May is a great time for gardeners in Centre County, with unique garden sales and opportunities to work on that green thumb. And what if growing an annual garden could mean something? What are the ways that gardening impacts the larger Centre County region, from exhausted families to struggling ecosystems to widespread food insecurity?
The following are a few resources that can help turn your garden into a gift that keeps giving.
Penn State Extension
Master Gardener’s of Centre County
Molly Sturniolo and her team of master gardeners are an invaluable resource for Pennsylvania gardeners. Sturniolo works for Penn State Extension and oversees the annual Garden Fair and Plant Sale. She also coordinates Centre County’s master gardener program, which is offered in 58 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties.
Penn State Extension is an important link between the university and the state. Without continuing education that it offers, gardening can be an impossible task. The landscape changes each year, including weather patterns that impact disease developments and insects that move in and can cause problems in different ways. Gardeners need to know the latest developments and research, and master gardeners are a first-stop resource.
“A master gardener is someone who wants to work with the public and provide horticultural outreach,” Sturniolo notes.
The horticultural projects by Penn State Extension are diverse. The “Home Grown” project is another way the extension gives to the community. Once a year, the Extension program goes to the State College Food Bank and takes live plants and distributes them to members of the food bank. It also teaches plant care.
Sturniolo says that the impact is profound with international communities, especially since growing food can provide a sense of home.
“We get a lot of people who don’t speak English and had gardens in their home countries, but they are struggling to grow plants in a new climate or did not have access to plants,” she says.
The biggest outreach the Extension program does is the Garden Fair and Plant Sale, an event entirely run by volunteers. The event will be held May 21 at the Ag Progress Days site. This year, the extension has “kicked it up a notch,” and the event is now the second largest plant event in Pennsylvania with more than 5,000 plants for sale. The event also features multiple educational opportunities, including two talks by celebrity gardener George Wiegal.
Helpful Tip: Solving the mysteries
Visit the Extension program and ask any questions about your gardening mysteries. A bug you can’t identify? A fungus destroying a plant? Penn State Extension offers free counseling. Check out its Web site and bring your toughest questions. The Extension program also offers regular educational opportunities from experts in the region. Want to become a master gardener? Classes are offered each fall.
Building a family farm
Starting a garden can be tricky and requires a huge learning curve. How can you get in on the joys of the season if starting takes too much time or if you’ve struggled in the past? Resources such as Wilson Home Farms in State College can make the difference and help kick-start a valuable practice.
“I loved farming. I loved the agriculture,” says Woody Wilson, who graduated from Penn State’s College of Agriculture and worked as farm manager at Tait Farm before founding Wilson Home Farms. In particular, he cared about giving people access to fresh, homegrown plants and vegetables. But what he saw again and again was that beginning gardeners would give up very quickly.
“I had to ask: What would keep these people gardening,” he says. “And it really came down to support.”
His goal is to keep people gardening by helping them with the harder aspects of the process: planning, installation, regular maintenance, and education. Without a lot of background knowledge, it can be impossible to have a functioning garden in the first year.
“But with an installation designed around a family’s interest, needs, and free time, I can help people have a producing vegetable garden in their first season,” he says.
And his clients are 95 percent families with young children.
“These are families who care about giving great food to their kids. But families with young children? They literally have no time,” he says.
He also notes that more families are interested in gardening because of the gardening and environmental education in local schools. With a “family farm,” you can grow a giving garden by giving the best product to your friends and family.
“The feeling of being able to walk outside and harvest peas for dinner is so different from going to the store,” Wilson says. “It’s your peas and your salad that grew at your house, and you didn’t have to do that much to make it happen. That’s what inspires me to keep people growing food for themselves.”
Helpful Tips:
Tip 1: “Don’t put too many crops in the same spot. The overgrowth will kill the plants. Pull crops that are crowding out others or at the end of their season.”
Tip 2: Avoiding and treating tomato blight:
• Give your tomatoes adequate spacing — 2.5 feet from each other. They all need space and sun!
• Mulch the soil with straw or black plastic. Soil- born diseases travel when rain splashes soil on the leaves. The plastic keeps the soil from hitting the tomato.
• Prune. Wilson suggests pruning after 2 feet above ground since most soil splashes can’t get that high.
• Prune more! It’s all about air flow. The longer a leaf stays wet, the longer the disease has a chance to spread.
• Treatment. Wilson uses certi ed organic sprays. Copper sulfate and OxiDate kill fungus outbreaks. Serenade, which contains a bacteria that eats fungus, should be sprayed as soon as flowers sprout.
Organic Garden Center
The Organic Garden Center, a family-owned and operated organic garden supply store, has seen a long line of enthusiastic organic gardeners come through their space since it opened in February. Now, with spring actually here, they are ready for the growing season and enjoying the connections with new customers and community members passionate about organic gardening.
The Organic Garden Center is an implant from the Williamsport area. Brian Kinney, part owner, moved to the area with his wife, Gabrielle, to take care of the new store and reach the new market. He says that they were following the growing organic food culture in State College.
“We really saw that there was growing momentum in this area, from the food industry using more farm-to-table models, more CSAs, more organic vendors in the farmers’ markets … we followed the momentum,” he says. He became interested in organic farming through photography. As a food photographer in Philadelphia, he visited a lot of restaurants and saw the different ways people prepared food. That led to some gigs photographing the farms where that food originated.
“I began to feel way more connected to the earth and to my food,” he says.
It was a natural step to join his uncle and brother in the family business with the Organic Garden Center in Williamsport and now with the opening in State College.
And the public response has been positive. He is excited to meet such a strong need in the community. “We’ve met people who were driving all over the state, from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh, to find the organic tools and supplies they needed,” he says. “People act like we’re heroes!”
Part of that warm response is to the educational aspect to their business, a feature in their business model from the very beginning. The store has offered and will continue to offer free classes on a range of gardening subjects. Most classes fill up. The business mission statement reads, “We believe that our success is built upon the education and success of our customers.’
And that education is about “demystifying the process.” Kinney says that, “If we can give access to organic processes, it makes a better community as a whole. It makes us mindful of what we are putting into the ground and what we are putting into the environment.”
Helpful Tip: Organic gardening doesn’t mean weeds and pests
If you care about organic gardening, that doesn’t mean you are stuck with weeds and pests and blight. There are a lot of products that are both organic and effective at dealing with the struggles many face in growing food and flowers each year. Even better, organic products do not endanger the environment, or the people in your garden or eating your food.
Central Pennsylvania Native Plant Festival and Sale
The Central Pennsylvania Native Plant Festival and Sale, this year on May 7 at the Pennsylvania Military Museum in Boalsburg, is a unique opportunity to expand the positive impact of your garden. Adding a few Pennsylvania native plants creates healthier neighborhood ecosystems. Oh, and did we mention that natives can be just downright beautiful?
Diane Albright, co-chair of the sale, disagrees with a common misconception that native plants are “just weeds.” She says, “Really, they are just as beautiful as non-native ornamentals, and they bring so much bird life to your garden!”
A native plant is one that occurs naturally in a particular region, ecosystem, or habitat without direct or indirect human intervention. For North America, a native plant is any species present before the arrival of Europeans.
Native plants have evolved with communities of native insects and animals that benefit from the plants and help keep the plants in check. Non-native, or introduced, plants, such as honeysuckle, tree-of-heaven, and barberry, with no natural enemies can escape home landscapes and become invasive species that grow rampant in fields, forests, and roadsides, throwing the ecosystem off-balance.
When you include native plants in your garden and landscape, you end up contributing to a whole system and seeing direct benefit such as more butterflies. You’ll also see more birds around your home because, in large part, native plants are supporting communities of native insects, and insects — notably caterpillar larvae — are a vital component of bird diets, especially baby birds who need the protein only insects can provide.
“If you have native plants, chances are they support native insects, and the insects, in turn, provide the food for birds and other animals,” Albright says. “It’s all part of the cycle of life.”
Native plants also can be easier to grow. They evolved with and became adapted to the local environment, including rainfall, temperature, and soil conditions of the local ecosystem.
Organizers of the Central Pennsylvania Native Plant Sale are careful to invite vendors who do not harvest directly from the wild but instead propagate native plants in nurseries.
“We use suppliers who are above board,” Albright says. “None of our vendors take plants from the wild, which is unethical, as well as illegal.”
Consider integrating native plants in your landscape this year. Just a few adjustments can create a garden that gives back to the world.
Helpful Tip: Replace or combine ornamental plants with native plants
Instead of forsythia, try a spicebush (Lindera benzoin), which is a host plant for the spicebush swallowtail butterfly. It has yellow flowers in the spring and red berries in the fall. Instead of burning bush (which is becoming invasive), try Eastern Wahoo (Euonymus atropurpurea), a native plant that also gets red leaves in the fall as well as red berries.
Instead of just six-pack annuals, try a pollinator garden. Native perennials such as milkweed, mountain mint, sedums, and Joe Pye can attract butterflies and pollinators and increase the diversity of your garden.
FoodCentres
A direct way to have a giving garden is to give a corner of your plot to FoodCentres, founded by Jessie Pierce and Kevin Sims. Last fall, FoodCentres won the Centre Inspires grant for the project. The aim of FoodCentres is to promote “food literacy” across the region.
“The project is comprehensive, but one piece specifically involves Centre County gardeners,” Pierce says. “You can volunteer some space in your garden. The donation is incredibly easy. We even give you the seedlings for free and harvest it when the time is right!”
All food is used at FoodCentres in Spring Mills and distributed to local food pantries or used in community programing. Food pantries often do not have access to fresh produce because industrial standard refrigeration can be too expensive for a nonprofit’s budget. FoodCentres is building a large refrigerator and freezer for overcoming that problem, which will allow it to give fresh produce that’s in season and essential for a healthy diet.
Community programs will include skill-building and food-based learning projects, including community dinners where everyone cooks together, cooking classes for children, and gardening tutorials.
“We really want to restore a sense of food literacy for Centre County residents,” Pierce says.
Helpful Tip: It doesn’t cost you more work to give food
Visit foodcentres.org for a link to volunteer a corner of your garden for the cause.
