Greetings newsletter subscribers! Giving Tuesday is next week, Tuesday, November 28, 2022. It's an ideal time of year to support a local organization you care about. If we have answered a question for you, you've learned something new from us by attending a class, or you feel inspired by our work, we hope you'll consider donating to our program.

Currently, we are installing demonstration gardens to be used as outdoor classrooms that the public can visit anytime, and we need your help!

Pollinator Garden 

Our Pollinator Garden is in the installation stage, and we could not be more thrilled. Currently, the irrigation and native plants are going in. Our Master Gardener volunteers were hard at work leveling, raking, and planting just this week.

Thank you Local Donors!

A big “thank you” to the West Resource Conservation District that helped us prepare the garden site, and to our local North San Joaquin Valley Chapter of the California Native Plant Society https://nsj.cnps.org/ for purchasing and donating the native plants! Many of these species are unusual and not normally found in the landscape. Although newly planted, everyone is welcome to stop by and visit*.

Your Funds Help Make this Garden Happen

Help make this demonstration garden come to life! Funds will be used to purchase additional plants, tools, and educational signage. Our big funding goal is a decomposed granite walkway. This is a pricey item, which can cost several thousand dollars. The benefits are a pathway accessible to everyone that avoids runoff and allows good drainage.

How to Give

Visit this website https://donate.ucanr.edu/ and click on the Master Gardener icon. Then, from the drop down menu labeled “Choose a County,” select “Stanislaus County” to make your desired donation. We are a 501 c3 organization, so your donation is tax deductible. Also, donors will receive a packet of narrowleaf milkweed seeds as a special, “thank you!”

If you prefer to donate by check, please make it out to: UC Regents and send to:
UCC Stanislaus County Master Gardener Program
3800 Cornucopia Way, Ste A
Modesto, CA 95358

Thank you

We look forward to meeting you in the near future in our “outdoor classroom” aka Pollinator Garden for classes on pollinators, California native plants, and how you can support them in your backyard garden, patio, apartment, or classroom.

* Our gardens are located at the Ag Center complex on the corner of Crows Landing and Service Roads in Modesto at 3800 Cornucopia Way, 95358. The Pollinator Garden is on the east side of the Stanislaus building, while the Sensory Garden is on the west side.

Giving Tuesday is November 29, 2022! Please join us in this opportunity to give to your local UCCE Stanislaus County Master Gardener Program. Your dollars are used locally to make our county a better place.

Thanks to generous donations from individuals like you, as well as in-kind donations and funding from sponsors, our Sensory Garden has been installed! In fact, the last landscaping step, adding mulch, will be done by volunteers on Giving Tuesday!

We removed old landscaping and revamped the broken irrigation system for the Sensory Garden space. Grover Landscaping donated time to help with irrigation, and Master Gardener volunteers learned how to install drip irrigation.

These photos show our Master Gardeners installing drip irrigation donated by Hunter Industries, and plants donated by Frantz Nursery.

Where can I see the Sensory Garden?

This garden is located on the east side of the Stanislaus Building, at the main entryway. The garden will be used

to teach classes on drip irrigation and low water use landscaping. It will also be a place where employees and visitors can relax on benches we plan to install later.

The Pollinator Garden

Thanks to a generous donation from the West Stanislaus Resource Conservation District, we are starting our Pollinator Garden. The Great Valley Seed Company donated milkweed seeds which will be planted in the garden, too. Next week, volunteers will be installing irrigation and planting.

How You Can Help

Any amount you can donate helps us grow our gardens and our program! The purpose of the gardens is to showcase low-water use plants the public can see anytime. In addition, the areas will be used as outdoor classrooms to teach topics such as drip irrigation, pollinator gardening, plant identification, low water use gardening, and more!

We also plan to install a pollinator hedgerow to showcase plants farmers can use in rows along their property to provide food for pollinators, in addition to helping keep dust levels low and create privacy. The garden will also include plants for pollinators, especially the endangered monarch butterfly.

Our Goal

We are looking to raise $5,000 to help with irrigation installation, tools, seeds, and other needed materials. We are a 501 c (3), so your donation is tax-deductible. https://ucanr.edu/sites/givingtuesday/ This site allows you to give by credit card. (A fee is taken for the use of a credit card.) If you would prefer to give by check, make your check out to “UC Regents” and mail it to:

UCCE Master Gardener Program
3800 Cornucopia Way, Ste A
Modesto, CA 95358

Thanks for your support!

 

Honey bees and native bees love capeweed, Arctotheca calendula, also called South African capeweed, cape dandelion and cape marigold or cape gold.

It's an invasive plant originating from the Cape Province in South Africa (Here's what the California Invasive Council says about it:

"Capeweed (Arctotheca calendula) is an annual or perennial evergreen herb that, when young, forms a low-growing rosette of heavily pinnately lobed leaves, with undersides covered by woolly down. With age, it forms an extensive, dense, mat-like groundcover by proliferation of rooting stems (stolons) from rosettes. Leaves are pinnately lobed; fine, dense hairs cause stems and leaves to appear silvery. Flowers are approximately two inches in diameter, lemon yellow, and daisy-like with yellow centers. The plant is conspicuous in late spring and early summer due to its increase in size and the profusion of large yellow daisies. Plants are seldom solitary, and they spread vigorously by creeping stems (Lasca Leaves 1968)."

Capeweed may have arrived in California in a shipment of grass seed from Australia, where it is a common weed, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture.  The invasive species compendium (CABI) listed it as a noxious weed in 2010 in California.

However, it's cultivated as an ornamental ground cover and has both "fertile" and "sterile" forms. 

We've seen lawnmowers run over the the weed in City of Benicia parks (yes, it grows back), we've seen it thriving in a gold carpet along coastal California, and we've seen bees foraging on it.  

It's a pollinator paradise, of sorts, but it's also invasive. 

On June 4, UCCE Stanislaus County Master Gardeners hosted BigDigDay, a day of giving to ask the community to support the programs they care about. Thanks to our generous donors, we had a successful campaign for our Learning Landscape!

We raised $2,675 towards our Sensory and Pollinator gardens! Combined with Big Dig Day (June 2020) and Giving Tuesday (November 2020), this brings our grand total up to $5,195!

We are still in the preparation phases of working out our irrigation system but will keep you posted as plans for the gardens progress.

Again, thank you for your support, and remember that you can give at any time. Visit https://donate.ucanr.edu/?id=3_16_1_37