Gwinnett County Master Gardeners
Promoting Gardening Through Education and Volunteering
We had a great lunch crowd of gardeners to hear Barbara Dorfman educate us on how to “Feel Empowered to Prune“. Barbara is a Master Gardener and a landscape consultant and spoke well to this topic. With plenty of analogies, ideas, and pictures, Barbara explained how to cut more confidently. She brought tools that make the job easy, explaining how shrubs and trees will respond to various cuts and types of pruners. There were plenty of tips on how to renew overgrown or butchered shrubs.
Our own member, MGEV, Margaret Molyson, presented “Alternatives to Lawns: How to Reduce Your Yard Work While Saving the Birds!” at our October 21st meeting at Bethesda Senior Center. Her highly informative talk addressed how reducing your lawn area and increasing your native plant area would not only reduce total time and money spent on yard maintenance but, more importantly, how it also supports the dwindling native bird population by giving them food for their young and nesting habitat.
Margaret had several educational and resource handouts to share and they are attached here.
Plants That Support Conservation Biological Control in Georgia
It was an educational and highly enjoyable hour as Mike Mengak, a Certified Wildlife Biologist and the Wildlife Outreach Specialist at the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources at UGA, spoke about “Nuisance Wildlife” at our August 19th monthly meeting. He had lots of tips and ideas for discouraging nuisance wildlife from our property. He pointed out the many popular things that don’t work…. as he said, remember, there are no rules and wildlife can’t read anyway!
In addition to teaching at UGA, Mike trains and works with landowners and extension staff to help manage the damage that wildlife can do to our property. He has authored or co-authored over 95 publications in peer-refereed journals, proceedings, technical reports, and extension publications on a wide array of wildlife ecology, wildlife damage management, and natural history topics.
