0hio Master Gardener Program

 I signed up for the Ohio Master Gardener program again this year.  

If you've followed me for a while, you might remember that I did this about 15 years ago in Crawford County because the classes were not available in Richland County.  

That was before I learned that my job was at risk because the Mansfield GM plant was closing.  I transferred to GM Headquarters in 2009.   That was a bad time for the country, economically.  What's good for General Motors is good for the country, and what's bad for GM? Well, there was a government takeover of GM's bankruptcy proceedings. 

I survived.  I became the subject matter expert for a software project, and then eventually transitioned to being the business analyst before I retired.  But I was living in Michigan, and in Michigan, everything I learned about gardening in Ohio was null and void because the soil in Michigan is different. 

So, when I learned that Richland County was offering a Master Gardener class this year, I signed up.  It is not offered every year and if the next one is ten years down the road, I may no longer be physically able to participate. 

I loved the botany class. Photo Credit to Steve McKee who founded the Gorman Nature Center, and who came to lecture us on Botany. 

Our current assignment is to prepare a presentation on gardening problems.  My small team decided to do Japanese knotweed.  I found out that I was confusing Japanese smartweed with Japanese knotweed.  Both plants are in the buckwheat family, but they are not the same.  

I have a weed problem in my garden with Japanese smartweed.  Japanese knotweed is an invasive species that grows along road cuts and stream banks, and has moved into the Cuyahoga River Valley.  The same family includes Vietnamese Cilantro, which looks remarkedly similar to my garden's smartweed, and buckwheat. The knotweed is a very invasive plant, it has underground rhizomes that have been proven to sprout from a root one meter underground.