Happy Birthday St. Johns County Agricultural Extension Center

County Agricultural Extension Center

St. Johns County is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Agricultural Extension Center at 3125 Agricultural Center Drive, St. Augustine, FL 32092-0572.  On any weekday (and a great many weekends) you'll see volunteers and county extension employees hard at work providing science-based information and lots of fun activities to help our residents understand and appreciate horticulture (professional and homeowner), agriculture, 4-H youth programs, forestry issues, disaster mitigation, marine and estuary programs, and consumer information and nutrition.  

For instance, every weekday from 9AM until noon, county residents can get free help with horticultural questions provided by our University of Florida certified master gardeners.  Just call  (904) 209-0430 or come to the center.  The extension center hosts many free and lost-cost classes and events too.  See the latest newsletters on Coastal Environment, 4-H Youth,  and Lawn and Garden topics.  

But you can't fully appreciate where you are unless you know where you've been.  Learn where St. Johns County has been by visiting the  County Administration Building, 500 San Sebastian View to see the free exhibit on our county's agricultural history.  The exhibit is open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.   It runs through April 24.   For more information regarding the display or the Agricultural Center,  call (904) 209-0430.

Welcome Spring! Our February Garden Party at Alpine Groves

Eight intrepid gardeners brought rakes, clippers, loppers, and, as you see, sheets and brooms, to the Garden Club of Switzerland’s February garden party at AlpineGroves Butterfly Garden.  For an hour they braved tangly old vines, pointy branches, crumbly leaves, and fire ants to prune back deadwood and sweep up the “carnage”.  The gardeners in the “American Gothic” photo were about to dump the debris from their sheet into the woods to decay.  No need to call in forensics, this is just what nature intends.  

Punxatawney Phil may have called for six more weeks of winter, but his prognostications do not extend to Florida.  We are enjoying the beginning of spring here, with daily highs bouncing between the upper seventies and low fifties.  And in the garden there were indeed signs of life, and not just from the gardeners who showed up for the party.

Our Garden Has a Pulse.  

A male coontie showing its cone, which looks like the cone of a fir tree - if fir tree's cones were orange...  Coonties are dioecious - meaning each plant is either male or female.  You never know what the sex is until the reproductive equipment start to show themselves.  We hope the other coontie in the garden is female, but she hasn't "come out" yet.  Learn more about coonties in our post describing the coontie as northern Florida's answer to the sago in our Resources section
  

A "clump" of green that may be a shasta daisy reemerging from its hibernating roots, or something else surprising:

 

 

Many Hands Make Light Work.