master gardener

As we walked into class this morning, we were greeted by a Master Gardener with a bag of colored papers. In a valiant effort to encourage us to sit at different tables and meet classmates outside our mentor groups, we drew a color from the bag and found the matching color on a table in the room. Essentially, we were randomly assigned a new table and new classmates to sit with.

The effect was quite entertaining.

Most everyone who didn't quite understand the goal of the random seat assignment, complained. "Why can't I sit with my mentor group?" they whined.

Personally, I enjoyed meeting new people. Community was one of two reasons I started taking the classes in the first place. Without the other people, that community would be pretty darn small.

Our third Master Gardener's class was today, the second one where we had reading to do. Once again, in preparing for the class, I'm hit with the amount of reading we need to do, and how procrastination with the reading is just not going to cut it.

Janis, Karen and I showed up at 9:15, about 10 minutes earlier than normal. I suspect the difference was because I wasn't late getting out the door, so Janis and I weren't late arriving at the carpool meeting place, and Karen wasn't late driving us over. It was my turn to drive, and I drove like the wind.

We've been heading over early to set up the A/V equipment for the class, sneaking in our volunteer hours half and hour at a time. This time, the equipment was in a strange state of disarray, causing the three of us to run around madly to organize in time. I also wanted to make sure Karen was up to speed on the setup, so I told her what to do, but let her do all the work.

The presentation went okay, with only minor issues with the audio. The biggest issue of the day with equipment was, thankfully, not our responsibilty: the video camera broke sometime this past week, so no video of the class was taken. Which is a real shame, given that the presenter was, as a Master Gardener stated, "an expert in the field and the best presenter for this information we've ever had."

The most pleasant point of the entire class was seeing Tish Fagin at the class, though she had a different last name on her name tag. Tish is Mischief teammate Adam Fagin's mom, so the moment was a nice life-folding-in-on-itself, serendipity moment. I had found out last Sunday that my mom is also a Master Gardener, though not in California, so seeing Tish and knowing that another person I know is also in the program is quite comforting.

Our class was about soil: composition, quality and management. Good class.

Today was my first "real" Master Gardeners class. Last week was basically orientation, so I don't think it really "counts" as a class. It does, but today was the first class of content.

The subject of today's class was plant physiology: parts of plants, how they grow, how they reproduce, all the good plant stuff. The content of the class followed very closely to the content of the handbook chapter we were to read before class, so I didn't feel I learned anything particularly new. However, different people learn different ways, so I was happy for the review.

In plants, there are two parts in the stem that make up the vascular system (with a third thrown in if the two parts need to be separated): the xylem and the phloem. The xylem moves water and mineral nutrients from the roots up to the aboveground plant parts. The phloem, on the other hand, nominally moves food from the leaves to the rest of the plant. With the xylem, everything goes up. With the phloem, materials can move every-which-way.

During the class, a fellow student asked the question, "Why does the material move in any direction in the phloem, but not the xylem? Why doesn't the water move down in the xylem?"

Various answers were proposed in the class, from a college botany instructor to other fellow students. For the most part, no one could answer the question. My answer would have been the cells are constructed in such a way that materials can easily move in one direction, but not the other, but I kept my mouth shut. Not really knowing the exact processes involved, I would be giving a Boy Answer™ with the Voice of Authority (VOA), and it might not be correct.

However, such inhibitions were lacking in a fellow student, who decided the proper answer was, "Because that's the way it is."

I'm unable to properly express how much such answers enrage every cell of my being. "Because that's the way it is" is the cop-out answer used by people who don't know the answer, in an attempt to both look knowledgable and stop the questioner from finding out the real answer.

Maybe the class wasn't really interested in or have the knowledge base of plant physics or molecular biology, and that's fine. But giving me a "because that's the way it is" BS answer makes me think you're a moron and immediately think less of any further words from your mouth.

Fortunately, I kept my mouth shut in class on that opinion, too.

Today marks the start of my Master Gardener training, with my mentor group meeting together at one of our mentor's houses and meeting everyone. Roberta and Susan are our mentors, and we comprise of Karen, Kathy, Kathleen, Kitt, Vera, Janis and Linda (ye ole Number 5 on the phone keypad, as Vera's last name begins with a K also).

We toured Roberta's back yard and gardens for a while, waiting for everyone to arrive. She had only relatively recently started incorporating edibles into her (preferred) ornamental gardens, and had a "meadow" as she termed the native grass back yard. She used the term meadow to convince her husband that, yes, it really was okay to rip up all the grass from the back yard and plant interesting, water-wise plants instead, it would still look good.

And it did.

After everyone arrived, we sat down and learned what to expect in the upcoming classes, that run every week until the beginning of June. I chose not to bring in paper or a pencil, so wrote all my notes on my Sidekick. I did a better job of note taking than normal, because I was limited to how fast I could type on the unfamiliar keyboard. Because of unfamiliarity with the keyboard, I types more slowly than I would on the Treo (around 20-25 words a minute instead of my 35-40 words a minnute I can manage on the Treo), and so had to pick out the important point of the conversations instead of transcribing every word.

Near the end of the mentor group meeting, after we had planned carpools for tomorrow's class, Janis, who was sitting next to me, asked what I was doing. The click-click-click of my keys reminded her of the sound her parakeet made when eating, "tick, tick, tick." When I said I was taking notes, her immediate response was, "Why?"

I flubbed some vague answer like, I like to remember what was said, or something equally inane, but honestly, the right question to answer was, "Why?"

I don't know why I typed all that information in. Maybe to make order with my thoughts? Maybe to keep me aware of the conversation: if I have to transcribe it, I have to be listening and paying attention. I don't know. Not taking is so default in my behaviour, I'm almost unable to stop it even when the task is completely unnecessary.

I think I'm the youngest in my mentor group. There are seven of us in the group, all women, with, I'd say, three of them in their forties, three in their sixties. One could be in her mid to late thirties, but I'm not completely sure. Two of the women in their forties are prime candidates to become my gardening buddies: they were friendly, outgoing, and near enough my age to have interests (besides gardening) in common, I suspect. On the casual meeting of the mentor group, I suspect only one of the women would annoy me after a bit, the rest I could easily become good friends with.

The mentor group was formed by sorting everyone's zip code, and divvying the groups into close locales, presumably to facilitate carpooling and social events. My mailing zip code doesn't sort properly and I was placed in the Los Altos group. Now, part of me is excited about this: Los Altos yards are generally bigger than yards in my neighborhood (exceptions being for behemoth houses on tiny lots), which means bigger gardens. However, the flip side is that my group comrades are also, well, significantly more well off financially than I am. Tragically, this difference has the potential to intimidate me, and I hate that in me.

When I think of it, it makes me want to find the nearest book, start reading and disappear into it, losing myself in the words. Or start developing, programming, lose myself in the code of my applications, to drown out the internal struggles and frustrations of where I am, and how it differs so much from where I want to be, or thought I would be in this part of my life.

It may be similar to how people ten years my junior feel when they compare their lives to mine: that decade means a a lot when discussing financial gain and accumulation. Frustration I'm not there yet, yet always the hope I'll get there eventually.

After I plant my garden.