Garden Seminar, Alameda Master Gardeners

I Went to a Fall & Winter Gardening Seminar held by the Alameda County Master Gardeners at the Merritt College Horticulture building on Saturday.

I attended three seminars: 

• Food Forestry: Part A Fruit Trees
• the Food Forestry: Part B Gardening Like a Forest
• A Year in the Garden 

There were nine options to select from for the three time slots, some of them sounded like other seminars/classes I've taken, but there were at least two I wish I could have gone to as well - there was an herb class that sounded interesting, as well as one on Australian Plants.

'Food Forestry Part A: Fruit Trees' was by Eric Beeghly and was pretty informative. I learned about planting fruit trees in clumps, which I had seen done at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center, and at a couple houses on Garden tours in the last year. I got a lot of good ideas for varieties. He went through each type of fruit tree and discussed varietals that were his favorites to use, and whether they would work in a sunset 16/17 zone or a 14. He kind of ran out of time at the end, but gave a good talk, and showed us some pruning examples on branches he had brought in.

John Valenzuela (member of the California rare fruit growers group) presented 'Food Forestry Part B: Garden Like a Forest.' He had a less technical approach to his talk that seems like it was supposed to inspire us, but I spent most of the time sorting through his inspiration for the useful bits. There were quite a few, names of interesting plants, places where people were doing this, and names of other horticulturalists that were active in this community, but you really had to catch them. He did have a fantastic handout with lots of resources. I wish his talk either would have been a little more how-to based. The talk was focused on understory planting, and farming on the edges of forest, or recreating that environment, having large trees ( canopy) that creates a windbreak, the low dwarf fruiting trees, then a shrub layer, herbaceous layer (veggies), surface layer (strawberries), root layer (root veggies) and a vine layer. He showed us lots of interesting ways this had been done, and brought in a lot of fruits to taste. I guess part of this could be the intensive veggie gardening, but I wasn't super-clear on if it was considered something different or if it was the same technique.

The third talk I attended was by Wendy Johnson, author of “Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate.” She was instrumental at Green Gulch Farms(which is the the dragon's gate), Edible Schoolyard program in Berkeley and the Marin College Indian Valley Organic Farm in Novato. We got a handout from a book published in 1913, that was a 'what to do in your SF garden month by month,' and she told us that she doesn't take any gardening book seriously that was published after 1940, because it focuses to heavily on chemical treatment. I thought she might be nuts, and had just not read some of the more recent books that have been published, especially the organic gardening books. She started off kind with a kind of acceptance speech thing that lasted about 20 minutes. And I was kind of regretting selecting that class, but once she dove into the slide show of the three projects she'd been a part of, it got more interesting, and once she got into the solstice and cross-holiday planting guidelines, I was really interested, and kind of started to understand why she made her comment at the beginning about not taking any gardening book seriously that was written before 1940.


There were also plants from the Merritt college nursery for sale (where I bought a new Cuphea), and books for sale through the Master Gardeners program. I thumbs through Wendy Johnson's book Gardening at the Dragons Gate, and it looks really interesting. This event as a whole was interesting and informative and totally worth the $35 registration fee. I'll be going again next year for sure.