By Mike and Karen Lance

We are Mike and Karen Lance, and this is about our experiences as First Year UC Master Gardeners, Class of 2025. We went through the training together and were impressed with the depth and breadth of the materials and the great instructional staff. Among many other things, we learned that we’ve been doing a lot of things wrong in the garden! An unexpected joy is the comradery we have developed with our classmates and other “CoCoMGs” that we’ve met along the way.

We have volunteered at the Water Conservation Garden in El Cerrito, Our Garden in Walnut Creek, and much closer to home, the Rivertown Demonstration Garden in Antioch at the County Fairgrounds, and we enjoy the attributes of each of them. Below are where we have/are spending most of our CoCoMG hours these days.

Rivertown Demonstration Garden -  Our Tuesday mornings are spent helping around the garden. We have met many new friends there, have been able to use our training, as well as continuing to learn new areas such as succulents, maintaining the orchard, growing California Natives, and composting in place. Everyone there is friendly and very happy to share their knowledge and experience with us. It feels nice to belong somewhere and we feel like we are contributing to the community.

Sharing Cherries – We were asked to rework our final group presentation about Growing Cherry Trees from training into a talk at the weekly Our Garden Talks series. Given the PowerPoint deck we had from class, and considering no PowerPoint at the garden, we created a multi-page flip chart walking through cherry tree selection, pollination, cultivars and root stocks, planting, watering, pruning, and so on. We practiced each part and talked about what worked and what needed a reworking. Lastly, we put together a handout for attendees along with a QR code to access the presentation and references. We were surprised to see so many people come for the talk, especially on a chilly morning! Afterwards we received a lot of kind words, and we felt like we had truly done something well.

New Volunteer Training - We have joined the team of people working to help train the new “Class of 2026” as our way of giving back to the program. It’s wonderful working with people we know and with CoCoMGs that we haven’t met before, everyone is happy to work together and share knowledge. Class is Thursday meetings on Zoom and in person weekly on Saturdays. Since the Saturday training is at the Rivertown Demonstration Garden, we know the garden and feel like we can step right in and get to work. As we get to know the new trainees, it is hard to believe that we have only been involved in this program for a little over a year.

Ongoing Training – We have attended several trainings held at Our Garden, and it is nice to go there and see familiar faces. Days start with hugs and a chance to catch up on what others are doing, then we dive into instruction in some area of gardening. Learning new things is always nice, but sometimes it turns out that we had heard something before and had forgotten we had heard it. Relearning things can also be a pleasure!

Together, we enjoy all the time we have spent learning new concepts, working with others, and contributing to this community of UC Master Gardeners. We hope you too enjoy your time here as much as we do!

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