Fort Bend County Master Gardeners

Texas Master Gardeners Website	Fort Bend County Master Gardeners, Inc.	Texas AgriLife Extension Website
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Berry Garden Butterfly Garden Circle Gardens Cottage Garden Grapes Herbal Knot Garden Japanese Garden Roses Texas Natives Water Garden YardWise		Fort Bend County Master Gardeners help maintain several demonstration gardens. On the first Saturday of each month, between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m., you will find our volunteers working these gardens on our regularly scheduled "Work Day." We invite you to visit our 4 acres of Demonstration Gardens and talk to the volunteers who design and maintain them. It’s a great way to learn! Park in front of the Agriculture Center, located at 1402 Band Road, Rosenberg, 77471. Take one of the sidewalks back to the area behind the building to find the Master Gardeners. What kind of gardens (This links require Adobe Reader. You can download Adobe Reader here.) do we have here? We have: A wonderful Japenese style garden that you can tour and reflect. A water garden with the soothing sounds of flowing water. A Texas native garden showing you some of our remarkable Texas native plants. A vegetable garden with seasonal plantings. A large greenhouse. A cottage garden to remind you of simple times. A butterfly garden to attract colorful insects. Our 'Circle Gardens' that contain many experimental plants. A berry patch brimming with various berry varieties. And other gardens of interest! Why Demonstration Gardens? Our Demonstration Gardens are used for many purposes but our primary goal is to determine how well certain plants perform in the Fort Bend County area. We ask questions like: Will this (tomato, berry, peach) variety produce here? If so, how much fruit can we expect to get from one plant in a season? Is the fruit tasty, fleshy, firm, large, small, etc.? Can this variety be cut and rooted here? Will the growth rate of this variety be increased with the addition of compost, more water, organic fertilizer? Of course, our Gardens are also used to train Master Gardeners in horticultural skills. We get hands-on training in planting techniques, berry patch maintenance, transplanting, rooting, plant identification, landscape design, insect control and identification, and many other areas. These skills are not classroom based. We get our hands dirty on our workdays! CEMAP CEMAP stands for Coordinated Educational and Marketing Assistance Program and it is an effort coordinated by the Texas A&M University Agriculture Program. CEMAP is designed to help consumers identify the best plants for Texas. The program consists of a special team of Texas A&M horticulturists who are constantly searching for outstanding landscape plants specifically adapted to Texas. When they find something that they believe will fit into this category, they enter it into a rigorous testing program that includes trial beds at locations statewide. Trials are conducted for up to three years for an annual flower, and up to eight years for a new woody plant. No pesticides of any kind are ever applied to the test plants in order to assess their genetic capability to resist disease and insect problems. The Demonstration Gardens at the Fort Bend County Texas AgriLife Extension Service Office is a site for testing of these plants. Once testing has been completed, the most outstanding plants, those which consistently delivered the highest levels of landscape and garden performance, coupled with the widest range of adaptation and the strongest pest resistance, are designated as Texas Superstar® or as Earth-Kind® Roses. They are then marketed through the media and through use of the Texas Superstar® pot label. In addition to the testing of the plants, our office will aid in the distribution of information regarding these plants.