Cornell Cooperative Extension Community Horticulture

Check out this piece full of some  gardening aim to help you reach carbon neutral. It is from the latest issue of Public Garden:

A pdf of this article is here

NPR’s science Friday has a video of late blight in action:

http://www.sciencefriday.com/videos/watch/10241

An exciting new professional development opportunity on volunteerism for  ALL Extension staff — Everyone Ready®.

Volunteers are vital to all Extension programs. Volunteers allow Extension staff to expand the capacity of programming in a county and they help to develop the social capital of our communities. They have been vital to our success in the past and will become even more important in the months and years to come!

I hope that you will personally enroll in Everyone Ready® and will encourage and support staff in your state to actively participate in Everyone Ready®.

Everyone Ready® is an online volunteer management training program developed by Energize Inc.   There is no cost to states or individuals (although the cost ordinarily for states is $12-18,000 per year and the cost to individuals is $495 per year).

Each month a new volunteerism topic is introduced – either as an Online Seminar or as a Self-Instruction Guide. In addition, Extension staff will have access to e-Volunteerism: The Electronic Journal of the Volunteer Community (a $40 value) and will be able to purchase volunteerism resources from the Energize online bookstore with a 20% discount. New topics are introduced on the third Monday of each month but will be archived for Extension use for the 3 years of the grant.

Register for Everyone Ready®

Please encourage every Extension paid staff member that works with volunteers to enroll and actively participate in the Everyone Ready® program over the next 3 years.  To do so, they may enroll at anytime.  The introductory online seminar will be offered for 30 days beginning on Sept. 21.  Modules will be archived and be accessible after the initial posting.

To register go to www.4-h.org/volunteerism.   Go to the Everyone Ready® section and click on Register.  Once they have completed the registration information, they will receive an email confirmation and will then have a user name and password that they can use to enter the “Extension” Everyone Ready® page.  This contains a number of useful tools and resources as well as the link to the “real” Everyone Ready® page.  They will be able to use the user name and password to access the online seminar or self-instruction guide each month beginning on the third Monday of the month.  Once they are registered they will also receive two email messages a month reminding them of the current and upcoming topic.

Once they are registered, encourage them to review the content on the www.4-h.org/volunteerism page as well as the “Extension” Everyone Ready page that they can access with their user name and password.

Time Commitment:  The monthly online modules will take about one hour to complete.  In addition, staff may want to review some related articles in the e-Volunteerism Journal or read some additional information available through the Energize Inc. web site.  In addition, we hope that staff  will think about ways to engage in conversations about the monthly volunteerism topic at county/unit staff meetings, regional/district  youth development meetings, and/or other staff gatherings.   State specialists may want to organize learning circles or cohorts around this initiative.

In Preparation for Launch:  The National 4-H Learning Priority Team on Volunteerism has spent the last two years developing a Volunteerism Rubric/Syllabus, Self-Assessment Tool, and Personal Professional Development Plan.  These resources can be found on the same web site – www.4-h.org/volunteerism.  Encourage each staff member to download these three resources.  Please read through the rubric which contains competencies staff need to be effective in working with volunteers.  The rubric includes learning outcomes, suggested readings, and learning activities.  The Everyone Ready® modules as well as the Volunteerism for the Next Generation Fact Sheets (VNG) are listed in the rubric. Once staff have reviewed the rubric, encourage them to complete the Self-Assessment to see which areas they might strengthen as a part of their own professional development.  Then they can transfer that information over to the Personal Professional Development Plan and list the Everyone Ready® modules and corresponding VNG Fact Sheets that they would like to utilize in the next year.  We do encourage participation in all Everyone Ready® modules.

Sheri Seibold, Extension Specialist, 4-H Youth Development at the University of Illinois is serving as the Everyone Ready Point Person.  If you have questions please email Sheri at sseibold@illinois.edu or phone her at 217.333.9290. Please encourage enrollment  today at www.4-h.org/volunteerism.

A new Web site developed by University of Missouri Extension provides information on gardening for people with physical limitations, such as arthritis:

http://agrability.missouri.edu/gardenweb/

www.gardenprofessors.com

We are university professors with expertise in the science behind various aspects of urban horticulture, arboriculture, gardening, and landscaping.  Every weekday one of us posts a commentary on something we feel passionately about – and sometimes it’s controversial.  Follow our debates, and leave your own comments as well!   This is an ideal spot for MGVs to peruse archives or pose questions, as we are all firmly committed to science-based information.

Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions –   ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Linda Chalker-Scott
Associate Professor and Extension Urban Horticulturist
WSU Puyallup Research and Extension Center
2606 W. Pioneer
Puyallup, WA 98371

Phone:  (253) 445-4542

Part writer, filmmaker, musician, photographer and best-selling author, Adam Leith Gollner is a true latter-day Renaissance man – and he’s coming to Ithaca. Gollner will deliver the second annual Elizabeth E. Rowley lecture, “The Fruit Hunters” in the Statler Hall auditorium on Wednesday, September 30, at 7:30 p.m. The presentation is part of Cornell Plantations’ annual free fall lecture series. A book sale and signing will follow the lecture.

Gollner’s lecture will focus on the fascinating subject of his recent book, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Obsession, Commerce and Adventure. A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and winner of the McAuslan First Book Award, The Fruit Hunters was described in a Sunday Times Book Review by author Mary Roach as “lustrous and exhilarating… jaw dropping… Adam Leith Gollner possesses a talent as rare and exotic as a coconut pearl…” The complete Times review, and more information about Gollner, can be found on his website, www.adamgollner.com

For his lecture at Cornell, Gollner will share stories about the otherworldly fruits he encountered while traveling to the Amazon, Borneo, the Seychelles and tropical West Africa. He will also discuss the idea of biophilia, the love of life that is behind fruit hunters’ obsessive quests. Attendees can expect to come away with a greater understanding of the intense relationships that bind different species of plants and humans, as well as a sense of the limitlessness and fragility of the biodiversity surrounding us.

Click here to find out about other lectures in the fall series

You, your staff and volunteers might be interested in this 2009 research update from Cornell’s Human Development:

Aging, Volunteerism and Environmental Sustainability: A New Human Development Extension Program

Linda P. Wagenet describes a new program for older adults that addresses the critical intersection of mounting environmental problems and a growing population of older adults. [Video & slides]

see other research updates here

Register today for the CCE Agriculture & Food Systems In-service.

It is Tuesday Nov 10 through Thursday Nov 12 at the Clarion Hotel in Ithaca.

See this pdf for a list of session for Horticulture educators. And you need to stay though Thursday because the scoop on bed bugs is going to be very helpful in addressing all those questions that will come in…they are in the news (see NYTimes)

With this pdf in hand click  here to register for the in-service.

Their blog site here offers more about the in-service but it is really hard to navigatewhich is why I made you the pdf.

We really need Horticulture to be a part of this yearly in-service. That will only happen if our 70 plus county horticulture educators attend. Register today or let me know what is holding you back.

here are details

Still time for some growing this fall…

From Fine Gardening e-news

by Terry Ettinger

If you dread the annual fall leaf-raking marathon, I have good news for you: Raking and collecting leaves every autumn is a tradition without scientific basis. Research has proven that mowing leaves into your lawn can improve its vigor, and observation shows that unraked leaves in planting beds don’t smother shade-tolerant perennials.

Based upon research at several universities, the organic matter and nutrients from leaves mown into lawn areas has been proven to improve turf quality.

Full article here