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Saturday, May 20, 2000

Master gardeners share good gardening tips guide to West Volusia

By MORRIS SULLIVAN | Correspondent

DELAND — Bob and Shana Sjoberg are Master Gardeners. They started with the program run by the University of Florida extension service about five years ago.

"We had just built a new house and had 1/3 -acre to landscape," Shana said.

"We started taking the courses to learn how to take care of our own lawn," added Bob.

That's how they got started, by signing up for the courses offered at the agriculture center in DeLand, near the fairgrounds.

To be a Master Gardener requires 50 hours of class time, 50 hours of volunteering at the center and another 50 hours of education each year, staying up with the latest in gardening information.

"The program is provided by the University of Florida," Bob said, "so it's a college education of a sort."

Shana said that, by the time their education and required hours were finished, "it had become addicting." The volunteering, plant sales, and other community outreach programs were so rewarding on so many levels that the pair stayed on as frequent volunteers at the Agriculture Center and ultimately took over the landscaping of the center's garden.

Shana said they decided to landscape the garden with wildlife in mind.

"So many people call in wanting to know how to get rid of animals. We wanted to show them that we can co-exist and we have to, for the survival of one another."

Their new garden contains plants, water and other "amenities" for the wildlife they're trying to attract. Lengths of PVC pipe protrude from the ground, providing houses for frogs. Birdhouses, bird feeders and a pond attract birds, including a pair of starlings that have nested in one of the houses.

They began the project by expanding an existing butterfly garden, adding flowers that attract the delicate, colorful insects and creating areas from which they can drink water.

"Butterflies drink water by sitting on the ground, sucking it out of the mud," Bob said. So the couple sunk coffee cans and flowerpot saucers into the ground, filled them with mud and scattered gravel over the tops.

"They work well," said Shana, "especially the shallower one."

The garden has a pond as its focal point, which Shana says attracts wildlife both because the animals need water and they're also attracted to the sound.

They planted red shrimp plants, because they attract hummingbirds. Artificial burrows, made from a piece of drain pipe sunk into the ground, and piles of brush can give homes to furrier varieties of critter.

Not all of their volunteer hours are spent tilling the soil and admiring their handiwork, Shana said.

"After we took the course, we were attracted by the learning process and I enjoy helping other people," she said. "It's great to have one-on-one conferences with people and give them advice about what to plant and what not to plant, so they won't keep getting more and more aggravated and spend more and more money."

Much of their time is spent on the phone, answering questions from other gardeners and giving out the latest recommendations from the university.

"A lot of the calls get pretty repetitive," said Bob. "People move here to Florida from other places, and one of the most common things we hear is, I used to grow such-and-such back home. Can I grow it here?'"

The answer, Bob said, is often "No."

Florida, he pointed out, is very unlike other states. The heat, moisture and soil quality make growing many plants difficult. However, the trade-off comes with the long growing season.

"Tomatoes, for instance," said Bob, "can grow just about year-round" if you protect them from the summer heat with shade cloth or other covering.

"They'll keep going until we get a good frost or hard freeze," he added.

Bob said to grow vegetables in Florida, it's probably best to do so in raised beds or containers. There are several reasons for this: it helps the gardener control soil quality and amount and type of fertilizer and water. Filling the containers or raised beds with sterile soil helps to cut down on the number of weeds, too, and removes one of Florida's worst garden problems, nematodes.

Nematodes, microscopic worms that live in the soil, can turn gardening into an exercise in futility.

"Some of these nematodes are relentless," said Bob. "They'll do serious damage. There are good ones and bad ones but, in Florida, the ones that do damage outnumber the ones that are beneficial."

In Florida, there's no such thing as a maintenance-free garden, but one can do things to reduce maintenance, by planting in the right place and grouping plants with similar requirements, said the Sjobergs.

As Shana points out, people sometimes want to move a shade-loving plant into the sun where it's more easily seen.

"It might grow," she said, "but it will take a lot more attention."

Bob recommends, too, that people use mulch. Their garden is mulched with leaves from surrounding trees.

"That helps keep the weeds down," said Bob.

"And it keeps moisture in, so you don't have to water as often," said Shana.

The couple are both from Massachusetts. They met at Shake a Leg, a rehabilitation program in Newport, R.I., and moved to Florida about eight years ago.

They now divide their time between tending the garden at the Agriculture Center and their business, Nature's Friend. They build and sell birdhouses and bat-boxes, which they learned to do while working at the Agriculture Center.

Bat boxes, Bob said, are available elsewhere, but many of them don't work well.

"Bats like to jam themselves together into tight spaces," he said. Their boxes are partitioned to provide such tight spaces for the furry little fliers to jam into. The boxes are less than two feet wide and three feet long, but Bob said 300 to 500 bats can live in one box.

The couple is involved in the early planning stages of the center's next garden project, the Millennium Garden. When completed, the garden will occupy a 4 1/2 acre parcel adjacent to the center. The garden, Shana said, will display a wide variety of plants in different areas that will represent different Florida environments.

"We plan to have artificial sand dunes, so we can show people on the sea side of the county what they can do to help preserve the dunes," she said.

The garden will be surrounded by a chain-link fence, "covered in vines. There will be a wildflower meadow, an area for dwarf shrubs," and so on. The goal, she said, is largely educational.

"Question-and-answer seminars are good ways to learn about gardening," she said, "but we find that people learn more if they can see what you're talking about. We want to get as much in this as we can and use as many examples as possible."

Building and planting the garden, Bob said, will cost a lot in time and money.

If anyone is looking for a good way to learn about gardening and help out with a good cause, they might consider getting involved with this project, he said.

"We rely on volunteers for most of the planting and maintenance."

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