Florida Master Gardeners on Marco Island

On a recent field trip after Hurricane Ian a group of Florida Master Gardeners stopped at the Calusa Garden Club’s Butterfly Garden on Winterberry Drive across the street from the Senior Ball Park on Marco Island. We observed that plants native to Florida survived the hurricane better than others. 

If you are interested in replacing your damaged plants, bushes, and trees with Florida native varieties you can come to this year’s Master Gardeners Yard and Garden Show on Saturday and Sunday November 12 and 13 from 9:00 AM to 4:00PM. You can talk to Florida Master Gardeners directly, tour the County Extension gardens at 14700 Immokalee Road in Naples and check out the many varieties of plants and things for your garden offered by 27 vendors. Admission is $5 and kids are free. You can also find out about becoming a volunteer Florida Master Gardener yourself, a fun and rewarding outreach.

Any resident can seek help with their gardens, plants, palms and trees by calling the Extension Office at 239-252-4800 on Monday mornings from 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM. This is a free service provided by the Florida Master Gardener Program. Alternatively, residents can use the UF/IFAS website for science-based information about all things gardening. The website is https://ifas.ufl.edu/ and easy to use. 

Volunteer Florida Master Gardeners help people find practical gardening and landscape solutions to problems specific to living in Florida. Each year the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences UF/IFAS offers an extensive training course for interested volunteers.

Here is a short history of how we came to be. In 1862 the Federal Land Grant Act gave states tens of thousands of acres of land. Proceeds from the sale of these lands were to be invested in an endowment fund that would provide support for colleges of agriculture and mechanical arts in each state, known as land grant colleges. The University of Florida is one of these.

Another 1914 Act established the Cooperative Extension System, a partnership between land grant colleges, including the University of Florida (UF), and the US Department of Agriculture, to provide scientific knowledge and expertise to the public through educational programs. 

In 1964, Florida’s higher education governing board created the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS) by combining various UF Colleges and the Cooperative Extension Services into a single unit.

Finally in 1979 a group of Florida Extension agents chose to maximize resources by using a new volunteer training program called the Florida Master Gardener Program. This Program trains people to assist extension agents in providing research based horticultural education to Florida residents. The funds needed to run the Cooperative Extension System and the Florida Master Gardener Program comes from the US Department of Agriculture, the State of Florida, and Collier County. The word ‘cooperative’ implies a sharing of information generated through sound research programs at the federal and state levels. The term “extension” defines this organization’s purpose – to extend the information generated at state and federal levels to people at the local level in the form of a “service.”

Today there are 78 volunteer Florida Master Gardeners in Collier County and six Florida Master Gardeners living on Marco Island. Some are pictured in the photo.