Welcome to Baltimore County
Master Gardeners!
We bring together people with passion, energy, and a desire to preserve and improve our landscape and the food we put on the table. We’ve been enlightened by 40+ hours of classes on horticulture from experts at the University of Maryland Cooperative Extension, which shares the university’s research through the master gardener program. In return, we volunteer to educate others in our community.
We’re an eclectic group. There are artists, writers, educators, a former school principal, and an engineer among us, to name a few. One of our members is passionate about native plants, another is a bee keeper. A third is involved in the stewardship of Marshy Point Nature Center. A fourth feeds scraps of food to worms in her basement, and harvests their fertile soil. Our first class of gardeners graduated in December 2007, following a groundswell of support for our own county chapter. For more than a decade, county gardeners trained and worked in Baltimore City or one of the surrounding counties.
In 2008, our intern year, members who completed the master gardener class began a variety of projects to give back. They include showing senior citizens how to make salad gardens for their kitchens, so they can pluck fresh greens for dinner every night, helping elementary and middle schools conserve energy by turning “green,” and planting nutritious veggies on school grounds that kids can harvest and cook into scrumptious meals! In the future, we’ll be organizing a speakers’ bureau and proclaiming the benefits of composting and Bay wise native plants to every corner of our county.
Each of us continues to volunteer for projects that ignite individual passions. But this year also promises to see the first of major projects we start as a group. In 2009, Baltimore County Master Gardeners will help spearhead a statewide initiative to teach people to grow their own edible gardens, county by county. At the same time, we have chosen five projects where members wish to devote special energy. They are: Hampton Mansion, Cromwell Valley, Marshy Point, the Irvine Center, and Oregon Ridge.
The possibilities are exciting. Why not join us?