Latest News

This Garden Report Calendar of Events is a quick reference for you to view upcoming Master Gardener events. Please contact the Penn State Extension office for the event's county for further information.

The Rose Bowl, the Tournament of Roses Parade, Valentine’s Day roses – everyone is familiar with roses, the “Queen of Flowers,” for beauty and fragrance. But as an herb?

As we settle down for the winter we often spend time thinking about our gardens and landscapes. We take stock of what we enjoyed in the garden, what we would like to change, and can’t wait for that first visit to the garden center to look for plants to add to our gardens and landscapes. If you are like me, you are an impulse buyer. You may see something that looks good in the pot and want to take it home. It does not matter where you will place it, if you have the correct growing conditions, or how big it will get, just that it looks nice in the pot. Today, I challenge you to think differently. First Challenge-Take stock

A common question we receive from individuals who are growing fruit trees in the home landscape is “Why are my apples (or peaches) so small?” Growing large fruit can also be a challenge for commercial fruit growers. Fruit size is influenced by cell numbers, cell size and intercellular air spaces. Plant physiologists are currently looking more closely at the processes involved in fruit growth and learning more about the pathways that control those processes. Potential implications for the fruit industry are increased product consistency and enhanced orchard sustainability. (Photo : In 2011, area orchards experienced dry conditions during the growing season and record-breaking precipitation, including a snow storm, in the fall. In preparation for the 2012 season, commercial growers are invited to participate in a Penn State Extension Crop Load Management Workshop to be held at the Adams County Agricultural and Natural Resources Center on December 20th.)

This time of year, as the weather freezes and gardening outside stops, we begin to look inside to satisfy our need for growing plants. Poinsettias, cyclamen, and Christmas cactus are often the plants chosen for indoor color, but have you considered other options?

Planting a tree is an investment in the future, so it is worth your time to select carefully and plant properly. When you visit a nursery, search the web, or peruse a catalog, you will find that nursery stock is available in three forms, depending on how it has been grown or harvested: bare-root, balled and burlapped (B & B), or container-grown.

One of the best things you can do for the environment is to turn a patch of your lawn into a meadow garden. Meadow plants provide nectar for pollinators, seeds for migrating birds and overwintering sites for beneficial insects. They don’t need fertilizer or pesticides; their deep roots will readily soak up rainwater, preventing runoff and erosion. Meadow gardens also add four season interest to your landscape and summer long butterfly watching.

Adams County 4-H Leaders Banquet & Achievement Night, October 3, 2011

As the summer begins to wind down, in preparation for the fall and winter months, my time as an intern at the Penn State Extension Center is coming to an end. The future is only a question mark for me, but for Adams County Agriculture the future has many good tidings. Earlier this year, community and agricultural leaders held an Ag Innovations Summit to explore ways of securing the future of Adams County agriculture through entrepreneurship and innovation. The organizations involved in the Summit meeting are taking steps to ensure that local farms remain competitive in the field and helping farmers find the next new niche in the ever-evolving agriculture sector.

Elaine Lemmon, a young farmer from East Berlin, Pennsylvania began her farming operation eight years ago with a pumpkin patch on a plot of her father’s land. With a background in archeology, Elaine switched her focus from digging in the soils in search of ancient artifacts, to planting seeds and harvesting fruits and vegetables.

Community leaders representing Penn State University, Harrisburg Area Community College, the Gettysburg Adams Chamber of Commerce, Gettysburg High School, the Adams County Tech-Prep Program, and the Penn State Extension Young Grower Alliance recently held a preliminary round table discussion on the current and future climate for formal education in agriculture. The planning session was an outcome of the Adams County Ag Innovations Summit, where agricultural producers expressed the need for locally integrated ag production and business management training to support the future of agriculture in the county. The hope is that an Ag Innovations Education Committee will be formed and that many others will become involved in developing and implementing an action plan to address the growing need for young farmers and farm employees to learn about cutting edge agricultural technologies and business management practices.

In the 1930s, North America experienced a period of widespread ecological and agricultural damage due to decades of farming practices that created erosion. The harm inflicted on the Mid-West caused the great Dust Bowl Effect, which was characterized by severe drought and horrible dust storms. In response to this ecological disaster, the USDA established an organization to directly address the soil, water, and air issues that came out of the “Dirty Thirties” as a result of agricultural practices. At its initiation the organization was known as the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) but they have since expanded to become a conservation and stewardship leader for all natural resources, and henceforth became known as the Natural Resources Conservation Service, or NRCS. Since 1935 the NRCS has made it their mission to help America’s private land owners and managers to conserve and restore their soil, water, and other natural resources in order to prove more resilient to environmental challenges, like climate change. “Over the years, we have developed hundreds of different practices to address different farming issues, so just about any problem there is, we have an ecologically responsible approach to resolve the issue,” said Jim Gillis, District Conservationist for NRCS in Adams County. “Our goal is to ensure the productivity of the land through the maintenance of a healthy environment.”

Information on problems that cause turf to deteriorate and suggested programs for revitalizing turfgrass areas.

As the summer progresses, most gardens begin to lose their color. One solution is to add various types of asters to your landscape. Besides having mounds of billowing color from the asters, you can get clouds of butterflies in the early fall. Asters provide one of the few remaining nectar and pollen sources and are invaluable to our diminishing bee population. Moths and other beneficial insects add to the movement created around them. If you let them go to seed, birds will also join the crowd!

Well now that you are growing an herb garden, what will you do with all of its wonderful production? Even for those of us who regularly use the fresh herbs in season to prepare our meals, we still want to preserve some of each of them for winter use.

Finally, this spring, those unwelcome guests left our homes for their final fling – a picnic, a romantic interlude, a deposit of eggs, and then death. The question now looming is how to keep the next generation of brown marmorated stink bugs (BMSB) from destroying the fruits of our garden labor and, like the bad penny that always turns up, again invading our homes this fall.

The ever-rising cost of electricity and fuel has highlighted an important issue within the agricultural realm: the effects of energy usage on the sustainability of an agricultural operation. According to an USDA report, approximately 15 percent of agricultural costs are related to energy consumption, and this percentage is higher for horticultural enterprises. Unfortunately, information regarding energy efficiency and renewable energy alternatives for these types of operations is scarce.

“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” These wise words, spoken by Plutarch many centuries ago, remain true today: a dichotomous imbalance appears most strikingly in food issues, like food security, where one group has the ability to purchase an abundance of nutritious foods, while the other socioeconomic sector goes hungry because of the inability to afford enough, or the right foods. In Adams County alone, 20 percent of the population is considered food insecure, and an additional 30 percent are suffering from obesity and other food-related diseases linked with poor nutrition. Food security is a necessity of life and is universally recognized as “a condition in which all community residents must be able to obtain a safe, and culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through a sustainable food system that maximizes community through self-reliance and social justice.”

On July 13, 200 or more local producers, scientists, and community leaders alike congregated at the Penn State Fruit Research and Extension Center (FREC) in Biglerville, PA to participate in a grower field day program that served as a wonderful educational opportunity for those in attendance. This field day provided attendees with the opportunity to view some of the most cutting edge agricultural innovations in development today by covering important research topics within the fields of entomology, horticulture, nematology, plant pathology, and agricultural engineering.