Master Gardeners of Cherokee County

CCMG staffed a table at the annual Heritage Days celebration in downtown Murphy. It was a beautiful day, and the sound stages we decorated looked great. Thanks to everyone who came out!

It's the most wonderful time of the year... Harvest time!

The 3rd Annual Fall Display Fundraiser is underway. Once again, proceeds will support the Community Garden in Marble as well as other Master Gardener programs.

Package #1 - $50 2 bundles corn stalks, 1 straw bale, 2 mums, 2 pumpkins (various sizes)

Package#2 - $95 4 bundles corn stalks, 3 straw bales, 4 mums, 5 pumpkins (various sizes)

Combine Packages #1 and #2 for $130

All displays include delivery and set up during the first week of October.

Take down/Haul away is by appointment. You may decide to save the corn for your squirrels and plant your mums. Straw makes excellent mulch. Corn stalks will compost fine. Chickens love to eat pumpkins.

If you’d like us to take care of disposal, you must call with your name, phone #, address and instructions (“Please haul away my straw and pumpkins. Please leave the mums and corn.”)

Order by calling the Cooperative Extension Office at 837-2210.

It is now that time of year that we are pretty safe to plant our crops for this season. The Community Garden is about ready to plant and if you are involved and have a plot....let's git er done!!! At the time of this writing, we hope to know where our plots are so no excuse....let's start playing in the dirt.

But if you have a garden already started at your residence, I am sure you have experienced the first sight of new growings starting to happen. Here are a few pictures of our garden at the house and the mushrooms that are starting to appear on our mushroom logs we prepared last year in the Master Gardener Class. What a delight and rewarding experience to see them come up. Very tasty too.....so if you attended this year in the class and prepared mushroom logs, what a treat you will have coming up. Also, have posted some of the crops we have at the house....asparagus are coming up and have tasted a few and they are delicious. We are also tending our hops by the trellis you see, strawberries growing rapidly and more....enjoy the photos and get in the gear of getting started in planting. Please notice the potted plants....those are the mums we salvaged last year from the mum harvest project. Yes, they survived the winter and starting to grow nicely. Already, trimmed them and ready to go into the ground, or maybe will just leave them in the pots.

Classes will meet at the Community Garden.

March 22rd Vegetable Plant & Selection & Preparing Raised Beds

April 5th Planting Techniques

May 3rd Trellising & Weed Control

May 17th Integrated Pest Management & Environmental Stewardship

June 28nd When to Harvest/Giving Back to the Community & Dehydrating Using a Food Dehydrator

July 26th Planting Fall Crops & Mid Season Garden Clean-up

August 9th at 6pm Garden Harvest Celebration

September 20th Composting

October 18th How to Take a Soil Sample & Understanding Your Report

November 8th Garden Clean-­‐up

Cherokee County Master Gardeners (MGs) will be helping organize the Extension's Community Garden (CG) this year. Working the MGs' two charity-only plots, weeding, and being on hand to answer Community Gardener questions are three opportunities for new Master Gardener Interns to get their hours in. MGs will also be needed on a weekly basis to harvest unpicked produce and get it to the food banks; this is a new policy that will prevent waste of valuable food.

The first CG meeting of the year was held March 8. Keith Wood and Teresa Wiley gave the orientation and answered questions from the gardeners. The garden still has a ways to go before it's ready to planted. It will be manured, plowed and divided into sections. The long rows will have drip irrigation and plastic mulch pulled. Non-plastic areas will be divided off with string.