Web Resources for Master Gardeners
2006 West Virginia Master Gardener Conference
Lee Young, Washington County Cooperative Extension
ljs32@psu.edu; Washington.extension.psu.edu
What’s On Your Website?
West Virginia Master Gardeners
http://www.wvu.edu/~agexten/hortcult/master/index.htm
West Virginia University Gardening Resources
http://www.wvu.edu/~agexten/hortcult/index.html
What’s On Our Website?
http://www.extension.psu.edu/Hort.html
Exercise: Can you find your way to the Pennsylvania Master Gardener website from this page?
http://washington.extension.psu.edu/
Click on “Solution Source” and look around at the available articles.
Problem Solvers and Pest Identification
1. PA IPM Pest Solver
http://paipm.cas.psu.edu/
Click “Pest Problem Solver” on the left bar.
This is the PA IPM problem solver site. Choose from among the different types of plants (e.g. Landscape, Home Garden, etc.)
Exercise: Use the problem solver to figure out a possible cause for a dogwood tree that is showing symptoms of leaf spotting (about ¼ inch in diameter) and die-back of lower twigs and branches. When you find the appropriate fact sheet, click on the blue underlined text to see pictures of the symptoms.
Exercise: Use the problem solver to figure out why someone’s petunias might be dying from the crown of the plant.
Exercise: Use the problem solver to find non-chemical ways of controlling squash bugs in the garden.
2. Penn State Woody Ornamental IPM
http://woodypests.cas.psu.edu/
This is a Woody Ornamental IPM pest problem solver from SW Pennsylvania.
Exercise: Use the Pest Diagnosis page to find out what might be causing browning of the tips of juniper plants.
3. University of Maryland’s Home and Garden Information Center
http://www.hgic.umd.edu
Click “Plant Diagnostics” on the left bar.
Exercise: Use the Diagnostics menu (left bar) to diagnose the following lawn problem. Grass leaves of perennial ryegrass are showing leaf spots with tan centers, and the grass is beginning to die out in areas of the yard.
4. Ask the Plant Doctors from Cornell
http://www.nysaes.cornell.edu
Click “Public Outreach”
Under “Plants and Gardening”, click “Ask the Plant Doctors”
This is a great guide to how to go about diagnosing plant problems.
Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “What’s Wrong with My Tomatoes?”
This is a useful FAQ page for common tomato problems, with detailed answers on control measures.
http://www.explore.cornell.edu
click on “home gardening”
OK, there’s a ton of stuff to look at on this page, and you can do that later. For now, go under “Vegetable Fact Sheets” and click “common problems”. Another FAQ site.
5. N.J. Weed Gallery
http://www.rce.rutgers.edu/weeds
Lots of pictures of common weeds. Could this be organized in a better way to help you identify an unknown weed?
6. Invasive Species and Emerging Diseases
http://www.aphis.usda.gov/ppq
USDA APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service); web page for plant protection and quarantine. Central location for information on invasive species and emerging plant diseases.
Exercise: under PPQ Hot Issues, find two diseases and one insect that threaten our landscape and garden plants.
Plant Identification, Varieties, and Cultural Information
1. Useful Sites from Penn State
http://consumerhorticulture.psu.edu
This is the Penn State Horticulture Department’s consumer horticulture page. There is a useful searchable database of FAQs and fact sheets on a variety of topics.
Exercise: Use the searchable database to see what might be causing an oak tree to decline during the fall.
http://hortweb.cas.psu.edu/extensin/vegcrops/herb_directory.php
A database of herb information.
Exercise: Can you think of any herbs that are not in this database?
This site has a lot of practical and accessible information about landscape trees. Because it is supported by a number of different organizations and agencies, it has many useful links to other sites on the web.
Exercise: I don’t know about you, but I’m not really that good at identifying trees. What kinds of resources does this page offer to help me?
2. Useful Sites from Cornell
http://www.gardening.cornell.edu
Exercise: Follow link to Vegetable Varieties for Gardeners. On the left bar, search for “tomato”. What does this database say about “Valley Girl” tomatoes?
http://explore.cornell.edu
We were here before, but here’s another feature. Click on the flower image to go to flower growing guides.
Exercise: Use the “all-in-one” search function to find an early fall-blooming annual with yellow blooms and a height of 1 to 3.5 feet, requiring only moderate care. How many plants match these criteria?
http://aggiehorticulture.tamu.edu/ornamentals/Cornell_Herbaceous
Exercise: Play with this list.
3. Useful Sites from Ohio State
http://ohioline.osu.edu
click on Yard and Garden
scroll down and under Web Sites, click “Web Garden”, then choose Plant Facts
Exercise: Enter a term in the search box at the top about a problem you have in your own garden. Did you find anything useful about the problem?
4. A Really Fun Site from Rutgers
http://ifplantscouldtalk.rutgers.edu
Exercise: Find an educational video and watch it. Take a virtual garden tour. Check out the variety of fact sheets available.
5. U Illinois Urban Extension, Selecting Trees for your Home
http://www.urbanext.uiuc.edu/
Select Hort Center, then Selecting Trees for Your Home
This is an interactive site designed to help select the right tree species for specific locations around the home landscape.
6. Don’t forget plant suppliers and plant industry associations such as…
http://www.bulb.com
Exercise: Find growing and variety information info at the site of a well known seed company (e.g. Stokes, Harris, Johnny’s Selected Seeds).
Pesticide Information
http://www.pested.psu.edu/
Penn State’s pesticide education site. Choose “Home and Garden”
http://www.btny.purdue.edu/Pubs/PPP/PPP-62.pdf
Offering Sound Pest Management Advice to the Public
http://www.npic.orst.edu
National Pesticide Information Center
http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/
Click Fact Sheets/Slide Set/Self Study Tutorial
pesticide applicator core tutorial
On-Line Training
1. Rob Crassweller’s pruning slide presentation
http://hortweb.cas.psu.edu/extension/treefruit/trfruit.html
Click on Pruning and Training Fruit Trees. This slide set is a good example of online training.
2. Other on-line courses, many of which are linked to Cornell’s Life Long Learning page:
http://extension.oregonstate.edu/mg/botany
On-line botany module from Oregon’s MG series.
http://erec.ifas.ufl.edu/MG
On-line plant pathology module.
http://pss.uvm.edu/ppp/hgpo/hgpo.htm
Herbaceous Garden Plants Online. Not free.
Curricula and Teaching Resources
1. Garden Mosaics
This is a wonderful curriculum for working with children, youth, and seniors.
http://www.gardenmosaics.cornell.edu/
2. Exploratorium Museum’s gardening site
http://www.exploratorium.edu/gardening/feed/index.html
click on ‘the dirt on dirt’
Free Software
A free office productivity suite of software (word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, database, etc.). Takes about 20 minutes to download over DSL.
Searching the Web
1. Search engines
Most popular include Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, Lycos.
Recommended to run a search on more than one search engine.
2. Basic searches
Get on a search engine: google, yahoo, MSN, whatever. Search for something simple. How many pages did you get? Or pages of pages? Sponsored sites vs. everything else.
3. Narrowing your search
Do a Google search on sweet corn. You get hits for sweet corn, corn, recipes, lots of extraneous stuff. 2 million hits or more.
Images. Do an image search for sweet corn. Could you use these images in a presentation or display?
Using the edu domain and narrowing search. Choose “advanced” search. Limit to .edu domain, and “without the words” for “recipe”. Results? Still lots of commercial production sites. Add “West Virginia” and “garden” to the “with all the words” field. What are we missing by narrowing to .edu domain? Anything useful in .gov or .org? .com?
4. Wikipedia: a new spin on “consider the source”
Go to www.wikipedia.com
Choose a language, and then do a search on sweet corn.
“Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has rapidly grown into the largest reference website on the Internet. The content of Wikipedia is free, written collaboratively by people from all around the world. This website is a wiki, which means that anyone with access to an Internet-connected computer can edit, correct, or improve information throughout the encyclopedia. On Wikipedia you are welcome to be bold and edit articles yourself, contributing knowledge as you see fit in a collaborative way. .
Because Wikipedia is an ongoing work to which in principle anybody can contribute, it differs from a paper-based reference source in some very important ways. In particular, older articles tend to be more comprehensive and balanced, while newer articles may still contain significant misinformation. However, unlike a paper reference source, Wikipedia is completely up-to-date, with articles on topical events being created or updated within minutes or hours, rather than months or years for printed encyclopedias.”