Garden workshop to be held in Ovid – FingerLakes1.com Archive

Beat down those winter blahs and start getting ready for spring! The Seneca County Cornell Cooperative Extension (SCCCE) Master Gardeners have organized a day of speakers, food and gardening information to help you prepare for the 2014 gardening season. The workshop will be held Saturday, March 7th at the Ovid Fire Department, 2136 Brown Street (just off of Route 414/96) in Ovid from 8:30 AM to 2:30 PM. Price for the workshop is only $30.00. There will be plenty of coffee, tea and refreshments for the morning break and a homemade buffet lunch at noon. Participants will also receive handouts, free seeds and valuable gardening information from some very knowledgeable speakers. There will also be a question and answer session with Master Gardener volunteers and door prizes. Note that this is a different location from previous years, but the same great homemade lunch and speakers! The first workshop, “Twelve Herbs for Flavor and Medicine” starts at 9:15 AM with Jana Lamboy, a retired plant pathologist from Cornell University and FLCC horticulture professor who grows cut flowers to sell at the Geneva Farmers Market. Jana will discuss kitchen herbs and spices and talk about how they become medicinal when prepared at a higher dose to prevent or treat illness. Learn to blend herbs from the garden for teas, decoctions, tinctures, syrups and vinegars to support your health. After a brief coffee break, “You Rule the Roost” will be presented by Dave Reville, a retired Cornell Cooperative Extension Educator in Horticulture who has a B.S. degree in Plant Science from Cornell University. Dave will lead a lively discussion involving training plants the right way. Pruning guidelines via visuals and plant examples will highlight the presentation as will ample time for questions. You are encouraged to bring your questions and pictures of your unruly plants in need of “discipline”! A lunch break, featuring homemade soups, fresh salad, bread and great homemade desserts is followed by “Composting,” presented by Linda Groves, a Master Gardener with Cornell Cooperative Extension in Monroe County. She has taken extra training to become a Master Composter. Linda will discuss various ways of composting, including simple piles covered with soil, automatic indoor compost machines, and vermicomposting using red worms to break down food scraps. Ideas will be shared about the ways to speed up composting, the proportions of items to use, differences in compost types, and types of containers. The day concludes at 2 PM with a Q&A session, door prizes and evaluations. All monies raised are used to support the Master Gardener program at SCCCE, a not-for-profit educational system. Interact with other gardeners and start preparing for your spring gardening projects. Registration by March 3rd is encouraged as space is limited. For more information or to register call Seneca County CCE at 315-539-9251 or visit our website at http://www.senecacountycce.org. Registration is also available on line at https://reg.cce.cornell.edu/letsgarden3_245