What you are holding in your hand right now is an important part of gardening in Galveston County.

If you are reading this on line, forget about it.

Newspapers, seven to 10 layers of them, are what go in your flower or vegetable garden bed, under four to six inches of mulch.

This arrangement is designed to keep weeds from growing, eliminating a huge percentage of those unwelcome plants that plague our floral showplaces.

That’s according to Ann Wygres, a Master Gardener from our county who told members of the Texas City Civic Club — not how the cow ate the cabbage — but how to grow that cabbage in the first place.

She said the two biggest problems in our area are weeds and moisture.

So, we need to make raised beds for everything to drain away all that extra moisture.

Then we layer them with newspapers and mulch. The papers block out the sun. Weeds can’t grow without sunshine. The mulch covers up the newspapers so the beds look pretty. Love them as we do, newspapers don’t look pretty spread out all over the ground unadorned.

The Master Gardeners program is probably one of Galveston County greatest treasures. Here, available to anybody who needs them, are folks who are experts on all kinds of horticultural subjects.

Master Gardeners are, in fact, great treasures in all the counties of Texas. Ours happen to be the second oldest group in the state, having been founded in 1982 by former County Agent George Meador.

We have specialists in fruit and nuts, bugs and weeds, vegetables and flowers. You name it, we got it.

Each Master Gardener, operating under the auspices of the Texas A&M Agricultural Extension Service and the county, takes 70 hours of classroom instruction and does 50 hours of volunteer work to qualify. Then, Master Gardeners get six additional training hours and 12 hours of volunteer work a year to keep current.

They are headquartered in the county building on state Highway 3 just before you get to Dickinson Bayou. There, they have a beautiful demo garden, built in 1966, on top of an asphalt driveway. They also have a collection of more than 600 bug specimens there.

But the newest, and best, demo garden is in the creating process out at Carbide Park, where all kinds of beautiful things are going on.

They began clearing “a thicket of poison ivy called the brush pile” in February 2004, and thanks to the help of bulldozers and dozens of volunteers, they have made a lot of progress, with more than an acre in an orchard and rows and rows of raised beds.

“Drainage is our biggest problem,” Wygres said, “so we had to create berms three feet above grade. In nine berms, we have apples, che, citrine, figs, jujubes, loquat, mayhaws, Asian and European pears, persimmon, grapes, blueberries, blackberries and papayas. We will learn what will do well here.”

There are test rows of old roses, 56 raised beds with vegetables, ornamentals and perennials. They have had the soil tested. They are testing some galvanized tomato cages.

All these tests will help all of us know what to plant, when to plant, where to plant, how to plant.

If you want to go see the demo garden, or need any other information, call the county agent’s office by calling your local county building and asking to be connected to that office.

Cathy Gillentine is a columnist for The Daily News. She may be reached at cgillentine1(at)sbcglobal.net.

source : news.galvestondailynews.com