GREENER GARDENS COURSE SYLLABUS; Spring 2013s

Instructors: David King and Orchid Black

Email: greenteach at gmail dot com  teach at nativesanctuary dot com

Phone: redacted 

COURSE TITLE AND NUMBER: Greener Gardens: Sustainable Garden Practices BIOLOGY X498.10

There are no prerequisites for this course. We will meet from April 01 through June 17for 12 meetings. There are three field trips as indicated in our schedule (below). All regular class meetings on campus occur 6:30 PM in Botany Bldg, Room 325 on Teuesday evenings.

Course Purpose:

Sustainability is today's buzzword and many people seek to create a lifestyle with a more favorable impact on the environment. From home gardens to school and commercial sites, our gardens present the perfect place to start. Designed for horticulture students, gardening professionals, educators, and home gardeners, this course focuses on turning your green thumb into a "greener" garden. Topics include composting, irrigation, water harvesting, water wise plants, eating and growing local produce, recycling, and moving towards a sustainable lifestyle when choosing materials and tools. Includes weekend field trips to the Los Angeles River to see our relationship with water in the L.A. Basin, as well as a native garden with sustainable features, focusing not only on California native plants but also on water-conserving planting design. Students also visit the John T. Lyle Center for Regenerative Studies at Cal Poly Pomona, which advances the principles of environmentally sustainable living through education, research, demonstration, and community outreach. This course will enable students to understand and appreciate the changes we will need to make in our gardens to achieve ‘sustainability.’ A multitude of differing strategies will be presented allowing students to choose the extent of their involvement with more sustainable gardens and, ultimately, a more sustainable life style.

Course Objectives:

1. Understand the concept of sustainability and its relevance to the modern garden.
2. The reasons to consider sustainability.
3. Be able to use the concept of sustainability in the creation of a garden and its maintenance.
4. Understand and be able to present to others the concepts and ideas of sustainability and the myriad of alternatives to an overly consumptive garden style.

Application:

This course is designed to be practical. Upon completion, students will be able to employ many different strategies to reduce consumption of water and oil-produced products and create beautiful and productive gardens that comprise a much smaller carbon footprint than most contemporary gardens.

Text for this course:

This course will not have a text. There will be an extensive bibliography from which the material presented has been gleaned; some books more practical, some books theoretical, while others present our current situation and the problems that affect our daily lives and the gardens we grow.

Course Schedule:

Mtg.	Date	Topic
1	01 April	Introduction to Sustainability
2	08 April	Design for Conservation of Resources
3	15 April	Soils
4	22 April	Water I: Water Conservation
5	27 April	Lyle Center for Regenerative Studies
6	29 April	Water II: Water Harvesting
7	04 May	Garden/Garden/The Learning Garden	Afternoon Field Trip
8	06 May	Sustainability of Front Yard Food
9	11 May	LA River Field Trip
10	13 May	Sustainable Planting Palette
11	20 May	Habitat and Hardscape
12	03 June	Sustainable Gardening: The Next Frontier	The Learning Garden

Your grade will be predicated on class participation and your choice of one project (or a combination of one of each for extra credit should it be needed or desired) or one paper of no less than 5 pages on aspects of sustainability; topics and project possibilities will be discussed in class. We encourage students to use their own area of interests when choosing their project or topic.

Office Hours:

We will have no set office hours, however, we will be available by phone and by email. We are willing to meet with students by appointment.

After class is usually not a very good time because that’s when all students vie for answers and we are all tired after a long day. You can get a more thoughtful answer by contacting us another time.

Updates and Handouts

For this course we will utilize a blog page (lagardennotes.blogspot.com) to post handouts and extra material to the class. There is an RSS feed that sends each posting automatically to your email so you can have access to handouts whenever they are posted. This approach is most handy when dealing with field trips because links to maps can be posted and any last minute updates are easily available. If this technology is new to you, another classmate or David will guide you through it. It is not difficult. Those of you on Facebook, there is Greener Gardens Group. While not specifically composed of UCLA Extension students, it includes students from all of David's classes, the preponderance are Extension with some talented professional contributors as well. Handouts are posted there as PDF files.

Please provide both of us with your email address as soon as you can!

Include your cell phone number and your reason for taking this course.

david