Mississippi State Extension Horticulture Outreach: A History of Southern Gardening, Poster Board #254

One of the most visible outreach efforts produced by the Mississippi State University Extension Service is the Southern Gardening program. Though television, radio and newspaper columns, Southern Gardening has been providing garden and landscape information to Mississippians for 27 years. The goal of Southern Gardening is to introduce new plants, educate gardeners about plant uses and celebrate the fun of gardening. Seeing new plants or learning how other home gardeners use plants in the landscape is of interest to the home gardener. The newspaper column and radio program were first produced in 1985, followed by the television program in 1996. All have been produced 52 weeks a year since 1996. In the beginning the newspaper column was called “In Mississippi Gardens” and the radio program was called “Gardening Mississippi Style. Both featured topics of vegetable gardening and landscape horticulture interest. In 1996 with the addition of the television program the name was changed to “Southern Gardening” for all three products. The Southern Gardening products are distributed to appropriate outlets across Mississippi. The potential consumption of Southern Gardening makes this effort one of the most visible outreach efforts for Mississippi State University Extension Service. Twelve television and cable outlets air the two-minute Southern Gardening television segments as a regular weekly feature with an audience of up 500,000 viewers. Southern Gardening is also a weekly feature of the “Farmweek” television program on Mississippi Public Broadcasting and satellite nationwide on RFD-TV. The newspaper column is a regular weekly feature in as many as two dozen newspapers. It is also published on an intermittent basis in many others. The total weekly readership is more than two million. The daily two-minute Southern Gardening radio programs are a regular feature on 11 stations across the state.