Polk County Master Gardener Greenhouse

PCMG greenhouse project is designed to provide the following:

• Education opportunities for the people enrolled in the Master Gardener class. These people are Interns who are required to participate in a lab at the greenhouse that teaches seeding, transplanting, watering, soil preparation, pot preparation, potting techniques, and inventory of plants. Also, they are required to spend six of their first year’s volunteer hours using those skills in the greenhouse.
• An opportunity for PCMG to earn volunteer and education hours toward their minimum requirement to maintain certification.
• For the gardens maintained by PCMG, grow their requested plants. The PCMG gardens are the Discovery Garden at the state fairgrounds, Demo Garden in Urbandale, and Enabling Garden in Altoona (these will be called the Gardens).
• Grow plants to be sold at the PCMG annual plant sale which is the single largest source of revenue for our non-profit organization.
• We also grow vegetables to be distributed by two food pantries (Urbandale, and Altoona) not to harvest but to give to folks empowering them to have their own gardens. For each pantry, we provide 20 tomato plants and 20 pepper plants.
• At the completion of our growing season and after the Plant Sale, the remaining plants are given to non-profit organizations. We average giving plants to 33 organizations every year.