- Author: Pamela Kan-Rice
“Pam helped the Master Gardener Program grow into a fabulous organization,” said Beth Teviotdale, who has been an active master gardener volunteer in Fresno County since retiring from UC Cooperative Extension in 2004. “It’s a whole new order of magnitude from where it was to where it’s headed. Pam’s vision and energy and ideas really made this happen.”
UC Cooperative Extension now has 5,600 master gardener volunteers. In exchange for the training and materials they received from the university, master gardeners volunteer to share their home horticulture and pest management knowledge with the public. Over the past year, the volunteers contributed a total of 326,521 hours, giving gardening advice through workshops, websites, newspaper columns and over the phone.
Geisel, a Bay Area native, moved to Fresno to attend Fresno State University.
“There were two things drawing me there,” Geisel said. “There was this great class called ‘Man and the Natural Environment.’ I always loved the outdoors and this class was a semester in an outdoor classroom with backpacking, hiking, etc. Also, I got a job with the National Park Service in Yosemite as a naturalist and Fresno was close to go to college in the winter and to work in the park in the summer.”
She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees, both in plant science, at Fresno State.
“Since it was an ag school, I just sort of fell into the plant sciences and, specifically, entomology,” she said.
After earning her master’s degree in 1980, Geisel took a part-time job at a nursery in Fresno. “The nursery job really hooked me on ornamentals and landscape management,” she said. “I just happened to be reading the Fresno Bee when I saw the ad for my UCCE position and I knew that it was the perfect job for me.”
In 1981, Geisel began her 32-year career with UC as a UC Cooperative Extension advisor in Fresno County. She wrote a weekly gardening column “Growing Things,” which was published in the Fresno Bee, and hosted a weekly gardening show on Fresno’s PBS channel. In 1993, she leased an acre of land from the City of Fresno for the master gardeners to develop Garden of the Sun.
“It was a vacant lot,” Teviotdale said. “They got rid of the trash and made a jewel of a demonstration garden.”
For the past 20 years, the master gardener volunteers have maintained Garden of the Sun and continue to use it to teach classes. The garden includes a variety of distinct sections, such as a 75-variety tomato garden, a children’s garden, an All American Selections demonstration garden, turf grass, fruit trees, a perennial garden, a garden for the disabled and a covered outdoor classroom facility.
In 2002, Geisel received an award for outstanding achievement from the Friends of Extension for projects she conducted in Fresno County.
Master gardener programs in each county had operated independently. When Geisel was appointed director in 2006, she began to create a statewide structure with a unified identity. She brought continuity to the program by standardizing the training. She developed a statewide website with resources for the master gardeners. With the help of UC Agriculture and Natural Resources programmers, she created an online volunteer management system so each county can keep track of volunteer hours and the master gardeners can sign up for events, manage projects, hold online discussions and store documents and photos.
She was a contributor to the ANR bestseller “California Master Gardener Handbook” and has published 50 peer-reviewed articles and dozens of leaflets related to gardening. For the last two years, she also served as interim director for UCCE in Glenn County.
In retirement, Geisel plans to spend time traveling with her husband Ralph Plemmons. An avid bicyclist, Geisel also hopes to become a cycling coach. She has been granted emeritus status by UC leadership and intends to continue to serve Glenn County residents as a master gardener volunteer.
- Author: Diane Nelson
“Sales of fruits and vegetables have remained strong, even during this recession when sales of other plants have lagged,” said Ron Hoffman, owner of Morris Nursery in Riverbank, Calif., echoing the sentiments of many in the state’s nursery industry. “People enjoy growing their own produce and they want plants that do double duty.”
And when they choose brightly colored edibles — like, say, Neon Lights swiss chard or Bronze lettuce — they can have their landscape and eat it, too. But designing and maintaining an edible landscape is easier said than done. How do you know what plants to choose? What if one plant needs different soil and more water than its neighbor? How do you keep the cat from pooping on your produce?
The folks at the UC Cooperative Extension Master Gardener Program, with assistance from California Center for Urban Horticulture at UC Davis, are answering those questions and many more at 6 two-day, “train the trainer” workshops throughout the state. Funded by a two-year grant from UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, the program teaches the art and science of edible landscaping to master gardeners who, in turn, will help train the rest of us.
“Before you install an edible landscape, you need to assess the site and the user,” said Missy Gable, program manager for the California Center for Urban Horticulture. “How much time do you have to devote to gardening? What are your harvest needs? We brought together experts from diverse fields such as landscape architecture, horticulture, food safety and water policy to provide an overview of what’s possible with edible landscaping.”
The workshops are inexpensive — $35 for master gardeners and $65 for industry professionals. In exchange for their reduced rate, master gardeners sign an agreement to teach two classes within three months of their training — one for fellow master gardeners and one for the public. Cheryl Buckwalter, a professional landscaper and executive director of EcoLandscape California, attended an earlier workshop and called the experience “invaluable.”
“Today's landscapes need to work harder than ever,” Buckwalter said. “They need to be water and resource efficient, functional and aesthetically pleasing. The Edible Landscaping Workshop not only showed me how to design the multi-functional landscape of today by incorporating edibles, I also feel qualified to educate my clients, the public and other professionals.”
Will the workshops change the way people garden?
“As part of the project, we’ll be looking at that very thing,” said Pam Geisel, director of the UC Statewide Master Gardener Program and the project’s principal investigator. “We will evaluate the impact of train-the-trainer methodologies to determine whether participants adopt more productive, sustainable landscapes as a result of being trained or from training others.”
The benefits of edible landscaping are bountiful. Parents, for example, love exposing their children to both the joy of gardening and the value of healthy food. Farmers appreciate that more people realize produce doesn’t grow on grocery store shelves. But without a few pointers, it’s easy to err with edibles. Sometimes, for example, our eyes are too big for our stomachs.
“Like me,” Gable said. “I’m a plant nerd. This summer I bought four varieties of zucchini because they were so cool. Believe me, no one needs four varieties of zucchini.”
No two yards or gardeners are the same and the course helps people customize their plan to meet their needs. Do you work 12-hour days? Maybe it’s better for you to help out at a community garden than plant too many edibles in your own back yard. Is your garden in full shade?
“Grow blueberries,” Gable said.
There is still room in four Edible Landscaping Workshops this fall: Oct 11-12 in Santa Clara; Oct. 24-25 in El Cajon; October 26-27 in Los Angeles; Nov. 2-3 in Fresno; and Nov. 30-Dec. 1 in San Luis Obispo. You can register and find more details at http://cchu.ucdavis.edu/events/edible/edible
Media contacts:
- Pam Geisel, Director of the Statewide Master Gardener Program, (530) 865-1154, pgeisel@ucanr.edu
- Missy Gable, California Center for Urban Horticulture at UC Davis, (530) 752-6642, mjborel@ucdavis.edu
- Diane Nelson, UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, (530) 752-1969, denelson@ucdavis.edu