Monthly Archives: April 2011

Having vented my fill yesterday  (and everyone else's) about how hard I found it simply to get to the class at all, much less with the right chapter under my belt, I shall turn to the far more trivial matter of what actually went on in this class, and what I learned.

The class reviewed the components of good soil—minerals in various sizes (sand, silt, and clay) organic matter, air, and water. I was familiar with this, and with the importance of soil aggregates (clumps) that leave spaces within which air, water, and roots can move. For many people the shocker is that organic matter should comprise only 5-10% of the soil.

But for me it was the graph quite indicated that in an ideal soil fully half the volume is taken up by air and water. That's right: 25% each. If I'd learned that before, I'd forgotten it.

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(This post does not actually deal with anything like content; I saved that for tomorrow. This is just about getting there.)

Yes, I have decided that it's time I actually learn something about this activity I've been blogging about (off and on) for four years now: I am taking a Master Gardener class. So far, two weeks into the course, just getting there, prepared, has turned out to be a major challenge.

The first problem was figuring out when and where (and if) the dang thing was being offered. In my innocence, I went to the University Extension website on Master Gardening, expecting to see dates. Ah, would that life were so simple! No, that site had a link to the County site, where I found information for 2010 and a link back to the same University site.

Further Googling left me well-informed about Master Gardening in a number of other counties, at other levels, and in several past years, but never did I manage to locate the center of this Venn Diagram, where all three circles intersect: my county, my level, this year. After half an hour of being bounced back and forth between the same two or three sites, (the sort of thing that leaves me feeling indiscriminately homicidal), I saw a familiar name.

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