Get the recordings!

Grab ten of the top-rated recordings from our 2024 Advanced Education Conference!

We’ve selected ten of the top recordings to help you boost your gardening knowledge and skills. You can purchase these recordings through May 15, 2025, and you’ll have access to watch them until June 1, 2025. This includes the keynote by Rebecca McMackin, a globally renowned horticulturist and garden designer, who will share insights on research-based gardening and environmental stewardship.

These recordings provide fantastic learning opportunities with top-notch classes and instructors. They support the WSU Extension Master Gardener Program’s mission to empower and sustain diverse communities through relevant, unbiased, research-based horticulture and environmental stewardship education. Plus, WSU Extension Master Gardeners can earn Continuing Education (CE) hours to enhance their ability to teach sustainable horticulture skills across Washington.

The recordings package includes the following classes:

Ticket Price

General:
$49

Purchase your ticket here

Once you purchase your ticket, keep an eye out for an email from Eventbrite with a link to view the recordings. They will be available to watch at your leisure until June 1, 2025.

www.rebeccamcmackin.com

2024 Keynote: Adventures in Ecological Horticulture

Who doesn’t love butterflies? Our gardens can be stunningly beautiful while also providing habitat for the wildlife that enriches our lives. Indeed, in these dire times, garden design and management must consider the many other organisms that use our land. However, traditional landscaping practices rarely take biodiversity into consideration, and there is a dearth of effective guidelines to follow.

For ecological horticulturist Rebecca McMackin cultivating habitat is central to landscape management.

In her 11 years as Director of Horticulture at Brooklyn Bridge Park, Rebecca oversaw 85 acres of diverse, organic landscapes, all managed to support birds, butterflies, and soil microorganisms. If she can do it in the middle of New York City, you can do it in your garden.

Natives, Cultivars, Perennials: What Plants are Best for a Changing Climate

Instructor, Molly van der Burch

Discover the unique traits of natives, cultivars, and perennials. Explore how they vary in attracting pollinators, adding biodiversity, and demonstrating climate readiness for a drier Pacific Northwest region. Recorded session.

Learn more about Molly

Molly van der Burch
A native Seattleite, Molly retired after 30 years of teaching in 2009 and became a King County Master Gardener. She helps staff the Mercer Island and Crossroads Farmer’s Markets Master Gardener clinics as well as teaching classes at the Bellevue Demonstration Garden and Bellevue Botanical Garden. Molly has been a Board member of the Northwest Perennial Alliance and the Bellevue Botanical Garden Society. She has a small garden consulting business, designing gardens and coaching clients on pruning, containers, and plant choices.

Native Bees and the Washington Bee Atlas

Instructor, Karen Wright

There are at least 600 species of bees in Washington state! Karen Wright will be talking about basic bee biology and the diversity of bees in the Pacific Northwest. Most native bees are very different to the European honeybee. She will then give an introduction to the new Washington Bee Atlas (WaBA) that was formed in 2023.

The WaBA is a community science group that trains volunteers to collect, euthanize, pin and label bee specimens. They collect all the relevant data through iNaturalist, providing date, location, collector and host plant information. The specimens are identified by the Washington State Department of Agriculture pollinator taxonomist and then deposited at Washington State University’s insect collection. Data is then made public via SCAN and will be used to assess the conservation status of all 600 species of native bees known to occur in Washington. WaBA is modeled after the Oregon Bee Atlas and uses much of the infrastructure that has been successfully implemented by Oregon State Extension.

Learn more about Karen

Karen Wright
Karen Wright was hired February 1st, 2023 by the Washington State Department of Agriculture to develop and manage the Washington Bee Atlas. She got her Master’s degree at Oregon State University in Entomology (working on true bugs and beetles in hazelnuts) in 1999. Then she moved to New Mexico where she started her career working on native bees. Working for the Sevilleta Long Term Ecological Research Program based out of the University of New Mexico, she started a long-term monitoring program on native bees and wildflower phenology. She took the Bee Course in 2001 to start learning to identify bees and then was mentored by Terry Griswold after that. She developed a collection of over 600 species of bees from central New Mexico that is housed at the University of New Mexico and the long-term study is still ongoing with over 20 years of data. She got her PhD from the University of New Mexico on the Evolution of Diet Breadth in Melissodes bees. After that, she was curator of the insect collection at Texas A&M University for six years until she saw the job listing for the Washington Bee Atlas. She has happily relocated to Yakima, Washington with her dogs and husband.

From Scraps to Soil: Mastering the Art of Composting

Instructor, Bonnie Orr, PhD

Compost is a soil amendment that enhances water retention and soil structure. Compost creates a biologically healthy soil by providing for earthworms, soil insects and microorganisms. In this engaging class with Dirt Diva, Bonnie Orr, you will learn how to compost safely.

Learn more about Bonnie

How Climate Change Will Impact Life and Gardening in the 21st Century Urban Environments

Instructor, Dr. Paul Hessburg

Climate change is rapidly altering the conditions and lifestyles of people in the American West. Impacts range from extremely dry and hot summers, to warmer winters, reduced winter snowpack, rain on snow events, earlier spring and later fall seasons, longer summers, and flash and long duration droughts. These changes will continue for the foreseeable future and they will intensify with time.

Variation in hot vs cold, wet vs dry extremes will also be greater. By 2100, climate forecasts tell us that the length of summers will be nearly 6 months, squeezing out shoulder season and winter season lengths. And perhaps most important, the seasonal phenology of ornamental and crop plants will change and become less predictable year over year. What is to be done with all of these changes? Can we even prepare? Yes, we can prepare for many of the coming changes. This talk will cover positive habits we can cultivate by reading our gardens and conditions change, and it will inform and hopefully diversify our planting and tending practices. The future is in bet hedging.

Learn more about Paul

Dr. Paul Hessburg
WSU, UBC. He is the 2022-2026 President of the International Association for Fire Ecology (AFE), Deputy, International Union of Forestry Research Organizations, and Distinguished Scientist USDA, International Association for Landscape Ecology-North America, and AFE. His research explores wildfire and climate change effects on landscape and wildfire dynamics, and the structure and organization of historical, current, and future landscape resilience under climate change. You can follow his research on ResearchGate and GoogleScholar. Paul is keenly interested in partnering with managers to advance the work of forest restoration and climate change adaptation — employing Indigenous Knowledge and Western Science, and stronger science and management partnerships.

Soil: What it is and How it Works

Instructors, James Cassidy

You will learn what soil REALLY is and why it not only makes your garden possible but how it makes everything possible!!!

Learn more about James

James Cassidy has been an instructor of Soil Science at Oregon State University for over 20 years. The introductory class now has over 100 students each term and is very popular. James is also the faculty advisor for the wildly popular OSU Organic Growers Club – OSU’s student farm.
Coming from a non-traditional background (music industry for over 40+ years) he is passionate about soil and is popular with students because of his dynamic speaking style. The student farm project has over 300 student volunteers on its list-serve and continues to grow. The farm cultivates over 50 different fruit and vegetable crops and is just beginning its 24th year.

How to Adapt Your Home Landscape to Changing Conditions in the Wildland Urban Interface

Instructor, Al Murphy

Climate Change impacts the vegetation around your home in the Wildland Urban Interface and how to cope to those changing conditions with the adaptable vegetation to increase the probability of the survival of your home in the event of a wildland fire.

Learn more about Al

Al Murphy
Al Murphy is a Master Gardener and a semi-retired forester. He spent his 37-year career with the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) working in most of the western United States and Washington DC. Al spent over 20 years on National Fire Overhead teams. While working for the BLM, Al provided National direction for technical assistance to local communities throughout the west. He has received multiple national awards recognizing his leadership in interagency fire management. Assisting communities in reducing losses from wildland fires has been Al’s passion for many years.

Mason Bees: How to Properly Care for Them in Your Garden

Instructors, Thyra McKelvie, Briana Price

Millions of bee hotels are purchased every year, but not many people realize they require annual maintenance. The lack of proper care can unintentionally harm bee health.

Food Systems and Climate Change

Instructor, Joan Qazi

Food systems are both a cause and a solution for our changing climate. In this session, we will discuss the ways that our food systems contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and how we might focus on robust local food systems, plant-based diets, reduced food waste, and healthy soils as a mitigation strategy against the higher temperature projections of global warming.

Learn more about Joan

Joan Qazi
Dr. Joan Qazi is the Geography professor and Sustainability Coordinator at Wenatchee Valley College (WVC) where she has been teaching about climate change and sustainable food systems for 28 years.

Joan earned her PhD from UW with a dissertation about women’s work in North Central Washington’s apple industry.

On campus, she collaborates with the Sustainability Committee and Facilities towards the goal of everyone having access to the benefits of a clean environment, a just society, and an equitable economy.

Joan supports her students to think globally while acting locally and is involved with several community-based organizations focused on climate change mitigation and resiliency.

Landscaping for Birds and Wildlife

Instructor, Betsy Dudash

Learn about the key elements that make a landscape hospitable to birds and other wildlife, including pollinators: habitat and shelter, including protection from predators; food sources through the seasons; fresh water; and areas for foraging, socializing, and bathing.

The presenter will focus on using native plants to create a new habitat or fine-tune your existing landscape to become a welcoming refuge for wildlife, whether you have a small yard in the city or a large rural property. You’ll also learn why a well-manicured landscape isn’t optimal for wildlife.

The focus will be on plants native to Eastern Washington, but the principles discussed are applicable anywhere. Using drought-tolerant native plants reduces the need for irrigation water in a changing climate in which “normal” precipitation patterns become increasingly unpredictable and periods of heat and drought become more intense and more frequent.

Learn more about Betsy

Betsy Dudash
Betsy Dudash has a B.S. in Landscape Horticulture and Design from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. She has lived in Wenatchee, Washington, since 2018.

She is a self-employed Landscape Horticulturist and Designer who focuses on using native plants in clients’ landscapes. Betsy offers consultations and hand-drawn custom landscape plans. She has been a part of Cascadia Conservation District’s Native Planting 101 since 2019.

She is currently finishing up her term as board president of Sustainable North Central Washington. Betsy also occasionally teaches courses such as “Landscape Design for Homeowners” in Wenatchee Valley College’s Continuing Education Program.