BOLIVAR — A crowd of 20 burgeoning gardening enthusiasts filled the meeting area in Bolivar-Harpers Ferry Public Library, eager to learn how to grow a successful garden in the Eastern Panhandle, on Saturday afternoon.
The “Intro to Gardening” workshop was one of seven being taught by members of the Berkeley-Jefferson Extension Master Gardener Association this month — twice as many as had been taught in 2025, its inaugural year. Each workshop was led by a different pair of Master Gardeners, with the ones teaching at Saturday’s workshop being Charles Town residents Elaine Pollinski and Angela Laboda.
“The focus of this workshop has been to cover information on the basics of gardening in this area,” Pollinski said. “Specifically, regarding safety, planning, soil testing, methods of gardening and site selection.”
She noted that the knowledge they shared on this subject was essential to successfully starting and maintaining a garden.
“The soil we have in the ground around here tends to be clay and can be very rocky, depending on the location,” Pollinski said, mentioning this was especially true around housing developments, whose builders did not put any effort into preserving the quality of their soil. “It’s not the most hospitable growing environment.”
For Pollinski, the poor soil quality around her home has driven her to make use of raised garden beds and container gardening, with buckets, for growing produce. Only with the flower garden that she wanted to surround her house, did she choose to make an exception to that. The decision proved to be worth it in the end, for her, though it required her to make a concerted effort to prepare and enrich the soil for growing.
“With the flower garden, because I was going to be putting plants into the ground, I laid down a layer of wetted down cardboard and covered it with mulch. I just let it sit and decompose,” Pollinski said. “That started to yield good results — I could see some worms coming up, which was great, because they are an essential part of the soil food web.”
Laboda said she had made a similar decision, to use raised beds for all of her growing, outside of her ornamental flower garden.
“A great idea is to put worm castings in your soil, if you don’t have worms in your garden but you want it to be enriched by worm poop,” Laboda said, mentioning it and a lot of other reasonably-priced gardening ingredients can be purchased at Costco. “Just add it right in — it can make an incredible difference.”
The pair taught this same course at the Bolivar-Harpers Ferry Public Library last year, but said they expanded on its original information to include answers to questions that had been raised by their previous audience. They agreed that their goal, with teaching the workshop, was to help others realize gardening is possible for anyone to do — and that it should be an enjoyable hobby, at the end of the day.
“Just have fun. Don’t stress too much about it,” Pollinski said.
The two remaining “Intro to Gardening” workshops will be held this coming Saturday. Those interested in attending the workshop at South Jefferson Public Library on Feb. 28, from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., are encouraged to reach out to 304-725-6227 for more information. Those who would like to attend the workshop at South Berkeley Public Library on Feb. 28, from 10-11:30 a.m., should RSVP by emailing david.porterfield@mbcpl.org.
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