Master Gardeners Welcome Five New Apprentices

Trainees Melissa Green, Jacqueline Miller, Amy Strong, Donna Krempasky, and Suzie Cloud passed their final exams on March 4, 2021 and were welcomed into the apprenticeship phase of their training by the Penn State Master Gardeners of Clinton County. Finishing Basic Training and passing the final exam are important milestones in the process of earning certification as a Master Gardener.

The new apprentices have a variety of gardening interests.

• Both Melissa Green and Jacqueline Miller are beekeepers interested in native plants and environmentally responsible gardening.
• Donna Krempasky focuses on houseplants. During basic training she shared photos of one of her more unusual houseplants, a Brazilian Walking Iris (Neomarica sp.), when its purple and white flowers opened in February.
• Amy Strong is interested in forest gardening and nature photography. She would like to use her graphic design skills to help promote Master Gardener activities.
• Suzie Cloud enjoys diagnosing plant problems and is looking forward to sharing her knowledge of composting and herbaceous plants.

Basic training is usually held at the Penn State Extension Office in Lock Haven from October through March. However, the pandemic forced the closure of Extension offices statewide and made holding training classes on-site impossible. Undeterred, Master Gardeners across the state made the switch to virtual basic training using Zoom.

Clinton County's basic training classes began in October of 2020 with weekly webinars on botany, plant diseases, pruning, vegetables, perennials, native plants, turfgrass, plant propagation, weeds, houseplants, and several other topics. Trainees met virtually via zoom on Tuesday evenings to discuss the webinars and reading assignments, ask questions, review chapter quizzes, and meet already certified Master Gardeners and learn about their experiences.

After completing six months of basic training, participants prepared for and passed the final exam, enabling them to become Master Gardener apprentices. The apprenticeship is the third and final step in earning Master Gardener certification. Apprentices must complete a minimum of 50 hours of volunteer service working with and learning from certified Master Gardeners on a variety of projects designed to provide home gardening education, information and resources to the public. The pandemic made it necessary to put some of those projects on hold while others, which could be done virtually or conducted within COVID guidelines, continued.

The new apprentices are now preparing for Garden Hotline duty, where they respond to home gardening questions called in to the hotline phone at 570-858-0198 or sent in via email to clintonmg@psu.edu. They are also beginning work on newspaper articles for the Backyard Gardening column in The Record and the Growing Tips column in The Lock Haven Express. Apprentice Melissa Green is working with Master Gardeners and fellow beekeepers Charles Kincaid and James Randall, to create a series of articles focused on the basics of beekeeping and the importance of native plants to bees and other pollinators. The apprentices will work with certified Master Gardeners to maintain and enhance the demonstration gardens at the Clinton County Fairgrounds, which they use to share information about the essential elements of pollinator-friendly gardening and the value of composting through public demonstrations. The five apprentices will also work as a team to complete a class project focused on developing a design and making native plant recommendations for installation along a local hiking trail.

Although the Master Gardener plant sale, usually held in May, has been postponed due to COVID-19, the apprentices are working with Master Gardeners on tentative plans for a September plant sale that will feature native trees, shrubs, and perennials that are well suited for planting in the fall. They also hope to be able to hold workshops in the fall since the annual Garden Sense Symposium, usually held in January, had to be postponed as well.

With the addition of five new apprentices, the Master Gardener group in Clinton County now has twenty-two active volunteers, the most ever, and it continues to grow.