WESTFIELD — Don’t let any lingering snow on the ground fool you. It’s time for garden lovers to think spring.
And that’s just what the Western Massachusetts Master Gardener Association hopes its upcoming gardening symposium at the Westfield Middle School will help area gardeners do.
Slated for March 29 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Westfield South Middle School, 30 West Silver St., this year’s “Let’s Get Growing” gardening workshops — offering 10 different topics plus a gardening marketplace, networking and raffles — are an opportunity to start planning for and dreaming about next season’s garden bounty and beauty.
Online workshop registration through March 27 is $30 for a choice of two seminars. Registration at the door, if available, is $40. For more information and to register visit WMMGA.org.
“We call it ‘Let’s Get Growing’ because it’s the time everyone is thinking ‘Let’s get going and get winter over with,’” said Rosemarie Bonner, a member of the Western Massachusetts Master Gardener Association’s spring gardening workshop planning team. “It’s an ideal time to do workshops before people get busy in their gardens.”
Now in its 26th year, Bonner wanted to stress that these annual workshops are for gardeners of all abilities — not just for elite gardeners or aficionados.
“One thing we want to make clear — it’s put on by master gardeners but it’s not just for master gardeners,” Bonner told Reminder Publishing. “We got feedback a few years ago that people weren’t attending because they thought the workshops were just for master gardeners, so we took that word out of the title.”
Bonner said that based on feedback from last year’s workshops — combined with requests to touch on specific gardening topics — this year’s slate of workshop topics encompass a breath of gardening areas — from edible gardening and companion veggie plantings to healthy lawns, vase-worthy gardening and growing houseplants.
Bonner added she and her fellow event planners are also very excited about the 10 speakers the workshop has been able to enlist this year.
“They bring a depth and breadth to the topics they are speaking on. They can field your questions on the spot and give you resources and options for possible solutions,” Bonner shared.
Outlining the types of workshops attendees can choose from, Bonner broke the offerings down by interests.
“We have gardeners who are particularly interested in flowers, so we’ve put in some flower workshops,” Bonner said of the feedback from past seminars. “We have one called ‘Gardening in the Shade of Shade,’ which is for people who are always looking for plants they can grow in the shade. Another is for gardeners who are looking for flowers they can cut called ‘Vase-worthy Flowers’ about how to put flowers in your [existing] garden beds, and a third one on growing native plants.”
The native plant seminar, Bonner said, is part of the master gardners’ continuing effort to educate people on the importance of promoting biodiversity. The presenter, Leslie Duthie, has extensive experience in ecological horticulture and has taught extensively on native plant use at the New England Botanical Garden at Tower Hill in Boylston.
The second category of workshops will be focused on growing food, especially with “prices rising and food shortages,” Bonner noted.
“We have two workshops, one is on making your [existing] garden edible with Eric Toensmeier, he’s written several books, and he is local, though he’s known worldwide … we’re very excited to have him,” Bonner said. Among Toensmeier’s books are “Edible Garden Oasis in the City,” “Perennial Vegetable Gardening” and “Edible Forest Gardens.”
The second workshop is on companion vegetable planting. “This one really talks about which vegetables you should put in combinations or as companions,” Bonner explained. “They are plants helping plants, they keep pests away, they have nutrients they pull out that the other plants put in [the soil] … it’s a good sustainable way to look at designing your garden.”
The third group of workshops are a pair of hands-on classes, something Bonner said attendees have asked to have included in the offerings.
“One is on updating an old garden,” Bonner said. “People will come with an idea of a bed they want to update, and she will walk them through it with sketches and ideas of what to put in the bed.” This workshop will be led by Larri Cochran, a certified horticulturist, co-director of the Northampton Community Garden and vice president of the Western Massachusetts Master Gardener Association, Boner added.
The second hands-on workshop will be on growing and using herbs. Attendees “will make a salad dressing, a sachet and leave with planting an herb,” Bonner shared. The hands-on workshops “are very small because we want to give people the attention they need,” Bonner said, adding those interested should sign up quickly as these classes fill up.
The last three workshops include “topics we believe people should be aware of,” Bonner said. These topics include one on healthy lawns — and what people can plant as alternatives to Kentucky bluegrass, one on composting, called “Garden Gold,” and a third on “The Ins and Outs of Houseplants.”
“We’ve had several requests on houseplants and [the speaker] Ed Sourdiffe is a master gardener who used to work at Shaker Farm. He’s also the ‘Green Thumb’ on [TV22’s] MassAppeal… he has a depth of garden knowledge,” Bonner said.
Bonner said complimentary coffee will be available before classes begin and during the Marketplace break between seminars, with other refreshments available for sale. Seminar attendees are invited to bring soil for testing, with “results in about a week,” and are welcome to pose any gardening questions to the experts at the “Ask a Master Gardner” booth. “We also have a raffle and used [gardening] books we give away,” Bonner said.
Looking forward to all the gardening knowledge and networking available to attendees at the 2025 spring gardening workshops, Bonner said she and her planning team are “very excited.”
