2017 ASHS Annual Conference

We developed this advanced educational program as our 2016 public education theme. We provided Extension Master Gardener volunteers with content and background for teaching home gardeners about responsible, thoughtful water use in yards and gardens that will maximize plant health and minimize negative impacts on water resources. It is the first comprehensive statewide program created for the Grow-U Education Program, a partnership of University of Minnesota Extension and the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum that strives to enhance knowledge and advance skills related to teaching research-based horticulture, gardening, and sustainable landscape practices. We developed a comprehensive package of teaching tools and materials specifically for Master Gardeners. This package, housed on a Google Site, consists of four Powerpoint presentations - a full presentation, a presentation on trees and shrubs, one on gardens, and one on lawns - giving volunteers the option of customizing the topic for their audience, event and timeframe. Additional teaching tools include speaker’s notes, handouts and a facilitator’s guide; hands-on class activities; class evaluations and record-keeping forms; posters for county and state fairs; a press release for local promotion, and a brochure. We also wrote five Extension publications, ten blog posts, and presented 13 lunchtime webinars for Master Gardeners throughout the growing season on related critical topics surrounding best practices in landscape water management. We developed a 2 ½ hour “teach-the-teacher” session for volunteers to learn how to effectively use and teach the content. In these sessions, we cover information on soil and its impact on water movement and availability to plants including demonstrating soil texture hands-on activities, and instruction and considerations about watering gardens, lawns, and trees and shrubs. We presented a total of four teach-the-teacher sessions: three sessions at our Master Gardener state conference, 24-25 June 2016, and one session in Cloquet, MN, on 20 October 2016 at our NW regional meeting. After each training, attendees received access to the Water Wisely Google site and signed pledge forms committing to teach a number of sessions, as they felt able, in their communities. Of the 141 total attendees at these four sessions, 117 committed to teaching a total of 197 sessions in 2017. Attendees also completed evaluations. Of the completed evaluations, 91% rated the training sessions as excellent. At the time of this abstract, Master Gardeners have taught and evaluated three sessions: two full sessions, and one on trees and shrubs only. Evaluations from the 81 home gardeners who have attended these sessions reflect knowledge gains of 25% (lawns), 40% (trees and shrubs), and 87% (soils, gardens) and plans to change landscape practices of 22% (lawns), 26% (trees and shrubs, gardens) and 38% (soils). As volunteers use the materials to teach Water Wisely, their input about the teaching materials is tracked on a Google Spreadsheet enabling us to make revisions to improve the teaching tools and content.