We hope you all stayed safe during the smoke brought down from the Canadian wildfires. Thankfully, our air quality is back to normal! We do not usually see these fire effects on the east coast, so it really amplifies the importance of climate-resilient gardening education.

Our newsletter this month includes employment opportunities, new continuing education events, research surveys, new HGIC resources, and more!

We have an Agent Associate / Master Gardener Coordinator position open in Anne Arundel and Charles County. Apply today or share with others who may be interested!

We are looking for experts to pair with the students in our new Sustainable Horticulture Certificate course to help them complete their final project. They have 9 project options to choose from:

1. Perform a soil test and interpret your results.
2. Propagate an indoor plant.
3. Grow a fruit or vegetable.
4. Start a new plant from a cutting in your yard. 
5. Build and fill a raised bed or salad box/table.
6. Make a new landscape plan.
7. Create a plant inventory of all the species in your yard. 
8. Identify and treat an ailing plant.
9. Certify your yard as Bay-Wise  

Time spent mentoring will count towards volunteer hours. What each student needs will likely be different based on the project they choose and how much experience they already have.

If you would like to lend your expertise, please list your name and email on this Google doc. We will email you if you are chosen to be paired with a student.

There is a new document for collecting demographic data at Master Gardener programs. It is called 'Invitation to Self-Identify' and can be found on the Master Gardener website on the 'Record and Report Volunteer Data' page. It is important to note that program participants must self report their demographic information, so please use this form going forward. You can ask participants to complete this page when they sign in for your program.

We had a wonderful drip irrigation workshop last month at the state fair grounds! Many thanks to Robert Cook and Anthony Nathe for teaching and to those who attended. We're looking forward to touring the UMD campus food garden later this month and hope to see you there or at one of our other upcoming continuing education events.

Make your garden come alive at night with color, fragrance, sound, texture and lighting. Learn how to choose the right plants and accents to make your garden a pleasure to enjoy after dark. Whether you want a serene getaway or a place to entertain under the stars, this class will help you create magic in the moonlight.

If you need a reasonable accommodation to participate in this webinar, please contact Stephanie Pully on or before June 21 at (410) 531-1754 or pully@umd.edu.

Join Emily May to learn more about the pollinators that come out to work as others turn in for the evening. Moths, flies, beetles, and other dusk and night-time pollinators can play important roles in pollinating wild and managed plants. Emily will talk about the ecology, diversity, and importance of these hidden pollinators, and how we can best support them.

Emily May is a Pollinator Conservation Specialist with the Xerces Society's Pesticide Program. She received a master's of science in entomology from Michigan State University, and has studied pollinator habitat restoration, bee nesting habits, and the effects of pest management practices on wild bee communities. Her work with Xerces since 2015 has focused on supporting crop pollinators through habitat creation and protecting bees and other beneficial insects from pesticides.

If you need a reasonable accommodation to participate in this webinar, please contact Stephanie Pully on or before July 20 at (410) 531-1754 or pully@umd.edu.

Did you miss any of our continuing education webinars last year?

Check out the recordings below! You can always see both upcoming continuing education opportunities and recorded webinars on the State MG Continuing Education webpage.

The Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance (UCFA) is a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color)-led collective seeking to increase both grower and crop varietal diversity in the United States. In partnership with the University of Vermont, we are conducting a research study to examine how food and agriculture can better enhance access to culturally meaningful seeds and produce. This information will support farmers and other participants in the seed value chain to expand regionally adapted, sustainably grown, and in some cases, less commercially available varieties of seeds (and the crops that come from these seeds). 

In order to do this, we need your help! If you are willing to take the survey, please fill out this quick (< 1 minute) form. We will use your contact information to send you the survey in September/October of 2023.

If you have any questions in the meantime, please feel free to reach out to Ujamaa directly at ujamaacfa.researchsurvey@gmail.com or uvmseeds@uvm.edu.

Sign up to receive the survey here: 

Sign up here

Or copy and paste the URL below into your internet browser:

https://qualtrics.uvm.edu/jfe/form/SV_0v31n3sDJmS6zDo

Dear Nature Enthusiasts and Master Gardeners, 

We are a group of researchers at Cornell that recently initiated a community science project, "Project GNBee," focused on mapping (and ultimately conserving) aggregations of ground-nesting bees using the iNaturalist platform. Here are some links to give you more background on the project:  

GNBee: website  iNaturalist: project  Instagram: projectGNBee

Every garden is highly supported by a network of native pollinators and your members could be a great resource for observing and recording these nesting sites. We would also be interested in your thoughts on the project and how we can improve and expand it. The project will help us understand how factors like topography and soil characteristics impact the locations of nesting aggregations and may allow us to create suitable nesting habitat in the future. We also hope that the project will lead to conservation efforts focused on protecting sites that host large aggregations of ground-nesting, wild bees.  

If you would be willing to send information about this project along, please let us know.

For further inquiries and suggestions please contact the project lead, Jordan Kueneman, at groundnestingbees@gmail.com. 

A research team from Johns Hopkins University and University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) is studying plants in cities. They are interested in what types of plants Baltimore residents have outside their homes in lawns and yards and are looking for willing participants to allow their team to identify and count the plants in their yard. The study includes a survey questionnaire and a physical yard survey if possible.

If anyone is interested in having their plants surveyed, they can indicate that at the end of the questionnaire survey. Please address questions and concerns with research team lead Kelsey (Kcoate11@jhu.edu). The survey questionnaire link can be found here: https://qfreeaccountssjc1.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_dj7FZFs4yf2w5GC

Please share the survey with those who may be interested.

Join Christa Carignan, the Coordinator for Digital Horticulture Education, for a virtual tour of the Home and Garden Information Center's website and learn how to search for content on the new platform. Passcode: #Q?z0r46

Be Proactive to Prevent Vegetable Diseases

By Annette Cormany, Principal Agent Associate and Master Gardener Coordinator, Washington County

Beyond Broccoli Part Five: Love Them or Leaf Them

By Erica Smith, Master Gardener, Montgomery County

The University of Maryland Extension programs are open to any person and will not discriminate against anyone because of race, age, sex, color, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, religion, ancestry, national origin, marital status, genetic information, political affiliation, and gender identity or expression.