Upcoming garden symposium will have you thinking spring

Canandaigua Daily Messenger
·2 min read

GENEVA — Get ready for a day of horticultural inspiration as part of the 27th annual Ontario County Master Gardener’s Spring Garden Symposium.

The event will be held from 8:30 a.m. to 2:45 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 10, at Club 86, 86 Avenue E., Geneva. Registration is requested by Feb. 2.

The cost is$45 per person and includes refreshments, hot buffet lunch, door prizes and a folder with all the presenters’ handouts. The registration flyer is available at https://www.cceontario.org. For more information or to receive a flyer, call 585-394-3977, ext. 427, or email nea8@cornell.edu.

Here are the presenters and topics of their talks.

How to grow native plants from seed

Krissy Boys will give a talk that demonstrates how to grow common native plant species that support local pollinators and birds. This includes collecting seeds from the wild using specific collecting protocols; growing plants from seeds using seed cleaning and storage techniques, including seed stratification, scarification and viability testing; using a timeline that produces plugs for planting out the following year; and determining a chronology of species that bloom from spring through late fall. Boys teaches classes and workshops at the Cornell Botanic Garden in Ithaca and lectures at plant conferences and gardening clubs throughout the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states. She has been a gardener and land steward by trade for 31 years.

Krissy Boys will give a talk on growing native plant species, which includes collecting seeds from the wild.
Krissy Boys will give a talk on growing native plant species, which includes collecting seeds from the wild.

Principles and practices of ecological gardening

Jennie Cramerwill help participants understand the core principles and practices of an ecological garden that will help you rebuild your garden ecosystem, with its natural feedback loops that result in greater abundance, lower pest pressure and natural disease resistance, and natural resilience to the erratic climatic conditions of today. Cramer is an educator with Cornell Garden-Based Learning and the owner of Garden Rhythm, an ecological gardening education program. She is an ecologist turned horticulture educator with 25 years of experience in organic gardening, regenerative agriculture, natural history and botanical education. She loves saving seeds, medicinal herbs and plants.

Gardening and addressing physical and spiritual needs

Lucienne Nicholson will lead "Inciting joy: A Conversation on Nature as a Spiritual and Ecological Vessel for Creativity, Nourishment, and Healing," which is a conversational presentation on the capacity of gardening to speak to physical and spiritual needs in building generative and dynamic pathways connecting people and nature across space and time. Nicholson, a native of Haiti, is a nature enthusiast, a passionate holistic gardener and organic backyard suburban farmer whose horticultural combinations are often compared to a living tapestry of edible and nonedible plants. Nicholson’s garden was recently featured in the "Better Homes and Gardens" May 2023 issue.

This article originally appeared on MPNnow: Thinking spring at the Ontario County Master Gardener's symposium