Master Gardener week III

This was another great week I thought. A~ thought it got a bit "down in the weeds" so to speak, but then again she's more of a big picture girl while I'm the type to get far too into the minutia.

Thursday
Thursdays class was held off site. That is to say that it was not in the normal classroom environment. This was our class on plant propagation so of course it was held in the Utah Botanical Center. Here's a peak inside one of the greenhouses that were there.
We got a lesson from the director of the botanical center on some of the different ways of propagating plants. I was actually hoping for a little more in depth information than we got, but I did find out that there's a separate class in April that is all on propagation.

After the presentation, we broke apart into groups to do a little hands on work. To be fair, this was really more like "get the students to do a bunch of the work that we need to get done" done for free time, but that's alright with me. For one, it got me out of the office for a couple of hours and got my hands in the dirt and that's always a net gain in my book! Even more than that though, it gave me a different perspective on the workings of a greenhouse and some of the ways things can get done on a larger scale. I do have to say that the whole time I was thinking to myself about all the possibilities I'll have next year at this time with a greenhouse in my back yard!
Here's a few pics of the stuff that we worked on...
I learned what a "dibble" was. What a cool little tool, and so simple. We used this to prep the pots for receiving the transplants that we had to do.
And these would be them. These are native pinion pine seedlings that my group transplanted and that will be sold this spring at a fundraiser for the center.
A little sampling of the different plants that we re-potted. Another group did something like 300 smooth elm seedlings. I helped with that group too.
Yet another group spent much of the time separating seed from native species that were collected this fall. This is part of the work of the center, keeping native species propagated and available.

Friday
Fridays class was back in the classroom and had another specialist guest speaker and WOW what a wealth of knowledge this guy had! This was the class I really geeked out on. We talked soil.

We were able to really get into some of the details of the way that soil interacts with it's surroundings, the chemistry of attraction and repulsion that cause clay to be either a plus or minus in the garden, the concerns and causes of soil salinity and my personal favorite...COMPOST! I am constantly amazed when I learn more about the way that the earth works. We're such a small part of the equation but can have such a profound effect on it.

Looking forward to more this week.
Take care all.
P~