Good morning, good morning, good morning. Welcome, welcome, welcome. We have our OLSU Extension Master Gardner in here with us today we have Kennedy McCall. Kennedy, how you doing today? I'm good?
How are you this morning?
Wonderful? Wonderful, wonderful. You're an AG educator. What are we going to be educated upon today?
Yeah, so today we're going to talk about Master Gardners. So that's kind of like a club similar to four H or OHSE within OSU Extension and that falls under my eg umbrella. So I'm kind of the facilitator of that.
What's happening.
Yeah, So we are getting ready to start our twenty twenty five Master Gardner courses. So those will start January twenty first. Basically, what it is is it's a ten course class and we'll have one a week and they will run through April first, and I can give you some more information if you like about that. Yeah. So they're on Tuesdays from nine thirty to three at Tri County Tech out on Nowater Road. Easy to find, yeah,
very easy to find. Every Tuesday, we have a class and we have a specialist from Oklahoma State come in and they teach their respective topics, so I can give you that list if you'd like. So we'll go through botany, plant physiology, soil science, plant diseases, vegetables, turf entomology, ornamentals, fruits and nuts, and pesta sites. So each class will cover a different topic. It's pretty extensive, about a four hour long class. We have lunch there at Try County
Tech with our group. So really good information if you're interested in diving deeper into Master Gardeners.
Now, how do we sign up for this?
Yeah, so you can visit our office. We're located right beside Dewey High School. We're just to the west of it. I can give you our address, but it typically won't get you there on.
They'll find it.
Yeah. Yeah, if you know where Dewey High School is, we're just right next door to them. So you can either come into our office and you can give your information to our admin assistant MICHAELA. And then you can pay the fee or you can do that by mail. So this year, our new fee is going to be
one hundred dollars. That gets you the course and then that also pays for a Master Gardener handbook that comes from OSU and that has all the information plus some in it and then if you're returning, it's thirty dollars. And we have a lot of returning members. They say some that have taken it fifteen years say they learned something new every single time, So it's a good thing to retake over and over.
A lot of folks just follow their passion and that's where it lies.
Yeah, that's right. And just to explain a little bit more about Master Gardeners, I mentioned that it was kind of an affiliation with OSU, So a lot of different counties in Oklahoma have this group. But you don't just take the courses and then you're done. So you'll take it. We will have a final test following the ten courses, and then you become a part of the membership. And basically what you do is you serve volunteer hours. So
we do things like an annual plant sell. We have the Garden of Eton if you've ever heard of that, where we donate produce. We do all kinds of things. Library beds if you've been to the Bartlesville Public Library, we take care of those beds. So it's a really fun group. Requires some volunteer hours, but you'll fly through them. And it's a lot of fun.
Now this does sound like fun.
Yeah, it's a lot of fun, really good group, close knit group. So I think anyone that wants to join and likes gardening would enjoy it.
Do you have a presence online where folks can read up about this?
We do in Yeah, you can either visit our OSU extension. You can just google OSU Extension, Washington County and they can find all of our information there, or if you're on Facebook, you can look up Master Gardeners of Washington County and we keep all that information there as well.
Super what else is going on?
Yeah, that's about all Master Gardeners have going on, right a lot? It sounds like a lot.
Yeah.
We actually just finished the year and we have our end of Your banquet on Thursday, so we just wrapped everything up and then this class kind of kicks off the new year for us. After that, we jump right into our annual plant cell, which is held at the Washington County Fairgrounds. Yeah, very popular sales and get there early, sells out past Yeah, that'll be the last Saturday in April. And then after that we just dive into the demo beds at the Extension. Garden, We take over the library beds,
start working on everything. But it kind of takes getting past this winter period to get back into the gardening routine.
So you get back into the fun part of getting dirty. Yeah, exactly.
Gotta let all the cold weather get by first, that's right, Kennedy.
I want to thank you for being with this.
Yeah, thank you very much for having me and look forward to having you guys. Sign up.
Alrighty, thanks