Remembering Stephan Megerdichian and His Gardens

Several of us are remembering a neighbor who recently passed away, Stephan Megerdichian Sahaki, with a donation to the Los Angeles Master Gardener program.

Mr. Megerdichian loved to garden. In Iran, where he lived until the 1990s, he had rose bushes. In Sherman Oaks, his last home, he had geraniums happily tumbling through the railings of his balcony to brighten the streetscape. It is a tradition in his culture to send huge bouquets of flowers for display at the funeral and the grave. Forgive us, but we have chosen to make a gift in his name to a program that will keep blooming forever.

Master Gardeners in Service to the Community

The Master Gardener program is part of the University of California Cooperative Extension program for Los Angeles County. Offered every spring, the Master Gardener Volunteer Training Program provides intense gardening training to enable volunteers to help low-income residents grow their own food. They learn about organic gardening, growing vegetables, fruits, flowers, shrubs, trees, soils, composting, pests and harvesting.

After their training, the Master Gardeners provide free gardening workshops and give technical expertise to community, school, shelter and senior gardens throughout Los Angeles.

In 2011, the 236 Master Gardeners volunteered 14,909 hours, serving 132,363 low-income gardeners in Los Angeles County at 271 locations including community gardens, school gardens, homeless and battered women’s shelters, senior gardeners and fairs and farmers markets.

University Caliber Knowledge Applied to Your Backyard

The 64 Cooperative Extension offices in California are local “problem-solving centers,” according to the Extension’s Los Angeles County website. They are the “bridge between local issues and the power of UC research.” Their focus ranges from helping farmers (both commercial and backyard) solve pest problems, grow more efficiently, apply smart water-use strategies, promote healthy diets and nutritious foods.

The website offers the home gardener wonderful information including Los Angeles-focused gardening tips and checklists by month, gardening articles on a wide variety of subjects, informational brochures on growing tomatoes, saving water, pruning trees and amending soils.

The Extension also offers classes as part of its Grow LA Victory Garden Initiative. Planning ahead to a bounteous harvest, you can also get involved in the LA County Master Food Preserver Program. This 12-week program teaches you how to use canning, pressure canning, freezing, drying and fermenting to preserve food.

Comments

Know Your Soil For Best Garden Results

I've always taken soil for granted. It was there. You put seeds into it. You put water on it. Plants grow and produce flowers, fruit or vegetables. Gayle Weinstein, author of Xeriscape Handbook; A How-To Guide to Natural, Resource-Wise Gardening , takes a different view: “Soil . . . acts as a highway between life and death, land and atmosphere, plants and animals.” It stores water, air and nutrients and makes it possible for an exchange of elements and chemical reactions to occur, she adds. She describes soil as being animal, vegetable and mineral combined. Here are six tests Gayle recommends for getting to know your soil. Grab a shovel and a quart jar. Dig up two cups of dry soil two-to-six inches deep from the areas you want to test. Gather a glass of water, dish washing detergent and paper towels. A soil pH kit, a meter or litmus paper will be needed for the final test.

Hand-Knit Trellis Now Ready for Climbing Foot-Long Beans

Just as the "June" gloom is starting to burn off, I finished my knitted trellis for the garden. It completely surrounds one of our bamboo tripods, with space at the bottom for tending the romaine lettuces growing within the tripod. It's knit out of nylon twine on US 35 needles. While the nylon has no stretch (the way a wool yarn does), the huge gauge has loads of give. The piece was knit flat with ties attached along one edge. It is tied to the tripod along one leg. One some early samples for a knitted plant trellis, I experimented with lace patterns. They look lovely, but I realized two things. One, once the plants grow up the trellis any knitting pattern is lost. Secondly, the plants and leaves need space to grow in and out of. I used a pattern for a shawl: k1, yo, k2tog and then repeat. I got lost a number of times: the yarn-overs drifted over other stitches on occasion. As this was a speed project that won't be visible ones the beans grow over it, I didn...

Water saving ollas

When you're saving water, the first step is to get the water where it's needed in the most direct way possible. No sprinkler heads rising like swans in a ballet to spew water 18-inches above the ground, splashing sidewalks and gutters. No sprinklers nodding back and forth sending sprays of water as tall as a child. Nope, it's irrigation dripping directly at the base of a stem or water bubbling at dirt-level. You can't get much more direct than an olla (pronounced oy-ya ). In the irrigation world, an olla is a clay pot, usually with a round bottom and a longish thin neck that is planted in the dirt next to plants that need water. The dirt is mounded around the pot so that only the end of the neck shows. Water is poured into the opening to fill the buried pot. The clay absorbs water that in turn is absorbed by the dry earth surrounding it. The plant gets a slow steady supply of water. Because the pot is buried, there's little exposure to the air and evaporatio...

The Fink Farm Dirt

Search This Blog