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The Lindstrom Home and Business Show and the Spring Gardening Bonanza are now history for the Chisago County Master Gardeners. Although they were both a huge success, we are now concentrating on our Spring Class Series and our plant orders.

I wrote earlier that Jim Birkholz was our first speaker on pruning fruit trees that was attended by 66 interested gardeners. Tuesday, March 25, at 6:30 p.m. is our next class at the Senior Center in North Branch, when we will tackle a couple of unique topics.

Diane Patras is a Chisago County Master Gardener who is no stranger to facilitating classes in many areas. However, this is her first class on sweet potatoes. I know very little about them, so I can only give some history on this unusual plant.

Sweet potatoes are members of the morning glory family. It is not a potato or even a distant cousin. Potatoes are tubers while sweet potatoes are roots. They traveled from country to country after conquests and records show that they were cultivated in Virginia in 1648. No vegetable commonly grown in the United States will withstand more summer heat and very few require as much heat as the sweet potato. Since they need hot weather and require a long growing season, they need to be started as slips indoors. She gave me two plants last spring and we had some great sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving.

Many schools and eating-places are now offering sweet potatoes as one of their vegetable choices. The Center for Science ranks the sweet potato as the number one most nutritious vegetable. It would take 23 cups of broccoli to provide the same amount of Vitamin A as in one medium sweet potato. On an average only about four pounds of sweet potatoes are consumed annually per person in the U.S.

Some of the Master Gardeners go to the Fruit Growers Conference in St. Cloud each winter. One of the classes we attended was on Shiitake mushrooms. Tom Dickhudt, who is our native plant expert, has taken a real interest in growing Shiitake mushrooms. He will demonstrate how to grow them and I will learn along with you. In this article I can only give some background into this interesting mushroom.

The earliest date of cultivation of Shiitake in the Orient is unknown. They were praised as early as the year 199 AD by the emperor of the Kyushu district of Japan. At that time they were gathered wild from rotten tree limbs. Methods of cultivation probably began about 250 to 350 years ago in China and were refined in Japan. Early methods included a system of spore inoculation in a natural setting where notches were cut with hatchets on felled tree trunks. The logs were then placed near logs bearing mature Shiitake mushrooms and exposed to their wind-borne spores.

There are many gardeners who have expressed an interest in raising their own mushrooms, so join us Tuesday, March 25 and learn how to raise both sweet potatoes and mushrooms. There is no charge for this class. To have a spring class schedule mailed to you, call 651-213-8901.

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