2024 Legacy Awards
Escambia, Pasco, and Santa Rosa receive 2024 Legacy Fund awards
The Master Gardener Legacy Fund was created to provide financial support for outstanding Master Gardener Volunteer projects.
Every year, counties apply to the Florida Master Gardener Legacy Fund in hopes that they will win funding. This year, UF/IFAS Extension Escambia, Pasco, and Santa Rosa County Master Gardener Volunteer programs won funding for their proposals.
Escambia County: Edible Gardening Education
Within the Escambia Demonstration Garden in Cantonment, the Edible Garden has been a crowd favorite since the beginning. With growing interest in edible home gardening practices, UF/IFAS Extension Escambia MGVs realized they needed to update the garden. New features would include more plants, seasonal planting guides, signage to describe practices, and plant labels. Additional in-ground and raised beds would offer more variety to growing approaches.
Another improvement to the garden would be a stand-alone area to host courses, such as garden mapping, planting times for seeds and transplants, pollinator identification, harvesting methods, and seed-saving techniques.
The MGVs have also coordinated with the Escambia County UF/IFAS Expanded Food and Nutrition Program to donate any food produced in the garden to the program. With these improvements and new learning opportunities, this popular garden will increase its impact in the community.
Pasco County: Crews Lake Demonstration Garden
When the administrators at the Crews Lake Wilderness Park in Spring Hill wanted to reestablish the park’s demonstration garden, they turned to the Pasco County Master Gardener Volunteers.
The park’s location on the west side of Pasco County offered an opportunity to reach a part of the community living far from the Extension office on the east side of the county.
After touring the garden with park staff, MGVs created a plan to establish raised beds and native plants on the half-acre site, as well as an outdoor classroom. There, the volunteers could finally offer gardening education to a population that has yet to be reached by Pasco MGVs. Local elementary and middle schools could potentially use this area, and homeschool groups that utilize the park for learning have expressed interest in assisting with the project as well.
Santa Rosa County: Greenhouse and QR Code Improvements
The Santa Rosa County Master Gardener Volunteer (SRCMGV) annual plant sale in Milton is the group’s primary fundraiser and an important event in the community. During the 2024 sale, over 2,000 plants were propagated and sold. With this many plants, tracking inventory and writing identification labels by hand was time-consuming, taking up to 21 hours for volunteers to complete. Utilizing QR and bar codes to link plant information would create a more organized inventory, as well as speed up the check-out process. Materials to create these improvements include a horticulture label printer and a scanner. Another improvement to the process would be an updated irrigation system for the SRCMGV greenhouse, where all the plants sold at the sale are grown and propagated. A fully operational and equipped greenhouse will allow for maximum use. The funds raised through the plant sale are used to support the SRCMGV community outreach and education programs, furthering the Santa Rosa MGVs’ impact on their community.