Workshop helps Romans get their gardens to grow

Friday provided the perfect weather for 17 people wanting to learn more about gardening as they got their hands dirty at Oak Hill and The Martha Berry Museum for a vegetable gardening workshop.

Spending the morning learning different techniques for planning, design, planting, maintenance and harvesting of vegetables, they then headed out to the greenhouses at Oak Hill to put their learning into practice.

“I know there are a lot of people who want to grow their own vegetables and want to learn how to do it,” said instructor Kristin McNully, who along with Heather Miller organized the workshop.

McNully said she hoped those who participated in the workshop learned a number of things, especially that vegetable gardening isn’t as hard as some make it out to be.

“A lot of people don’t realize they can grow things in containers with good results most of the time,” she said.

Everyone who participated in the class was sent home with a tomato plant to help start their own gardens.

That was helpful to participants like John Shahan and Mark Bates, who both said they learned a few things they hadn’t known before about gardening.

“It’s nice to get to put into practice what you talked about earlier in the day,” Bates said Friday afternoon during a break from tilling the soil.

Both Bates and Shahan said they planned to start their gardens for hobbies, with the added benefit of having fresh vegetables by the end of the summer if all goes well with their own planting.

“It’s relaxing and burns off the stress and energy you build up during the day,” Bates said. “You get the satisfaction of watching something grow.”

Tips for growing your own

According to Kristin McNully, vegetable gardening might be one of the easiest and most productive forms of gardening around. Here are some tips she said people should generally follow:

# Though giving plants plenty of room to spread their roots is the best way to grow vegetables, McNully said a large amount of space isn’t necessary to plant a garden. Many plants will grow in containers, so long as they’re big enough.

# Once the plants are in good soil and growing, they need to be well watered and tended. She said to keep a sharp eye out for pests, fungus and other diseases that might grow on plants.

# Sunshine is the engine that makes plants grow up healthy and produce the fruits of gardening labor at harvest, and McNully said to keep vegetables in as much sun as possible. Though difficult to grow the plants in the shade, it isn’t impossible.

McNully said tomato plants are among the easiest vegetables to grow if you get them from nurseries. If you prefer to sow the seeds yourself, she suggests starting out with squash, zucchini and cucumbers.