Stay Informed

There’s something special about gardening.

“It is very satisfying for me to go outside, get some basil, get some garlic, get some tomatoes and make a dish out of that,” said Teresa Bowlby of Hancock County. “It’s so good, you know? It’s very satisfying for me to know exactly where my food is coming from.”

Luann Troxel of LaPorte County enjoys fresh vegetables, but it’s the plants themselves that attract her. “I love looking at the texture and the color of plants, what works and what doesn’t work,” she said.

Bowlby and Troxel have taken their passion for gardening a step further and have become master gardeners, a national program administered in Indiana by the Purdue Extension Service. The master gardener program helps participants increase their knowledge of a wide variety of horticultural subjects. In turn, participants share knowledge while providing leadership and service in educational gardening activities within their communities.

Troxel said she didn’t really take to gardening until she was an adult. Her mother had a vegetable or “truck” patch, but that didn’t make her into a gardener – far from it.

“The truck patch basically meant that my siblings and I would sit around the picnic table doing snap beans,” Troxel said. “It was not fun, it was this awful chore, and we hated it. We didn’t have enough respect for fresh-grown things.”

Her introduction to gardening as an enjoyable pastime came when she married her husband, Tom, and moved to Tom’s dairy farm. The couple retired from dairy farming in 2016 but still farm 220 acres in LaPorte and Starke counties.

They had some landscaping done, but the results were less than good.

“A lot of it died. I didn’t know what I was doing,” she said. That was when she started getting interested in plants, starting with daylilies and then moving on to many other kinds of plants and flowers.

When a master gardener program was offered in Porter County just 10 miles from her farm, she took that opportunity to acquire more knowledge.

For Bowlby and her husband, Steve (who is also a master gardener), gardening “has always been something we’ve done.” The couple owns 78 acres in eastern Hancock County, which they rent out. They enjoy flowers and landscaping, and they also raise vegetables in raised beds and containers.

It was the community service aspect of the master gardener program that attracted the Bowlbys. After she retired from Eli Lilly, Bowlby said she was looking for a way to get connected to the community, and the master gardener program seemed to fulfill that.

“There are a lot of things that we can do within the master gardeners,” Bowlby explained. “We’re definitely more than a gardening club. We’re helping the environment, we teach people about invasives, we help with invasive removal, we teach people about planting native plants.”

Bowlby’s particular passions are pollinator habitats and invasive species removal.

“There are so many things that you can be involved in. You can be a big hosta person, you can be a big annual person, you can be a garden person. There are so many possibilities. There really is something for everyone,” she said.

In addition to regular gardening, Troxel said that she’s become a “plant nerd” and now has well over 200 houseplants.

“To be totally honest with you, in the last three years, I have just gone nuts with houseplants,” she said.

Her plants stay outside during the warm months but are overwintered in a unique structure: the Troxels’ former milking parlor, now converted into winter plant storage and a fitness area that Tom uses for a wellness program designed to help him better manage his Parkinson’s disease.

Aside from increasing their knowledge, what both Bowlby and Troxel like about the master gardener program are the opportunities it offers to serve their communities.

“It can be intimidating when you say ‘master gardener,’ but really we’re masters at finding answers for people,” Bowlby said. They do this through speaking engagements and community workshops. In addition, the Hancock County Master Gardeners are in the process of establishing an answer line on their website.

“I’ve found a little bit of a marriage between farming and gardening,” added Troxel. “I feel like there needs to be a little more dialogue. And I feel like that’s happening, to be honest. It’s way better than it was at one time. It was almost a turf war at some times, and I feel like we’ve found mutual respect.”