Placitas Garden Tour What to Expect Beautiful landscapes. Incredible views. Inspiration for your gardens. Artists at work in each yard. Activities for the whole family. All take place 9 a.m. – 4 p.m. this Sunday, Sept. 8, at the ninth annual Placitas Garden Tour. This year’s seven diverse landscapes showcase what’s possible with native and low-water use plants, creative hardscaping, and thoughtful use of garden art, including one property with a large-scale Stonehenge structure. Each presents a sustainable solution to the challenges of high desert g ..read more

Meg Buerkel Hunn, Advisory Council Chair: May Your Gardens Flourish “Everything in nature – and we’re a part of nature – was planted here to grow. And not only to feel alive, but to beget and [to] generate and [to] give life to other things.” * These words stayed with me well after sociologist Corey Keyes said them to Shankar Vendantam in his interview on a recent episode of the podcast, Hidden Brain. Keyes was talking about human flourishing and languishing, but gardeners have access to this truth on a regular basis! I think it doesn’t get much better in the garden when there is a successf ..read more

Meg Buerkel Hunn, Advisory Council Chair: Where Are You Finding Hope? May has been a doozy of a month! The end of another school year brings all kof seedlings to plant out in the garden, I’m just waiting for a span of time to get them planted… I am hoping they may be happy enough to wait until the school year ends and time feels more spacious. And, just for the ‘fun’ of it,  I opted to take a weekly Olli class about climate change. I’ve learned a lot about the geology of the Sandias and the Jemez mountains from Dr. Carol Hill. Most of us already know a lot about climate change, and, if ..read more

Meg Buerkel Hunn, Advisory Council Chair: We Share Much More Than What Divides Us These two plants, to the gardener’s eye, are quite different…  Obviously, one is a cactus, the other a lettuce.  The leaves of one deter close interactions, the leaves of the other are delicious, especially with some bleu cheese dressing!  One likely took decades to reach this size – the other, of similar size, took weeks to grow this large.  One is in my backyard garden where it is both shaded and irrigated, the other I saw while hiking in the Ojito Wilderness area, it’s in full sun and tr ..read more

Placitas Wildflower Walk – Field Trip by Brandt Magic Sharon Walsh, Master Gardener and Botanist, recently led a Wildflower Walk in the Placitas Open Space. 16 Master Gardener interns and veterans were there. This is the second year for this successful event. Participants observed and learned to identify native plants including One-seed Juniper, Tree Cholla, Thicksepal Crypthantha, Fendler’s Hedghog Cactus, Mormon Tea, Fendler’s Bladderpod, Indian Parsley and many others. Many experimented with plant identification phone apps including iNaturalist. Others compared flowering plants observed t ..read more

Preparing for the Big Till at New Beginnings Preparing for “The Big Till” at New Beginnings Garden by Tracy Bogard There was a lot of anticipation this year for the New Beginnings garden in Bernalillo.  The clients – from the TeamBuilders Behavioral Health Psychosocial Rehabilitation (PSR) program – had made some requests for vegetables to grow (notably chiles!) and were ready to get started.  2024 brought a new crew of Teambuilders counselors and the Sandoval Extension Master Gardener project leads had worked hard to ensure that everyone would have an opportunity to contribute. A ..read more

Museum of Southwestern Biology Field Trip by Brandt Magic For the second year in a row, the Museum of Southwestern Biology at UNM (http://msb.unm.edu/ ) welcomed Sandoval Extension Master Gardener interns to view their world-class insect collection. The museum’s Arthropod collection is the most extensive in the southwest and includes a large number of the over 20,000 describe species in New Mexico. Dr. David Lightfoot, collection manager, spoke about the science of entomology (the study of insects). He talked about how he has worked at the museum studying insects and for Fish and Game d ..read more

What I learned at the 2024 “Think Trees NM” Conference by Ed Chappelle The nuts and bolts of Tree Culture was the focus of the 38th Annual Urban Tree Care Conference February 8th – 9th, 2024. You need to think of being on “Tree Time” when evaluating tree issues. It’s a little bit like island time, but much, much longer. Starting with proper tree selection for the landscape and soil conditions, followed by proper planting. Examine the root ball after removing ALL transporting material such as burlap and wire cages to insure the roots were not container bound. If root bound cut the circling ro ..read more

Meg Buerkel Hunn, Advisory Council Chair I wrote about the GROWTH mindset last year…  you’ll recall that I loved that my daughter’s third grade teacher taught her students the Yeti Way: changing definitive statements and ‘fixed mindsets’ into opportunities to grow and change.  In the Yeti Way, ‘I cannot do long division’ becomes ‘I cannot do long division YET!’  In the Growth Mindset, we always have the opportunity to learn and grow and change – and this does not stop when we finish school years (and long division)! I am still learning that there is a TON of gardening knowled ..read more

Santa Ana Nursery Field Trip by Brand Magic Mike Halverson, native plant expert, just hosted a fascinating field trip for the Sandoval Extension Master Gardeners. 40 Master Gardeners, interns, and mentors toured the green houses and the outdoor growing areas. Species grown at the nursery are primarily native to New Mexico and grown from seed collected regionally by Mike and his staff. The nursery mission includes support of pueblo farmers, cultivation of traditional plants used ceremonially, and species grown for restoration projects on native land and areas managed by the National Park Serv ..read more