties.
17:10
SPEAKER_00: So it's out to the residents and we disseminate that information.
17:14
SPEAKER_00: And I I think you you're absolutely right.
17:16
SPEAKER_00: And and again, this program is found in Puerto Rico and all 50 states, and it's expanding to other parts of the world.
17:24
SPEAKER_00: I know Australia has a similar program, South Korea has a program.
17:28
SPEAKER_00: I believe parts of the United Kingdom are even having a program too.
17:32
SPEAKER_00: So you can even check the part of the world in which you live.
17:36
SPEAKER_00: So, regardless of where you're listening to this program, you can find this Master Gardener program somewhere.
17:42
SPEAKER_00: And it'll enable you to do the research based for your own climate zone.
17:48
SPEAKER_00: And so we kind of talked a little bit about that.
17:51
SPEAKER_00: So, why did the University of California create the Master Gardener program?
17:56
SPEAKER_00: You touched on this a little bit, but explain it a little more.
17:59
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, let me take a better another shot at another shot at the history of the Master Gardener program.
18:05
SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, we started the Master Gardener program started in 1972 in Washington State, in King County and Pierce County.
18:13
SPEAKER_01: And it was because one of our the agents, the cooperative extension agents, were getting bombarded, the office was getting bombarded by people interested in gardening.
18:24
SPEAKER_01: So apparently in the early nine, in the early 1970s, like interest in gardening was increasing.
18:30
SPEAKER_01: And so there's a lot of questions coming into that cooperative extension office.
18:34
SPEAKER_01: And so some one of two of the agents there, the cooperative extension staff at Washington State University, came up with this idea of engaging volunteers to help to answer these questions.
18:46
SPEAKER_01: So that was the genesis of the Master Gardener program.
18:50
SPEAKER_01: And so they trained Master Gardener or they trained people in gardening, sent them out to a uh one of the first things they did was they went out and had an information booth at the Tacoma Mall in Tacoma, Washington.
19:03
SPEAKER_01: And uh they started that program there, and it's grown exponentially across the country, et cetera.
19:10
SPEAKER_00: And I believe it was 1980 it first came into the program was copied in in California.
19:16
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
19:17
SPEAKER_00: And I know here in Orange County, the first thing we ever did was we just manned a hotline.
19:23
SPEAKER_00: And it was by phone then, because we didn't have internet, and it was Saturday mornings, and people around the county could call in with their gardening questions, and master gardeners were on hand to answer them, which is pretty cool, and it kind of looks at at what we've grown.
19:39
SPEAKER_00: So tell us about what the typical UC Master Gardener does during a uh year here in Orange County.
19:47
SPEAKER_01: Well, there's a lot of different things that Master Gardeners do.
19:50
SPEAKER_01: We have our hotline, which is now an email-based process.
19:53
SPEAKER_01: We we used to have a phone call.
19:55
SPEAKER_01: You could call in and leave a voicemail, but uh, we weren't getting a lot of traction on that.
20:00
SPEAKER_01: Not a lot of people are taking advantage of that.
20:02
SPEAKER_01: So we now do it by email.
20:04
SPEAKER_01: Um the hotline answers uh this year so far in 19 to in 2026, we've answered 340 plus questions uh from the community.
20:15
SPEAKER_01: That's an uh important project we have going on in Orange County.
20:19
SPEAKER_01: We also have a really robust speakers bureau.
20:22
SPEAKER_01: And our speakers bureau here in uh 2026 so far has reached more than 4,000 people.
20:29
SPEAKER_01: I think we do about 20 talks across the county on different subjects.
20:33
SPEAKER_01: I'm sure it's one of the more robust speakers bureaus in uh our UC cooperative.
20:38
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry, UC Master Gardener program.
20:41
SPEAKER_01: So they do a lot of that, but you don't have to be a garden, you know, a research person that likes to research like our hotliner people do, or a speaker that gets up in front of a bunch of folks.
20:53
SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of different things we do.
20:55
SPEAKER_01: We have a partnership with the Giving Farm, which is in Westminster High School.
21:00
SPEAKER_01: We are out there helping in there, they have a pollinator garden that we help to establish, and we they have uh an orchard of different trees, well, fruit trees.
21:11
SPEAKER_01: I believe it's mostly avocados, but there's a bunch of different kinds of plants there.
21:15
SPEAKER_01: Um we help with uh maintaining those trees in the pollinator garden and helping to teach the students there at the Westminster High School or community members that come in to volunteer at the Giving Farm.
21:28
SPEAKER_01: And so that's another example where we're at.
21:31
SPEAKER_01: Here at our location at South Coast Research and Extension Center in Irvine.
21:36
SPEAKER_01: We have a teaching garden and a compost demonstration site that we maintain.
21:42
SPEAKER_01: And so we can do we have a um boys and girls club have been out twice this this summer to learn about gardening from our master gardeners.
21:52
SPEAKER_01: We have information booths that we are out at community events all throughout the year, like I mentioned earlier, where.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: At the fair right now.
22:01
SPEAKER_00: Our biggest one, I think, is UFC Fair.
22:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they always at garden shows.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: Um some of these booths sometimes we teach people how to sharpen their tools, which is one of my favorite things to do because garden tools take a beating.
22:14
SPEAKER_01: It's always good to have sharp garden tools, and that's a great thing to learn.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: It sure is.
22:20
SPEAKER_00: So we've broadcast a weekly gardening show, which you're listening to now since 2015.
22:26
SPEAKER_00: It's been called In the Garden with UC Master Gardeners, and of course it airs every Thursday morning from 8:30 to 9.30 a.m.
22:34
SPEAKER_00: here at KUCI.
22:35
SPEAKER_00: We've recently made our program available on a range of podcast platforms in order to reach more people.
22:42
SPEAKER_00: So do master gardeners come to your house and take care of your garden?
22:46
SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, no.
22:47
SPEAKER_01: I know I get a lot of phone calls from people saying that they need somebody to help them in their garden.
22:52
SPEAKER_01: But no, um, we we do research, we do uh extension of information other ways.
22:58
SPEAKER_01: Uh we don't come and help you at your garden, I'm afraid, here in Orange County, but we give you a lot of good information.
23:05
SPEAKER_01: Uh, because we're part of the University of California, we can't uh specifically promote any particular businesses or products and that sort of thing.
23:15
SPEAKER_01: So uh we generally uh aren't going to be able to direct you to a gardener, obviously, but we might direct you if you need an arborist to the International Society of Arborists that have uh a listing of certified arborists uh all over.
23:32
SPEAKER_01: And so that's the kind of thing that we would do.
23:34
SPEAKER_00: And we might teach you how to ask questions of a potential person that you're gonna hire at your home to do gardening.
23:41
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
23:42
SPEAKER_01: And uh we sometimes do different kinds of trainings or give you enough information that you can be a really good, you can be a really um informed consumer.
23:52
SPEAKER_01: I know uh we haven't done this for a little while, but we've done a uh irrigation workshop where we show people how to put together irrigation and you learn all about the parts and things like that.
24:01
SPEAKER_01: That's the kind of thing that we you know, we teach you enough that you know how to interact with people that are going to be doing things for you.
24:08
SPEAKER_01: Pest management companies, like we know about pest management.
24:12
SPEAKER_01: One of the greatest resources, it's one of these that we use at Master Gardeners.
24:17
SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's one of the statewide programs that are offered by UC Agriculture and Natural Resources.
24:23
SPEAKER_01: It's called UC IPM.
24:25
SPEAKER_01: And IPM stands for Integrated Pest Management.
24:28
SPEAKER_01: And that's a approach to pest management that takes the least toxic or the least uh environmentally dangerous uh attack first when you're approaching a problem with disease or pests.
24:42
SPEAKER_01: So UC IPM is a great resource.
24:44
SPEAKER_01: Knowing about the Master Gardeners knowing about pests and teaching people about pests and how to manage them.
24:49
SPEAKER_01: You can, like I've had many conversations with pest management people that come to my door trying to sell their services.
24:55
SPEAKER_01: And I can really quickly understand what their approach is, what they're offering to me.
25:02
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes I'll ask them questions and I'll see that no, they're not actually gonna do the thing that I want, the they're not gonna take the approach that I want them to take.
25:10
SPEAKER_01: They're gonna uh you know display uh with their their pesticides that they offer, whereas in our household, we prefer to to uh you know minimize how many pesticides we use and encourage all the natural predators and that sort of thing.
25:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I think that's everyone.
25:27
SPEAKER_00: And so to give another example of IPM, so going back to aphids, which is a problem in the summertime nationwide, the first approach you would take using IPM is you would uh take your garden hose and put it on a setting where you get a good stream of water, and you would wash those aphids off the undersides of the leaves.
25:47
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
25:48
SPEAKER_00: And and that's going to kill the aphids, and it's not going to leave any chemical residue for your for your environment.
25:56
SPEAKER_00: And that's an example of where you start with integrated pest management.
26:01
SPEAKER_00: Uh it can mean sometimes that you may have to give up on the infected plant if it's too infected and start over again.
26:09
SPEAKER_00: With that IPM, you go to a poison, so to speak, or a chemical, if you will, kind of as a last resort.
26:17
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
26:17
SPEAKER_01: Right.
26:17
SPEAKER_00: And we teach things like uh for snails.
26:21
SPEAKER_00: You use a old toilet paper roll and you put it on the garden, and the snails and slugs crawl in there to hide during the day, and you just remove that, and then you can remove those pests.
26:32
SPEAKER_00: Uh so there's a lot of different techniques.
26:35
SPEAKER_00: And again, researching the website ucarnr.edu here in California, or in your own state or region of the world, you can find out about how to, where to start.
26:49
SPEAKER_00: And the important thing, especially that they'll tell you about integrated pest management, is you've got to know what the pest is.
26:56
SPEAKER_01: Oh, for sure, yeah.
26:57
SPEAKER_01: The UC IPM website, it's fairly easy to find if you search online.
27:02
SPEAKER_01: It's chock full with great information.
27:05
SPEAKER_01: There are um some tools to figure out what weeds you have or what uh vertebrate uh critters you have uh causing troubles in your vertebrate pests in your garden.
27:18
SPEAKER_01: It'll teach you a lot of things about things.
27:20
SPEAKER_01: Like if you're interested, if you're worried about the aphids that you found on your rose, it you can look and find the pest note that tells you all about aphids, how to manage them, their life cycle, how it works.
27:31
SPEAKER_01: Um, it's just a really great, it's a better approach to just spraying something when you find an insect.
27:37
SPEAKER_01: You're gonna learn more about it.
27:39
SPEAKER_01: Like just this morning, I was in my garden, I found some aphids.
27:42
SPEAKER_01: I hardly have any aphids.
27:44
SPEAKER_01: I was glad to see some aphids, and I understand that if you leave some of those guys there, they're going to, there's other predator insects that are gonna come along and and uh you know lay eggs in the the living aphid uh that are gonna hatch into more of these predatory wasps that are out there.
28:03
SPEAKER_01: So I you just learn a better understanding of how the natural world works.
28:09
SPEAKER_01: That's the kind of information that we master gardeners are gonna teach you about.
28:13
SPEAKER_01: Um, you're gonna learn that you can leave a couple pests there.
28:16
SPEAKER_01: It's the the amount of damage that they're causing maybe isn't too bad.
28:20
SPEAKER_01: Maybe your rose is just gonna be fine with a few aphids on it.
28:24
SPEAKER_01: You got the water hose, you don't have to pull out the big guns right away, because that's gonna damage not just um those insects, it's gonna damage the beneficial predator insects that are gonna come along too.
28:37
SPEAKER_00: Um, so anyway, that's just a and and that's something we teach a lot of people have an idea that if it's a bug or an insect, it's bad.
28:44
SPEAKER_00: Right.
28:45
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's not true.
28:46
SPEAKER_00: We have a lot of uh insects that are uh very beneficial.
28:50
SPEAKER_00: And many of you may have heard of uh lady beetles or ladybugs or the lace wings, and you can even find those for sale at your garden center uh as a way to doing this.
29:02
SPEAKER_00: And I think you answered why it's so important that gardening recommendations are based on science.
29:08
SPEAKER_00: And we've just been talking about why why that's important.
29:12
SPEAKER_00: So speaking of that, are Master Gardeners allowed to simply give their personal opinion?
29:18
SPEAKER_01: No, we uh are really clear when we're going through the Master Gardener training class that we you some people will some people come with lots of gardening experience, some people don't.
29:28
SPEAKER_01: And we want to make to make sure that your gardening experience that you've learned over the years in your own garden and from your grandma, like I like to say, um, that's not what we're talking about.
29:38
SPEAKER_01: We're talking we're we're training you on uh research-based information about gardening that you're gonna stick to when you're out there in the in the public.
29:47
SPEAKER_01: Just because something's worked for people, somebody, doesn't mean it's gonna work for everyone.
29:52
SPEAKER_01: And you can like online research, you can get information that comes from Minnesota.
29:58
SPEAKER_01: And so not everything that they do in Minnesota in the garden is gonna work here in California.
30:04
SPEAKER_01: Um, so it's important that the master gardeners don't just give public their own opinions, they give information based on what they've learned in the trainings that we've given them.
30:15
SPEAKER_00: And I want to emphasize that too, is that again, one of the more important things to gardening is the climate in which you live.
30:22
SPEAKER_00: And there are different things we do in different climates to combat different things to get something to grow differently.
30:30
SPEAKER_00: So here in Southern California, one of the things that might surprise the rest of the world is the Mediterranean climate we have, we don't get summer rain.
30:38
SPEAKER_00: And the rest of the world climates all have summer rain.
30:41
SPEAKER_00: And that's an anomaly of uh Southern California.
30:45
SPEAKER_00: So what happens when gardening advice on social media or other platforms conflicts with university research?
30:52
SPEAKER_00: What do we tell people?
30:54
SPEAKER_00: Oh, we tell people to you know stick to what we're telling them.
30:58
SPEAKER_01: There was, I was just recently exposed to uh somebody saying, oh, this uh problem with ACP, uh, or ACP was the Asian citrus silence, the Huanglong Bing or the citrus silid uh citrus greening disease that we've I've been mentioning.
31:14
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't pass the eyeball test because I haven't seen a bunch of people, uh a bunch of trees dying off.
31:19
SPEAKER_01: And it's just you know, the eyeball test doesn't cut it for us.
31:23
SPEAKER_01: Like just because you haven't seen the problem doesn't mean the problem's not that out there in the world.
31:28
SPEAKER_01: And uh and it could the problems, this like invasive species uh that come into the California, like we're combating them because they can be they could be um you know detrimental to industries or you know, people's backyard citrus.
31:45
SPEAKER_01: I really appreciate my citrus in my yard.
31:49
SPEAKER_01: And we want to combat those things early on.
31:52
SPEAKER_01: And uh and learning about that is is learning about these kinds of things and understanding that there's real life research behind it, not just people coming up with ideas on their own.
32:06
SPEAKER_01: Uh that's what we're all about.
32:08
SPEAKER_00: So we it's not anecdotal, and you have to remember on social media you're going to hear a lot of anecdotal ideas, like someone saying, Well, it doesn't pass the eyeball test.
32:19
SPEAKER_00: I'm not noticing citrus dying.
32:21
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, it must not be a problem, which is we know is not true.
32:26
SPEAKER_00: So, do you have to be a professional gardener to become a master gardener?
32:30
SPEAKER_00: No, let's talk about that.
32:32
SPEAKER_01: I just recently was having a conversation with another coordinator in a different part of the state.
32:36
SPEAKER_01: We just asked people to come with uh an interest in gardening and an uh uh interest in getting out into the community and teaching other people about gardening.
32:46
SPEAKER_01: And we found that uh some of the master gardeners who come to the program without any gardening experience, I mean, we're gonna teach people how to garden and they're gonna learn more from us and be more successful gardeners in their own lives.
33:00
SPEAKER_01: But uh, you know, they bring other skills that are really helpful in our program.
33:04
SPEAKER_01: We have uh a great engineer who didn't know anything about gardening, but he came to us, and his skills on online are helping us out here in Orange County uh immensely.
33:14
SPEAKER_01: But no, you don't have to be a gardening expert when you come to us.
33:17
SPEAKER_01: In fact, probably it'd be sometimes you have to unlearn a few things that you already do if you're a gardener.
33:24
SPEAKER_01: And uh and we do have a lot of people, uh, like I like to say, being going through master gardener training is not getting a master's in gardening.
33:32
SPEAKER_01: It's not just for you doing your own gardening, it's for you teaching other people how to garden.
33:38
SPEAKER_01: We also have uh people that come to us and they're starting a gardening business and they want to kind of get it as a credential.
33:46
SPEAKER_01: But again, it's not about it's not something that we want people to refer to as a credential.
33:52
SPEAKER_01: If you've got, if you're working with a gardener and he's got that or they have Master Gardeners on their business card, they're probably not one of the University of California Master Gardeners.
34:05
SPEAKER_01: They uh we really are strict about how uh we are just doing, uh you know, you may be in the in the industry, you may be a gardener, but we want you to keep that separate from the what we're doing in the in the community volunteer.
34:19
SPEAKER_00: Because there is a way that that we're going to teach you that we want you to present and mention that research first.
34:27
SPEAKER_00: So talk about a little bit more about what other qualifications that you might look for in a potential master gardener.
34:36
SPEAKER_01: Mostly the enthusiasm to get that out there in the con in the community.
34:40
SPEAKER_01: Uh that's one of the things we really focus on is to explain to people that if you're going to come to us to become a master gardener, then uh we want you to go out into the community after we've done the training.
34:51
SPEAKER_01: There's a certain amount of volunteering that's expected from every Master Gardener every year.
34:56
SPEAKER_01: Uh the training class is a pretty big commitment for people from the get-go.
35:01
SPEAKER_01: It's not just about learning about gardening yourself, it's about going out there.
35:05
SPEAKER_01: And it's a really nice, I have to say, it's a wonderful, uh, I think it's a I see all the time that we have this wonderful community of man of community of practice, they like to say.
35:17
SPEAKER_01: And so we have that we're building this community of master gardeners.
35:20
SPEAKER_01: There's 300 of us here in Orange County, like I said before.
35:23
SPEAKER_01: And each time we have a class, which is about 30, 35 people in each class, people come together, they come together over gardening, they talk about gardening with each other, they make friends, they become part of this bigger community that we have, and they get out to to meet people in the community itself.
35:42
SPEAKER_01: It's um, you know, just that kind of community of practice and getting together and making friends and and having that kind of um social infrastructure, like expanding that so that people get to know each other on a one-to-one basis or in in the community is is I think one of the best parts about being a master gardener, I think.
36:00
SPEAKER_00: It is.
36:01
SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know, one of the things I like to kid about, we do know how to eat in Master Gardeners and we do celebrate a lot.
36:07
SPEAKER_00: And uh anytime you go to a general meeting or you come to training, uh, the snacks are incredible.
36:15
SPEAKER_00: I will tell you that.
36:16
SPEAKER_00: So I don't know if you would say if being a cook or a baker is a qualification, but I just think to sum it up, you you want the ability to know that, okay, I'm gonna be able to volunteer some of my time to present this information.
36:32
SPEAKER_00: I can do it at home in my pajamas if I'm answering hotline questions.
36:37
SPEAKER_00: If I feel comfortable speaking to a group, I could become uh part of the Speaker's Bureau.
36:42
SPEAKER_00: I could uh talk one-on-one with a person at an informational booth.
36:47
SPEAKER_00: And then there's even too behind-the-scenes clerical stuff that gets done by a lot of very active master gardeners that you don't see.
36:55
SPEAKER_00: So I think within our community and with what we do, you can find your niche.
37:01
SPEAKER_00: Oh, for sure.
37:02
SPEAKER_00: And and that's the other important thing, too.
37:05
SPEAKER_00: So if I kill every houseplant I own, I can still become a master gardener.
37:10
SPEAKER_01: Yes, I think one of my favorite uh quotes that I can't attribute appropriately, but um, is so that if you're not killing plants, you're not gardening hard enough.
37:20
SPEAKER_01: Oh I think that we all all us gardeners who've been doing it for years have killed many, many, many plants.
37:27
SPEAKER_01: So uh, you know, if you're interested in gardening, enthusiastic about it, but don't know much yet, uh, we are happy to have you come and join us uh and teach you all about gardening.
37:37
SPEAKER_01: And you're gonna learn and and you're gonna be amazed at what you can do.
37:40
SPEAKER_01: I think that's one of the main things I want to mention is that Master Gardeners were all lifelong learners.
37:45
SPEAKER_01: Like you're right, a lot of Master Gardeners are here because they just like to learn too.
37:50
SPEAKER_01: That's that's one of the main things that drives our community.
37:54
SPEAKER_01: We want to learn things, we want to understand things better, and uh and that's one of the appeals of becoming a Master Gardener, I think.
38:02
SPEAKER_00: And I know from my point of view, I like being able to talk to the researchers that are working here at this at this uh research station.
38:10
SPEAKER_00: And being able to learn from them, I think is just a wonderful benefit.
38:14
SPEAKER_00: So let's talk specifically about Orange County.
38:17
SPEAKER_00: And again, regardless of where you are in the country or the world, it's going to be similar, but it's going to be different.
38:24
SPEAKER_00: But I didn't ask you, Randy, are we in Orange County?
38:26
SPEAKER_00: Are we a one of the bigger programs in the state of California or even, or do you know?
38:30
SPEAKER_01: Um, I haven't looked that up, and it does vary from from year to year because some of the other counties do every other c uh class or every other year.
38:41
SPEAKER_01: Right.
38:42
SPEAKER_01: And so it's it can be different from here to there.
38:44
SPEAKER_01: But I I'm sure we're one of the top uh one of the larger uh programs in the county.
38:50
SPEAKER_01: I know that San Diego has another robust Master Gardener program, and uh I'm sure there are around 300 or more now.
38:57
SPEAKER_01: There's some up in the uh Bay Area that are really big.
39:00
SPEAKER_01: So I'm not 100% sure if we're uh what our ranking is.
39:04
SPEAKER_00: Okay, but that that does make sense.
39:06
SPEAKER_00: So what's the selection process here in Orange County like?
39:09
SPEAKER_00: Here in Orange County, we do our training class every year.
39:12
SPEAKER_01: I'm proud of being able to do that.
39:14
SPEAKER_01: Me too.
39:15
SPEAKER_01: Yes, Bill helps with that, the training class immensely.
39:18
SPEAKER_01: So thank you very much, Bill.
39:19
SPEAKER_01: He's one of our two leads that uh helps to run that class.
39:22
SPEAKER_01: And we do it every year.
39:24
SPEAKER_01: The process for becoming Master Gardener starts in September, and that's when we have our information day, we call it.
39:32
SPEAKER_01: It's actually a couple days.
39:33
SPEAKER_01: We have two meetings this year, for example.
39:36
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so you come to either a Zoom meeting or in person to learn all about the program.
39:42
SPEAKER_01: We go over some of the things that we've talked about today, about how it's not just learning about gardening, you're a volunteer, we talk about what the expectations are, we lay out all the uh commitment time commitments for the training class and the cost and uh that sort of thing.
39:59
SPEAKER_01: And so you learn about that in early September.
40:01
SPEAKER_01: Once you understand it better, then we give you the application and there's a written application.
40:07
SPEAKER_01: Uh, once you do the when you submit the application, we uh are very we make a lot of effort to make it as our evaluation of your application is as objective as possible.
40:19
SPEAKER_01: We have people score the applications and everything.
40:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we take the names off.
40:23
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we take the names off.
40:24
SPEAKER_01: It's we're we're serious about trying to um overcome any implicit biases that we have when we select Master Gardeners because we want the program to be for everybody, not just people that are like us.
40:37
SPEAKER_01: So it's really important for us to uh to really reach out to everybody in our community.
40:43
SPEAKER_01: So we do that, and then also we have a uh there is a uh interview that we do.
40:48
SPEAKER_01: We always have here in Orange County, we always have more applicants than we have spaces.
40:52
SPEAKER_01: We literally we're actually sitting in the room where we do this present, we do the training, and there's 34 chairs here.
40:59
SPEAKER_01: So uh we have to go through this whole selection process with the application, and then we go through the that interview.
41:05
SPEAKER_01: We have a a group of Master Gardeners uh interview each person, and we again we do it score, we score things and and avoid our biases, and and so we can be as welcoming as possible.
41:17
SPEAKER_01: And then we select our folks, we tell them, I believe it's in October, is usually what we tell everybody that they get to uh be join us in the program or maybe try again next year, and then we have our first class is our orientation, which is in November, and that's uh like the Thursday before November, at least this year, and and most years we've done it this way.
41:41
SPEAKER_01: And then uh you you sign all your paperwork and you learn the basics of the Master Gardener program, and then you come back in January from mid-January to mid-May is uh we have our weekly classes, and the weekly classes right now and probably in the future are on a weekday, unfortunately.
42:00
SPEAKER_01: It's on Thursdays from say nine in the morning to 2:30 or maybe earlier in the afternoon.
42:06
SPEAKER_01: That's our current schedule.
42:08
SPEAKER_01: And that's a big commitment because we can only let you have one absence.
42:12
SPEAKER_01: Uh so you've got to commit.
42:14
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you gotta commit.
42:15
SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, if you've got a big planned trip this spring, it's probably not the year for you, we tell people.
42:21
SPEAKER_01: But that's one of the reasons I'm proud we do this every year, is because it's it's no fun to tell people they have to wait for two years.
42:27
SPEAKER_01: Um, but we do that, and then uh you you grad there's a test at the end of the class, and you graduate, and then you go off into our community.
42:36
SPEAKER_01: You can actually start going off into the community and being a volunteer during the class, and you go out into the community and then you do your volunteer hours.
42:44
SPEAKER_00: And so they're yeah, we try to help you find during your training what you're going to be interested in, whether it's Speaker's Bureau or Hotline or any of the other various programs that we have.
42:55
SPEAKER_00: So the training is people will find it rigorous.
42:59
SPEAKER_00: I know one of the things that I found the big aha moment for me when I went through training was oh, I didn't even know anybody researched that.
43:09
SPEAKER_00: And you know, you find out that there's a whole body of stuff that you didn't even know about.
43:14
SPEAKER_00: So a lot of times, and it's it's perfectly normal that people do get a little overwhelmed during training because there's a lot of information coming very fast.
43:22
SPEAKER_00: Because we may have a researcher that has a doctoral degree in a certain area and they're trying to give you all the information they've learned in a 20, 30 year career in three hours.
43:33
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's like taking a college course in one day.
43:35
SPEAKER_01: So it is a it's a fire hose, as we often say.
43:38
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
43:38
SPEAKER_01: But I think the most important thing is you're don't, it's not like you're learning everything in through in the class uh about entomology, about insects for the rest of you know, you're not gonna be expected to go out and tell people every little detail about scale.
43:54
SPEAKER_01: Uh scales and insect.
43:56
SPEAKER_01: You're you're learning where the information is, you're being Exposed to the information and we're teaching you how to go back and find the information about scale on the UC IPM website.
44:07
SPEAKER_01: You know, you're you're not going to you're going to learn a lot of details, but you're not expected to regurgitate everything you learn.
44:13
SPEAKER_00: So the test that we would give you, for example, is not that type of test.
44:18
SPEAKER_00: Um, so when I become a master gardener, does that mean I'm done learning?
44:22
SPEAKER_00: Oh no.
44:23
SPEAKER_01: Like I said, we're lifelong learners.
44:25
SPEAKER_01: We uh actually, some of the commitment if is when you're a master gardener, the first year you're a master gardener, you have a little bit more volunteering to do and a little less uh you don't have any continuing education hours.
44:37
SPEAKER_01: But every year our Master Gardeners are expected to do 25 hours of volunteering and 12 hours of continuing education.
44:46
SPEAKER_01: So there's lots of opportunities these days now that we have Zoom and we do a lot of training classes on Zoom.
44:53
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, there's all kinds of things that are available to us to get continuing education.
44:59
SPEAKER_01: We do a lot of classes.
45:00
SPEAKER_01: I was just talking about uh yesterday with somebody about setting up a summer rose pruning class for Master Gardeners to learn about that.
45:08
SPEAKER_01: And so we do a lot of learning throughout our time as Master Gardeners.
45:13
SPEAKER_00: And and you do, and attending an annual meeting is an example of continuing ed.
45:18
SPEAKER_00: Listening to this podcast is an example of continuing ed that you can do here in Orange County.
45:25
SPEAKER_00: So the first year you're a Master Gardener, you have to put in 50 hours of volunteer time.
45:31
SPEAKER_00: There's no continuing ed.
45:33
unknown: Right.
45:33
SPEAKER_00: And then your second year, and thereupon after, it's 25 years, 25 hours, 25 years, 25 hours of volunteer time and 12 hours of continuing education time.
45:47
SPEAKER_00: And that's what you remember.
45:48
SPEAKER_00: So again, the key is is you are a volunteer.
45:51
SPEAKER_00: So what would you tell someone who's thinking about becoming a master gardener?
45:56
SPEAKER_00: What would be your words of wisdom and advice?
45:58
SPEAKER_01: Oh, definitely.
45:59
SPEAKER_01: Um you know, there's a whole selection process.
46:02
SPEAKER_01: Like some people say, Well, how do I make sure I get selected?
46:05
SPEAKER_01: Or how do I, you know, what's the what's the the trick?
46:10
SPEAKER_01: And you know, it's really I think I actually went through the to I was uh I applied twice before I applied once before I got in.
46:17
SPEAKER_01: They didn't didn't let me in the first time I applied.
46:20
SPEAKER_01: And I think it was because I didn't really have a a demonstrated track record of doing volunteering.
46:26
SPEAKER_01: And so it's really we are really looking for people that are gonna go out and volunteer in the community, not just come to the class and learn.
46:33
SPEAKER_01: They're gonna go out out that learning and do the volunteering.
46:37
SPEAKER_01: So somebody who already has kind of an established uh track record of doing volunteering or is is really interested in engaging the community and sharing their passion for gardening, that's who we're looking for as Master Gardeners.
46:50
SPEAKER_01: And if that sounds like it's you, then you definitely want to learn about our uh information day, which is coming up here in early September.
46:59
SPEAKER_01: Uh we have a web on our web page.
47:01
SPEAKER_01: You can pretty easily find Master Gardeners or the UC Master Gardeners of Orange County by searching that on the internet.
47:09
SPEAKER_01: That's the easiest way for me to find it.
47:11
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
47:11
SPEAKER_01: And then we have uh, like I said, there is a Zoom, uh an online opportunity for information day, and then another day we have an in-person one here at the South Coast Research and Extension Center.
47:25
SPEAKER_01: You can sign up to uh come to either of those, learn all about the program, then we give you the application and start the whole process.
47:34
SPEAKER_01: We'd love to see you.
47:34
SPEAKER_00: And I have to say, some of our better Master Gardeners have actually been rejected the first time that they applied and they got it on their second or third try, and they've become fabulous master gardeners.
47:45
SPEAKER_00: Oh, sure.
47:46
SPEAKER_00: Well, Randy, it's been great talking with you today.
47:48
SPEAKER_00: Whether you're an experienced gardener or someone who has managed to kill a cactus, there's always something new to learn.
47:55
SPEAKER_00: And perhaps that's the real meaning of being a master gardener, not knowing everything about gardening, but being willing to keep learning and then share that knowledge with your community.
48:05
SPEAKER_00: If this interests you, consider becoming a master gardener here in Orange County if you live here, or in your own county, or even your own country.