In article , Ann
wrote:

Stephen Henning expounded:

Each state runs their master gardener programs differently. I am not a
master gardener, but know many and even tutored several who were
studying for the master gardner status. In our area the master
gardeners have a number of gardens they maintain for educational
purposes and for the local Penn State campus. They participate in lots
of actual gardening projects for local parks and provide demonstrations
for school children. They go on interesting field trips and have a lot
of information to share with each other. They tend to be cliquish and
identify with each other. They do not sit at tables and answer
questions. They include a cross section of our community including
teachers, nursery and garden center workers, and other gardeners. In
our area there is no waiting list to take classes and we get a lot of
people taking the classes.

The Master Gardener program run by the Massachusetts Horticultural
Society is a serious program too, Stephen, but many people get their
jollies out of ridiculing Master Gardeners. Not around here, they're
known as knowledable advisors, but somewhere they must not be very
effective to have earned this bad reputation.

The reality is that the University of Massachusetts Extension Service,
assessing the master gardeners system as of very little value when it
comes to education, stopped supporting a program that wasted University
resources on what never became more than a social outlet for a very few
amateur gardeners (some knowledgeable most not so much but none
knowledgeable due to a workshop series & volunteer service). Now
volunteer service is praiseworthy, but these volunteers are just about
always lousy sources of horticultural information.

Since the Horticultural Society took over the program, four or five
hundred of their 7,000 members have gone through the process & can now
boast they are Master Gardeners. If they know they did it for social
reasons & to help their Society squeeze more funds from them & to do good
volunteer work as unpaid public garden weeders, then that's respectable
enough. If "graduates" ever believe they're instantly the next best thing
to an arborist then that's a little sad. But I think most people within
the system know perfectly well they joined a club & their "teachers" are
merely clubsters who joined earlier. It's only the occasional individual
impressed by the word "master" but never saw the club in action who
mistakes it for more than it is, a misconception master gardeners may at
worse allow to go uncorrected.

In most states an agricultural college or horticultural system oversees
the program so there's at least an off chance of encountering & learning
from people with educating expertise (it just won't be anyone whose
greatest boast is they're a Master Gardener, i.e., a club volunteer).
Around here that would be Washington State University's extension. With
the right affiliation Master Gardener volunteers will have access to soil
sample testing services for the public or can give tours to enormous worm
bins & do an "educational" show & tell for folks who've never seen a worm
bin.

But the MG system as the University of Massachusetts figured out really is
more suited to garden social clubs & public garden fundraising entities
than it is to educational systems. In the future there are bound to be
more colleges & extensions dropping their affiliations with the program.
If the MG system is to survive into the longterm future as the club it has
always been, it'll probably be increasingly sustained by the volunteers
themselves, perhaps in affiliation with old horticultural clubs as in
Massachusetts. But if the Massachussetts example becomes standard & more &
more university systems ditch the MG as dead weight, this will hardly be
evidence of its value as education.

Does that mean amateurs can't do good work? In some regions Master
Gardeners work side by side with "ordinary" gardeners & other sorts of
garden club members to help sustain roadside gardens, babysit in
children's & youth gardens, work in p-patches that help feed the poor, &
work for free in private & public gardens to keep things weeded &
fertilized & topcoated, very rarely even to help select the plants. So yes
they do good work. They only seem silly when their volunteer service means
they end up sitting at a cardtable at a farmer's market or nursery to
answer gardening questions they never can answer, because they so rarely
have any expertise of any kind, & if one meets the very rare MG who is
very knowledgeable, they got that knowledge elsewhere than the MG system.

Since it is an amateur system it occasionally happens that by sheer luck
in one or another region there are more knowledgeable participants &
instructors than elsewhere, but actual expertise is not a prerequisite, so
it is more likely to be found elsewhere.

And if you find the facts "ridicule" M-G, that would be because YOU don't
value the good volunteer work they do & so have to make up imaginary
values above & beyond the helping hands their club can provide to
underfunded gardens & p-patches that need unpaid laborers to survive.

-paghat the ratgirl
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