2022 Recorded Public Education Classes Now Available on the Website
Check out any Public Education Class you may have missed in 2022 in the Master Gardener Virtual Classroom.
Public Education
Plants
These plant and gardening related presentations from the Glencarlyn Library Community Garden offer a range of educational information on gardening and includes a new series on Beautiful Native Plants
Recipes & Crafts
These videos include some of the herb-focused activities usually featured at the Glencarlyn Library Community Garden's annual AutumnFest event.
Best Gardening Practices
These videos from the Glencarlyn Library Community Garden includes a series on Climate Conscious Gardening as well as some introductory Gardening 101 tips.
Wildlife
Information and observations on insects from the coordinators of the Glencarlyn Library Community Garden.
Urban Agriculture
Techniques for successfully growing vegetables, herbs and fruit in urban and suburban landscapes – whether backyards, front yards, rooftop gardens, balconies, school yards or community gardens – for you and your family and sharing the harvest largesse with others.
Glencarlyn Library Community Garden Videos
The coordinators of the Glencarlyn Library Community Garden started making short educational videos in the fall of 2020 as an alternative, distanced means of providing some of the educational content and herb-focused activities usually featured at the garden's annual AutumnFest event. They enjoyed the medium so much that they have continued to make plant and gardening related presentations as opportunities have presented themselves.
Raised Bed and Container Gardening for Seniors
Master Gardeners of Northern Virginia (MGNV) is pairing with Arlington County’s Langston-Brown Community and Senior Center (LBCC), 2121 N. Culpeper St., Arlington, Virginia 22207 to assist seniors in planting and maintaining container gardens for vegetables, herbs, and flowers.
Healthy Bark, Healthy Tree Part 2: Mechanical and Weather Damage
Mechanical damage is the most preventable of bark injuries because it is often due to impatience, inattention, or ignorance. Careless maintenance practices can damage trees that take decades, not weeks, to grow. While we cannot control the weather, which can cause irreparable bark injury, we can control what plants we purchase and where we choose to locate them—the right plant in the right place increases its chances of surviving weather extremes. Enjoy the amazing photographs in this article on preventing mechanical and weather damage to trees.
Healthy Bark, Healthy Tree Part 1: Wildlife and Fungi Damage
A vigorous native tree may be host to many insects, which provide food for birds and omnivorous mammals. A stressed tree is most susceptible to pests, fungi, and disease. Trees have numerous ways to protect themselves; in fact bark is their first line of defense. However, trees sometimes need our help. Learn how to identify damage from borers to birds, invasive spotted lanternfly to spongy moth, and deer to voles as well as what to do about it.
Winter Is the Time for Pruning
While the garden is dormant, you have a chance to find and correct landscape issues concerning many varieties of deciduous trees. This is the best time to prune this type of tree.
Planning for the Red, White, and Blue: Part 2
Interested in planting your own red, white and blue garden to bloom this July? Enjoy this article by Mary Free that includes plants from the MGNV demonstration and other gardens on or around July 4 which are actually coloring the landscape red, white, and blue.
Are You Lichen the Bark? Lichens and Mosses
Part 3: Lichens and Mosses
Crevasses in oak and other barks form important habitats and microhabitats for ferns, orchids, fungi, and epiphytes. Epiphytes include mosses, algae, and lichens that are integral to biodiversity in North American woodlands.
Are You Lichen the Bark? Five Birch Trees of the Mid-Atlantic Region
Part 2: Five Birch Trees of the Mid-Atlantic Region
Learn about five birch trees native to different areas of the mid-Atlantic region. Their uses in a cultivated landscape are varied. Those with the showiest bark shine year-round as specimen, shade, or lawn trees.
The Beauty of Birch
Check out the Birch Tree video featured in the January 30, 2019 article title Are You Lichen the Bark? Part 1: Beautiful Bark
Are You Lichen the Bark? Beautiful Bark
Part 1: Beautiful Bark
Where, beyond snow-covered landscapes, does one search in winter for wonders of the natural world? If one looks carefully at that which winter has laid bare, then the beauty of bark emerges. With no leaves to obscure the view, one can truly appreciate the varying colors, textures, and patterns of deciduous tree barks.
Nurture Your Soil to Grow Your Best Garden
Gardens with rich, dense and diverse plantings—not bare land—attract and provide food for these organisms. They, in turn, move through the soil, aerating, enriching and making it more porous and absorbent. Whatever your “crop”—perennials, annuals, vegetables or fruits—you can join the growing movement of “soil gardeners” who care for their soil in order to grow better, more successful gardens.
Winter Tool Care
Gardeners usually think of winter as a time for taking stock of the year’s successes and failures and then planning for the upcoming growing season. One important task they should consider before designing new beds or perusing seed catalogs is preparing their gardening tools for off-season storage. Tools that are well cared for will last longer, take less effort to use, cause less damage to plants, and help to prevent the spread of diseases.
Five Things You Didn’t Know About . . . Arlington National Cemetery Memorial Arboretum
Anyone who visits Arlington National Cemetery (more than 4 million people do so every year) knows that America’s most hallowed ground, the final resting place of more than 400,000 service members, veterans and their spouses on 624 acres, is also a sanctuary for lovers of flowers and trees.
Grasses vs. Sedges
Grasses and sedges are both classified as monocots. These are plants whose seeds have one cotyledon (the part that will grow into embryonic leaves), and which possess flower parts in multiples of three, leaves with parallel veins, and scattered vascular bundles. While they resemble each other superficially, grasses are members of the Poaceae family and sedges belong to the Cyperaceae family.
Native Sedges for the Home Garden
As local plant sales and nurseries carry more straight species and cultivars of some Mid-Atlantic native grasses, commercial and residential landscapers are beginning to recognize both the ornamental characteristics and value to wildlife of these native plants.
Five Annuals for a Pollinator Garden
Pollinators such as bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds gravitate to gardens that bloom throughout the growing season and that contain an abundance of the same plant species as well as a diversity of species of like colors arranged together. Annuals, with their extended bloom period, ensure a continual nectar source for pollinators when perennials have yet to flower or are in decline.
Five Things You Didn’t Know About . . . Annuals
Unlike perennials, which live for more than two years, annual plants sprout, bloom, produce seeds, and die in a single growing season. If the garden was a stage, perennials would be the leads and annuals would be supporting performers.
The Meyer Lemon as Houseplant
By Christa Watters, Extension Master Gardener Last fall I harvested five beautiful Meyer lemons from a potted dwarf lemon tree I had received as a Christmas present in 2015. Along …