The Grow LA Gardens Initiative by the UC Master Gardener Program of Los Angeles County has been going on since 2010. This is a course taught by Master Gardeners for residents to learn about gardening in order to start their own gardens at home.

With all my recent failures and oversaturation of different viewpoints in gardening, I was happy to stumble into this program which provides a scientific background in the basics of gardening. Classes are held throughout the Los Angeles County in Fall and Spring and some locations fill up quickly. A class is offered virtually but there are many benefits to taking the class in person as you can enjoy the tactileness of gardening and meet like-minded people.

I took my course at the Los Angeles County Fairplex at The Farm. Not only is it a joy to walk through a lovely small farm every morning for four weeks, but I also wanted to experience what it was like here should I want to volunteer in the future.

A typical session would include lectures for several hours and then a hands-on task. The hands-on tasks were fun take home projects to get you interested and started in growing.

I was pleased to see the emphasis on regenerative practices that an urban gardener can apply to their home garden. These topics included composting, understanding your soil, and water usage including watersaving and irrigation. I felt that this information was quite beneficial as it helped decode some of the issues I was having at home. It addressed how much compost should be applied and how much water and how often my plants needed to be watered based on the type of soil I had.

There is some homework for the course and it involves reading from a Master Gardener’s home garden handbook. It has some basic information for gardening. If you are busy or don’t really enjoy reading, this is the minimal amount of homework for the course.

If you are interested in the topics and have more time, there are additional videos and reading material which accompanies each week. As someone who is neither beginner or advanced but somewhere in between, I consumed this additional course work. This added about 2-3 hours of homework to my week. Most of this information is also covered in class so it is not necessary to go through this information but I felt that reading about it in advanced allowed me to ask questions should I have any. Attending the lectures helped clarify what I read and gave me a more solid background on the information.

A truly unique feature of The Farm was their compost bins. Their composting area was larger than my entire garden and included the many different phases of composting from several wired bins to the turning of hot composting and to even an even finer finished compost area. Seeing that in person made me want to focus on compost more and seeing how I can strengthen my composting. One of the reading materials was a lengthy Master Gardener’s Composting Guide which I did not read (the only material I didn’t read) but one that I want to tackle some time in the future.

The other resource of importance were the Master Gardeners themselves. We had a minimum of 5-6 Master Gardeners every week and sometimes even more. They all showed up ready to assist and help anyone with questions or to just chat about gardening. They volunteered their time and on our class, on a Sunday, to help anyone with garden questions, showing their true love of gardening and helping others.

Classes are offered in Spring and Fall. $65 for the course. View their website for locations, dates, and current pricing: https://ucanr.edu/county/los-angeles-county/grow-la-gardens-class-schedule.