Dig This!

A Spring Gardening Checklist For a Gorgeous Landscape Year-Round   by  Andrea Beck for Better Homes & Garden ( February 5, 2020)                                                                           The garden is waking up, and you're in charge! It's time to start planting, pruning, and preparing your flower beds. Much like a good spring cleaning after a long winter can help freshen up your house, taking a similar approach to your yard will help you get it back in shape for the warmer months. Even after the snow and ice melts, it can be a little overwhelming to tackle all the work that needs to be done for a picture-perfect spring landscape. Use this checklist to help pace yourself as you get your flower beds and shrubs cleaned up. It's broken down into early, mid-, and late spring so you can plan out your garden clean-up tasks and hit each area of your landscape before summer arrives. Early Spring When you're first getting back out into your garden,

RCEMG’s March meeting welcomed Pippin Williamson, brewmaster for Sandhills Brewing, a small microbrewery located in Hutchinson. Their focus is on oak-fermented and specialty beer but, as a tiny brewery, they have flexibility to experiment and try all kinds of beers. One of their goals has always been to create beers “from right here.”  In other words, a beer that is uniquely central Kansas and specifically Hutchinson.  Ninety-eight percent of the beer made here uses water from a local sand hills well which gives the beer its unique flavor. Sandhills Brewing also incorporates local Kansas-native fruits in some of its brews to give beers a distinct flavor and color. Pippin mentioned black cherries, sand hill plums, staghorn sumac, and pawpaws.  A few of our Master Gardeners have even provided hops and grapes for the brewing process. In the vein of keeping it local, local resources are used whenever possible and all the beer varieties are named for local birds. Pippin

2019 was the first year for the cut flower section at the Hutchinson Community College garden. Because the spring of 2019 was cold and wet, we were not able to get  the garden planted so the flowers were blooming during the garden tour in June.  Nevertheless, in the form of bouquets delivered to people who needed a day brightener, this experimental garden provided pleasure for some who never visited the garden.  Some visitors to the garden came looking for ideas for flowers they might grow at home.  Others simply enjoyed the flowers in the same way they find pleasure in all beautiful plants. One day’s harvest from the cut flower garden. Dividing flowers into categories depending on how they function when arranged in a vase helps people who are planning their cut flower gardens. Line flowers, focus flowers, and filler flowers make up these categories.  Making sure that a cut flower garden contains something for each of these categories helps insure that bringing the beauty of

The Master Gardener Demonstration Garden is featured  in the March 2020 issue  of Kansas Country Living magazine. R ead the entire article at: Show Us