Oregon State University’s master gardener program has been running for 50 years and provides advice for gardeners in all but nine counties in Oregon.
It has evolved since its 1976 conception to include plant clinics, an internet helpline and counsel for gardening questions via phone by a master gardener who lives and gardens in your county.
But what is the evolving role and importance of this kind of guidance when information is so widely available online?
To answer that, we’ll hear from Chris Rusch, president of the Oregon Master Gardener Association, and Pat Kolling, who’s been a master gardener volunteer for the last two decades, based in Bend.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Oregon State University’s master gardener program started 50 years ago. What began as a service for people with questions about home gardening has expanded to include plant clinics, an internet helpline, free food and a lot more. Last year, more than 2,400 volunteers answered more than 70,000 documented questions. They donated 35 tons of produce to food pantries, schools, and senior centers.
Chris Rusch is a master gardener volunteer in Douglas County and the president of the Oregon Master Gardener Association. Pat Kolling is a master gardener in Bend. They both join us now. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.
Pat Kolling: Thank you. Happy to be here.
Chris Rusch: Thank you for having us.
Miller: Pat, you became certified in 2007 as a master gardener, so almost 20 years ago. What got you interested?
Kolling: I’ve always been interested in gardening. I moved to Central Oregon when I retired. And I had lived, actually just before I moved up to Central Oregon, in Arkansas, which clearly had a very different climate for gardening than Central Oregon. So I wanted to really delve into more the pros and cons of how I was going to continue with gardening as I had in the past. Before that, I actually lived in Seattle, so never really gardened in the sort of climate that we have, in the High Desert of Central Oregon. So that really piqued my interest, and it was something that I’d always wanted to do.
Miller: Do I understand correctly that part of your interest in pursuing this was to learn for yourself so you could become a better gardener, not just so you could help other people?
Kolling: Yeah, that’s true. That’s definitely a part of what I think a lot of master gardeners have that initial interest in. But also, in my past career, I had been in a career where I did a lot of teaching and a lot of community outreach. So it’s something that I was also very interested in, the community outreach, and the fact that you really have the ability to teach other people and help them to be able to grow the things that they want to grow, whether it’s vegetables, whether it’s dealing with the soil in Central Oregon, or whether it’s having a beautiful landscape. So that part of it really piqued my interest as well, to be able to have the ability and an outlet to do that kind of teaching.
Miller: Chris, what about you? How did you decide to become a master gardener volunteer?
Rusch: I joined the master gardeners in 2010, so I, too, have been a master gardener for quite some time. I joined after retiring from the Forest Service where I was involved in a lot of restoration work. I was drawn to the idea of OSU and continuing education and also working in our community to help people learn how to grow food, learn best practices for gardening.
I’ve been gardening all my life. I’ve lived in Oregon all of my adult life, and I’d been gardening for quite some time when I joined the organization. So I mostly joined it for the continuing education aspects and for the community involvement parts.
Miller: Chris, what are some of the most common questions that you get year after year?
Rusch: Oh boy, there’s so many. Since I started, I’ve been answering these questions. I guess cucumber beetles is a big deal in the summertime. People continue to have issues with cucumber beetles. This year was particularly interesting because of the hot weather we had. Some people were just losing their cucumbers and their squash plants due to these little critters. They’re little, green, and look like a little green ladybug if you’re not familiar with them. They can also have stripes too. But probably the biggest question is the insect damage that they were causing.
Miller: I would give them some zucchinis, but I wouldn’t want them coming for my cucumbers. So what do you do for cucumber beetles?
Rusch: So yeah, there’s a lot of different things you can do. Mostly, a lot of it is cultural. You need to rotate crops. It’s really important. I always encourage people not to plant the same thing in the same spot year after year. So rotating crops is a big deal. Using mulch helps really because the cucumber beetles go back and forth between the soil and the plant. So therefore, if you put a barrier up for them to do that, that seems to help. Then there’s also a lot of products out there that are organic products like insecticidal soaps and sprays that you can put on your plants to control them as well. But garden hygiene is really the biggest issue with them.
Miller: Garden hygiene. Pat, what do you find to be the questions that come up over and over again?
Kolling: One thing that I think we hear a lot of … Because so many people are moving into Central Oregon from other parts of the country, they’ve heard this thing about, “You can’t grow anything in Central Oregon. It gets too cold at night. The soil is awful. How am I supposed to grow things in Central Oregon?” Because people have heard you can’t grow anything here. I think that’s one of the big areas that we spend a lot of time concentrating on. So you need to amend the soil, you need to make sure you have adequate water. You need to select the correct plants for our climate.
So, for example, you can’t grow a great big, chubby, fat tomato in Central Oregon because our growing season is too short. So people need to adapt some of their growing practices for our part of the state and even for our different parts of the county. There are different things that you need to do to extend the season [like] using row cover early in the season, and then using row cover later in the season, when you want those green tomatoes to ripen. So one of the most common questions that we get is, how do I really make things grow here?
Miller: Chris, Pat is talking there about the diversity within Central Oregon. The Central Oregon master gardener program spans Deschutes, Jefferson and Crook County, a really big geographical area. But even just in Douglas County, you stretch from the coast to the Umpqua National Forest. How much might your advice vary based on the questioner’s location just within one county?
Rusch: Yeah, that’s a great question. I also get questions from Josephine and Jackson counties sometimes as well. And you’re right, the climates are so different between those parts of Oregon. From the coast, they have problems with powdery mildew, fog and even salt in the soil. Then we have the high elevations for those people who live in the eastern part of Douglas County, up in the mountains like I do. I live at 1,800 feet so our challenges are a little bit different too.
So always ask where they are calling from. That’s my first question a lot of times. Some things like cucumber beetles, it doesn’t matter where you’re calling from. But things like what you plant in your garden, the varieties that you use and the practices that you may do may vary from region to region, even within the Umpqua Basin. We call it the land of a thousand valleys. That’s what we call the Umpqua Valley.
Miller: Pat, how do you think about the services that you all are providing in this age of Google and AI; An age when, seemingly, you can ask any question you want and you might get an answer to those on the computer. I guess what it really boils down to is what you’re providing that computers can’t?
Kolling: First of all, what we provide is research-based information. So this is not something that is an old wives’ tale. This is the information that we are providing that is based on actual research, what works and what doesn’t work. I also think that one of the things that master gardeners can provide that the internet doesn’t is that sort of face-to-face connection. It’s that ability to actually talk to somebody, the ability to have someone bring in a plant sample and have someone in the plant clinic talk about what’s happening with that particular plant sample. So I think that human-to-human connection is really lacking when you get something on the internet. I mean, you can get the answer to the question in different ways and 10 different answers, and which one do you rely on?
So I do think that the ability that we all have as master gardeners to get out into the community … For example, we’re in the home and garden show, and we have demonstration gardens, and we have a plant fair. That gives us the opportunity to really interact with the public and to have people ask specific questions. One of the things that we’re spending a lot of time on right now is firewise gardening. How do I make sure that my home is safe, that the types of landscape plants that I choose are going to be resistant to fire? Then also water conservation. How do I make sure that I’m not using more water than I need to? Since we all are dealing with drought and the fire season that your speaker before talked about. So I think that human connection is really big.
Miller: Have you seen an increase, Pat, an interest in firewise landscaping or low water gardening in your time? I mean, you’ve been doing this now, as we said, for about 20 years.
Kolling: Absolutely, absolutely. In fact, we work very closely with the city of Bend’s Water Conservation Department. We have a big field day that we do together in June that really combines what the city is doing for water conservation and what we can do as gardeners for water conservation. I think that has really increased. Although, because we’ve always been sort of a desert system, we have always conserved water. But I think the firewise piece is really huge now. OSU has a really nice publication on the appropriate firewise plants, what are less flammable, how you create a defensible space, which all falls into the purview of master gardeners because people are interested in their landscapes. We spend a lot of time on that as well, much more than we did in the past though. So, it’s a big effort.
Miller: Chris, I saw a lovely quote attributed to Jan Powell McNeilan, a retired statewide coordinator of the master gardener program, in a press release celebrating the 50th anniversary of the program. She said that even though gardening with plants is your program’s work, she said that you also grow people. Does that ring true to you?
Rusch: Oh, definitely, of course. We have quite a few of our programs where we reach out into the communities. Especially during these times of food security, we’re building partnerships to encourage that. The friendships that I’ve made in the program have been really beneficial for me, just to know that I’m working with other gardeners and teaching other people. Right now, I’m just starting up a program in Douglas County for junior master gardeners, working with youth. To me, that is the way to really reach out and build those bridges between our children, to teach them how to grow sustainable gardens in a scientifically based manner.
I think those partnerships and fostering the friendships in our group is really important. Like Pat said, we reach out in the communities all the time with all of our attending fairs and promoting our program, all throughout Oregon.
Miller: Pat, I wanna go back to something you said earlier, that one of the things you can do that people cannot do on Google or with AI is that they can bring pieces of a plant or plant sample in and you can check them out. Are you essentially acting like detectives?
Kolling: Yeah, that’s actually a very good description. Definitely. Our plant clinics are open in the extension office. So physically, people can bring in a plant sample, and the master gardener will do research. Or people can also call in the number and give the information. Yes, absolutely, we use a microscope, we use all of our research-based information. We have books. We have the “Pacific Northwest …” Whatever that big book is called. [Laughs] But we have lots of information.
We do answer people’s questions either in person, on the phone or via email after they send in the info. It’s definitely like being a detective. Every day in the garden is kind of like being a detective. I mean, just what Chris was saying about the cucumber issue. You have to know what you’re looking at. How do I really know that that’s what I’m looking at? So yeah, definitely being a detective is a good description of what we do.
Miller: Chris, if we were in your garden right now, what would you be most excited to show me right now?
Rusch: Well, right now, the flowers are beautiful. I have a lot of zinnias. I grow a lot of pollinator plants within my vegetable garden. I have a huge garden. Yesterday I just harvested over 100 onions from our garden. So I think I would probably show you my cucumbers that are gorgeous. Corn is coming on, we have a lot of squashes, zucchini. My garden is quite lovely right now, although it’s winding down. I did, like I said, harvest a lot of it yesterday.
Miller: And Pat, briefly, what would you show me?
Kolling: I would probably show you my hummingbird mint, the agastache, which is a flowering plant that attracts pollinators, in particular hummingbirds. I probably have six different varieties of hummingbird mint, a desert-looking plant that I really love. It comes in different colors, and I love that the hummingbirds just hover around, along with other pollinators. So that’s kind of my favorite plant in my landscape right now that I would love to show you.
Miller: Pat and Chris, it was a pleasure talking with you both. Thanks so much.
Kolling: Thanks for having us.
Rusch: Thank you for having us.
Miller: Pat Kolling and Chris Rusch are longtime master gardener volunteers.
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