Urban Advanced Gardening is not meantfor advanced gardeners, it’s designed tocreate advanced urban gardeners. It’s for gardeners who have some experience but want to get a comprehensive educational foundation of organic gardening and learn what works best in our local climate. We have gathered all the latest techniques and data for veggie gardening in our local region and assembled it into a six week course that will set you on the path to knowing what to grow and how. Would you like to get higher yields and better veggies with less work? Then this course is for you.

About the instructor: John Valentine is a local legend in these parts, well known for his broad and deep knowledge about urban agriculture, small plot gardening, and year-round gardening (scroll down for his bio and bona fides). This course is his attempt to make better gardeners of us all because successful gardeners are more likely to keep at it. John’s philosophy is that gardeners don’t just need to know what to do, they need to know how to make good gardening choices. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to learn from the best.

This is a six week course that will meet Wednesday evenings from 5-7pm at the downtown Tacoma Bates College Main Auditorium on these dates: 4/22, 4/29, 5/6, 5/13, 5/20, 5/27

Class descriptions:

• Week 1: Maritime Northwest gardening – we define the many characteristics, limitations, advantages, and idiosyncrasies of maritime northwest (MNW) gardening. This puts gardening in the MNW perspective so that you can respond to problems aware of the underpinnings of our area, the rules of the game. We look at measuring your own data.
• Week 2: Soil and Amendments – Amending Soil, Testing, Fertilizers, Managing Tagro, Watering
• Week 3: Organic Pest Control – Philosophy of IPM. Monitoring, Interventions, Allowing natural predators to prevail.
• Week 4: Rogue’s Gallery of Pests– club root, mildew, cabbage root maggot, cabbage looper, slugs, cutworm, carrot fly, leaf miner, and blight. Identify and control them.
• Week 5: Weed Management – Every gardener’s nemesis, a serious problem, especially with our mild winters. We’ll cover: Weed control, mulching, barriers, prevention and keeping them from coming back.
• Week 6: Maritime NW Crop Varieties/Season Extension – Review of short season, disease resistant, cold tolerant, and season-appropriate seed varieties. Early starting and late/overwintering food production.How to select varieties according to specific needs for NW success.

More about John Valentine:

John Valentine is a former molecular biologist and science teacher. He teaches classes for the Edmonds Community College Sustainable Agriculture program,Pierce County Master Gardener program,Harvest Pierce County Fruit Tree Stewardship program, Gallucci Learning Garden, and for Tacoma Community Gardens. He is on the board of Farmer Frog non-profit, Foundation for Sustainable Communities,Tacoma Urban Land Trust, and Western WA Fruit Research Foundation. He advises the Mt Tahoma HS FFA club and their aquaponics research installation and is the Career Tech Ed assistant for Plant Science classes at Mt Tahoma. He has a business designing and installing residential hoop houses and teaching gardeners to raise food year round.

WSU Master Gardeners! You qualify for the student discount, so please bring your badge as your student ID.