What do we want? PORE SPACE? How do we get it? HUMUS!
This, I’m sure, is the official cheer for Master Gardeners. We had a hootin’ and hollerin’ good time during the third Tennessee Master Gardener training class–which was all about soil and plant nutrition. Last week we had a great speaker on landscape design and, as you can imagine, there were lots of lovely pictures to ooh and ahh over. So, when I sat down to do my homework for this week about dirt, I was a little worried that the honeymoon was over and it was time for the really boring classes to start. I’m not a scientist and I literally cannot remember a single thing from high school biology. Reading about minerals and soil amendments and the science of decomposition was proving to be a bit of a challenge. I was starting to think that this was going to be too hard.
I was wrong. Soil is awesome and SO not boring. Our instructor this week will go down in history for being the first person to make dirt interesting and will forever be credited with crafting our official MG cheer. It’s all about pore space, y’all. Get that organic matter decomposed (humus), feed those micro-organisms, and BAM you’ve got pore space in your soil to hold the water, air and nutrients your plants need to grow. Okay, it’s not exactly that simple or the class would have been 5 minutes instead of three hours, but you get the idea.
So far I’ve come away from every class feeling like I’ve learned a LOT of really helpful information, and with the desire to keep learning more! It was a really great decision to start the journey to becoming a Master Gardener in Tennessee. You know what else is awesome about training to become an MG in Tennessee? Someone always brings a tub of killer pimento cheese for snack time. Oh, and donuts…lots of donuts.
What do we want? PORE SPACE (and pimento cheese)! How do we get it? HUMUS (and show up next week because that’s just how we roll here)!
