Taken from the Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
Written by Alan Hickman

A year ago, when it was first mentioned in this column, Peel Teaching Garden was little more than an untested scheme designed to fill a gap in the programs locally available to home gardeners.
For people who contemplate a career in horticulture, local colleges and universities offer excellent introductions to the scientific and business aspects of the industry. For the home gardener though, these courses are usually far too costly, involve too much time, and delve into matters which are not particularly backyard relevant.
At the other extreme, garden clubs and their kin are inclined to spend most of their time and resources on organization, fund-raising, flower shows, and social events. While some individuals might be involved in gardening projects, the education component of the organization is likely little more than a flower arranging demonstration or sitting in the dark at a general meeting while someone projects innumerable pretty pictures on the wall.
There was a time when a lad could sign on as an apprentice in the gardens of one of Europe's great houses. While in winter he would likely spend his days scrubbing out clay pots in cold water and at night waking up every hour to stoke coal into a greenhouse boiler, he would, all year, be surrounded by skilled journeymen and could learn by seeing and doing. Those days mostly died, though, along with millions of people and a whole way of life, when the First World War ravaged the continent.
Even fifty years ago, the skills required to cultivate a garden were still quite commonplace and most anyone with a garden could prune their own apple tree for best yield. Now, for many, just figuring out how to open the safety-catch on the secateurs is a challenge and as for knowing which way to hold the pruners and which bits to cut off the tree ....??! Today knowledge of gardening as a craft has become so diluted by time and so distorted by commercialization, and marketing designed to sell this gadget or that product, that people literally don't know the difference between a spade and a shovel far less what each tool is used for.
It was to bring back, to pool, and to share with others, the skills and the craft of the practical gardener that Peel Teaching Garden was conceived. To be effective the school needed to require little or no financial commitment on the part of the participants, it needed to generate the very minimum of administration and paperwork, and it had to be useful and of interest to people of all origins and levels of gardening experience.
What was offered was eight hours of 'free'classroom seminars which explored the Whys and Hows of gardening. The Peel Agricultural Society donated the classroom space at no charge and, in return, each seminar attendee agreed to contribute eight hours of actual garden work, maintaining the flower beds at the fairgrounds. It was an elegant plan; nobody needed to spent any money and all the participants could end up better off than when they started.
In practice things worked out more successfully than could have been reasonably expected. Starting in January and ending in April, there were four, two-hour, seminars which took an eclectic look at all manner of things from how to sharpen a spade to what pH actually means. In the gardens, what was planned as simple work parties turned out to be a season-long extension of the learning process.
People who were skeptical during the seminars turned in to believers when they put theories into practice and saw the results. The gardens also became a social place. Working in groups of two or three, people got to know each other as they got to learn new skills and techniques. Perhaps most importantly, as everyone managed at least once to tip over a wheelbarrow or stab a tulip bulb or fall backwards off a garden stool, nobody felt particularly inept, embarrassed or vulnerable.
For a few, a couple of hours here and three or four hours there added up and the original eight-hour commitment became a distant memory. The nursery garden was more than doubled in area, going from a neglected patch of shoulder-high weeds to over three thousand square feet of cultivated bulb and perennial beds. Existing baked-up display beds were re-worked and more than two-thousand spring-flowering bulbs were planted. Even large misplaced shrubs were given legs and relocated to where they could grow and be useful. With a couple of weeks still to go before the season ends, the fairground gardens have had the benefit of more than five hundred volunteer hours.
The 2005 seminar series will begin on Saturday 8th January. As last year it took only one mention in this column for the seminars to be filled, anyone who might be interested in participating should e-mail mailto:peelteachinggarden@rogers.com for further information