High Elevation Gardening Web Log "Blog"

Now there is one for gardeners, both novices and veterans. It’s a local group, called Flagstaff Garden Starts CSA. CSA isn’t an acronym for Confederate States of America but for Community Supported Agriculture. Led by Anne Sheridan, the program is supported by Flagstaff Native Plant and Seed and Mountain Meadow Farm. A Master Gardener herself and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point in Natural Resource Management, Anne was an Apprentice at the prestigious Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at University of California, Santa Cruz. Any institution with such an obscure tongue-twisting title has to be worthwhile. As a peripatetic gardener, she’s gardened in such diverse places a Fairbanks, Alaska, and Hawaii, but now she’s landed in Flagstaff. As with most gardeners, her love of gardening began as a child with her mother and grandmother in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.

The program is three-fold. For a minimal fee, they will supply what are called “starts” which is a small six pack of seedlings. They offer a wide variety of vegetables and flowering plants at appropriate times throughout the growing season. Included in the small fee for the starts they also offer support for growing the “starts,” as in “how do you cook the turkey?” and “do I hold my baby when he cries?”

Lots of money is lost on plants that die once they are planted, generally because the gardeners didn’t know what they were doing. Gardening in Flagstaff is especially daunting with high winds, capricious weather, soil nearly void of organic matter, short growing seasons, and aridity. Well, here’s a program that not only sells the “starts” but also sells a program of support so that the gardeners will know what they’re doing. It’s a kind of 911 for gardeners, a physician who actually answers the phone. There ain’t nothing like human contact, especially from someone who knows what they’re talking about.

So far so good, but “the best is yet to be” as Robert Browning would have said. More often than not, gardeners learn from one another rather than experts, like the old lady next door who’s been growing really great herbs for years or the old geezer who gives away fresh flowers and vegetables to his neighbors. The argot today is “networking,” a word gone stale from overuse. The sources of gardening support are not only Anne, Nigel Sparks and his staff at Native Plant and Seed, and Chuck McDougal and his staff at Mountain Meadow Farm, but also a whole host of gardeners who know from experience what they are doing, especially in Flagstaff. One of the great things about gardeners is that they’re not given to proprietary secrecy but are willing to share what they know.

For more information, those interested can call Anne at 773-9406, email her at flaggardenstarts@yahoo.com, or go Internet at www.nativeplantandseed.com and click on “What’s New.” Indeed, there
is something new. Help.

Dana Prom Smith is a Master Gardener volunteer and coordinating editor of the Master Gardener Column for Coconino County Cooperative Extension. He can be contacted at stpauls@npgcable.com. For more information about the Master Gardener Program, call Hattie Braun, the Master Gardener Program Coordinator, at 774-1868 ext.17 or visit our Web Site: highelevationgardening.arizona.edu.