Cornell Cooperative Extension Community Horticulture

From the National Gardening Association http://www.garden.org/home

This article with images can be found at: http://www.ngagardenshop.com/campaigns/show/3619

The National Arbor Day Foundation has recently completed an extensive updating of U.S. Hardiness Zones based upon data from 5,000 National Climatic Data Center cooperative stations across the continental United States.

Find it at: http://arborday.org/media/zones.cfm

This is an interesting development. The Province of Prince Edwards Island, Canada will be requiring retailers to keep certain pesticides behind the counter and only a trained employee can dispense them.

See the full article at

 http://www.cbc.ca/canada/prince-edward-island/story/2007/01/25/pesticide-control.html

The latest edition can be found at: http://www.nysaes.cornell.edu/pp/extension/tfabp/newslett.shtml

The link to the site is:

http://www.hort.cornell.edu/department/faculty/wmiller/bglannuals/

You will find links for both general trial information, as well as specific performance data and photographs for the past three seasons. New this year…we have added a recognition system including “Best Overall” and “Best in Category” titles. Check it out!

Bill Miller
&
“The Crew”
Melissa Kitchen, Stephanie Whitehouse, Cheni Filios, Maria Stager

FYI: New Online Course from USDA SARE program:

We are excited to inform you about SARE’s new National Continuing Education Program in Sustainable Agriculture, an online course for Extension and other agricultural professionals.

The course provides a detailed introduction to sustainable agriculture and what it means for farmers, ranchers and communities. Perhaps most important, it explains how sustainable concepts and principles relate to the roles of educators as they try to improve farming and ranching systems.

Learn more at www.sare.org/coreinfo/ceprogram.htm.

In keeping with a 1994 congressional mandate requiring SARE and Extension to train all new agents in sustainable agriculture, we’d like you to encourage your Extension colleagues to take this free, user-friendly, self-paced course. Completing the course should help agents:

• Work even more effectively with clients
• Develop research and education programs that address agricultural sustainability
• Adapt models that worked well for others into programming
• Earn continuing education credits (Certified Crop Advisers only)

The course is presented in an interactive, Web-based format and includes a variety of activities, real-life examples and links to other sites offering information, resources, and assistance to help agents in their work. The course is self-paced so participants can complete it on their own schedules. Â

“Sustainable Agriculture: Basic Principles and Concept Overview” is the first course in a series that will cover subjects such as agroecology, strategic marketing and more. Learn more at www.sare.org or contact us. We have a promotional flyer we’d be glad to send upon request.

- Jill Auburn, SARE director/National Program Leader for Sustainable Ag, jauburn@csrees.usda.gov
- Kim Kroll, SARE associate director, kkroll@sare.org

Cornell Vegetable Varieties for Gardens makes it into the Detroit News…

Saturday, January 13, 2007

By Jeff Ball: The Yardener

While there used to be many good reasons to have a vegetable garden in the back yard, now there is only one.

Years ago, one grew vegetables to save money. It was cheaper to grow your own in most cases. We grew our own 20 years ago because we wanted fresh organic produce free of the pesticides found on most vegetables and fruits in the grocery store. We had our own veggie patch because we wanted fresh. Most produce in the grocery store came from Florida or California.

All those reasons have disappeared. You don’t save much money growing your own any more. You can get very fresh organic fruits and vegetables at the many farmers markets that have popped up all over southeastern Michigan.

So why do I have a vegetable garden? There is still one reason for me to keep planting that vegetable patch each spring. I can still grow vegetables that taste better than anything I can buy at the farmers market. Yes, I get fresh and organic, but it is that taste and that mind-blowing flavor that I can’t get any other way.

Unfortunately, there has always been a major problem finding the varieties of each vegetable that will in fact taste better than the produce at the market. The reality is that every variety of tomato sold as seed or as a seedling does not grow equally well in every state in the union.

Every variety has a preferred region where it will grow to its genetic potential. Only in that preferred geographic area will it have its most outstanding flavor, its highest level of nutritional value, and grow with the most vigor reducing chances of disease and insect attack.

The problem is that no one will tell you which of the 400-plus varieties of tomatoes for sale in this country will be happiest growing in southern Michigan. In the seed catalogs, all varieties are described as totally wonderful and all taste terrific, thank you very much.

Most experienced veggie growers will tell you that it takes years and years of testing many different varieties of each vegetable to find the “best” varieties for their garden; the varieties that taste the best. That testing process might have been fun 30 years ago when folks had more time to play around with, but with today’s time pressures, that approach to finding the best varieties is ridiculous. Someone needs to tell us which is best.

Now there is a program that promises to give us that valuable information in the next few years. Called the Vegetable Varieties Project For Gardeners, this Web site is run by the folks in the Horticulture Department of Cornell University, www.veg varie ty.cce.cornell.edu.

You register on the free site giving your state and county. Then you are free to rate any varieties of any vegetable you have grown in your garden. More than 1,300 gardeners from 40 states have registered so far and have offered thousands of ratings.

Lori Bushway, the director of the project, says, “Now that the software is in shape, we are working to register hundreds of thousands of gardeners, offering their geographically based ratings of the thousands of varieties of vegetables that are out there. Then we will have a very exciting and valuable database.”

What that will mean is when you want to find the best cucumber for Michigan, you can go to the Cornell site and get the name or names of those varieties of cucumber that other Michiganders have found to be superior in taste. You can read their opinions. You also can find those varieties that did not do so well.

You can get data for bush cucumbers as opposed to spreading cucumbers. You can find out which are best for pickles and which are best for salads. What this program does is reduce the chances of your making a mistake in choosing the varieties of cucumber in your Michigan garden.

But we need lots of Michigan gardeners registered for this project. So I hope all of you veggie growers out there will join this project and help build the database of what are the best varieties of veggies to grow in Michigan.

No more trial and error stuff for me. I want to get it right the first time, and in a few years, I will be able to plan my garden with the confidence that all my veggies will have outstanding taste.

The Yardener Jeff Ball, a Metro Detroit free-lance writer, has authored eight books on gardening and lawn care. You can visit his yard care Web site at www.yardener.com, and his blog at http://gardener yardener.blogspot.com. E-mail him at jeffball@usol.com.

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007701130403

A recent article in the Journal of Extension by Cornell’s Marcia Eames-Sheavly and others.

Abstract: Developed as a new model for youth engagement, the Children’s Garden Consultant Program aimed to encourage youth voice and involve youth to the fullest extent possible in the design and programming of children’s gardens. Seven youth attended a 3-day event in which they explored approaches to children’s gardens and made recommendations to an adult audience of children’s garden experts and youth development specialists. Surveys, focus groups, and interviews with youth and program organizers illustrated the ways youth benefited from this event. Adults who work with youth can apply the lessons learned to garden-based learning and other settings.

Click here for full article.

An article in the Journal of Extension

Abstract: Knowledge of client preferences is important when designing continuing education programs. Extension professionals surveyed 131 Master Gardener volunteers in El Paso County, Colorado to guide future programs. Results showed they are highly interested in continuing education events, especially in improving diagnostic skills. Master Gardeners are also interested in learning about local ecology, home gardening skills, and home landscapes through lectures, field trips, and hands-on activities. One-time or regular monthly events held on weekday mornings and afternoons are most popular, especially October through May. When these guidelines were used to design continuing education classes, actual attendance was similar to predicted attendance.

Click here for full article.
Do you think if we surveyed NYS Master Gardener Volunteers would could expect similar results?

Americans get quite a bit of information from the Internet, and if recentsurveys are any indication, they also seem to spend quite a bit of time browsing around the web as part of their day. This 42-page report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project released in November 2006 confirms that Americans also tend to use the Internet as a way to research various scientific subjects and related news items. The report was jointly conducted with the assistance of the San Francisco-based Exploratorium, and revealed that fully 40 million Americans use the Internet as their “primary source of news and information about science.” The report contains a number of other interesting findings, including the observation that 87% of online users have used the Internet to look up the meaning of a scientific concept, answer a specific science question, or check the accuracy of a scientific fact. The report will certainly be very useful to science educators and those concerned with information science and related topics.

For the full 42 page pdf click here.