Jonathan VanBuskirk - Week 5

Week 5... that's crazy. I can't believe I'm already halfway through this internship. This week was a busy one, and I feel like I spent just as much time traveling around the state as I did in the office.

Monday, Wednesday, and Friday were mostly spent working on office projects. I spent quite a bit of time putting together laminated plant identification workbooks for the 4-H Horticulture Club. That meant printing, cutting, laminating, cutting again, and assembling 12 workbooks, each with five pages. It probably wouldn't have taken nearly as long if I hadn't accidentally messed up the first batch and had to do the whole thing twice.

I also created three Jeopardy games for the same horticulture club to help members practice identifying fruit crops. Since real samples can be difficult to come by (I mean, where exactly do you find a pistachio leaf in Maryland?), I made one game focused on foliage, one on flowers and nuts, and one on fruit. Those games will be used during the club's Wednesday meetings, where I now get to help teach as a "certified" instructor—which basically means I get to talk about trees.

My favorite office project of the week came on Friday, when I inventoried all of the plants in the Master Gardener demonstration beds outside our office. I identified each plant, mapped the beds using 5-foot grid sections, and organized the inventory by both nativeness and life cycle. It was a great opportunity to sharpen my plant identification skills, which had gotten a little rusty over the past year.

The busiest days of the week, though, were Tuesday and Thursday. On Tuesday, I traveled to the Washington County Extension Office to help my mentor teach elementary and middle school students about how drones are used in agriculture. We showed them how drones can be used to spray crops, scout fields, and even plant seed. We also demonstrated how the propellers work, flew the drone for them, and handed out small propeller toys for them to experiment with. Surprisingly, only two of them broke.

Our table at the crop scouting event at the Wye Research and Education Center. At this station, we helped teach others about common corn and soybean diseases like frogeye leafspot, tar spot, and corn leaf blight.

Then on Thursday, I traveled to the Wye Research and Education Center to help teach a crop scouting workshop for farmers and other attendees. We covered common corn and soybean diseases and scouting techniques before heading into the field to look for frogeye leaf spot. Unfortunately, because of some unusual planting patterns in the research plots, we weren't really able to scout the field the way we had planned.

I saw this tree on the way to the Wye Research and Education Center on the side of the road. I think it's some sort of stone fruit, either a peach or nectarine (or something like that). Just something cool from this week.

Overall, this internship has been a great experience so far. I've learned a lot, and everyone in the Harford County Extension Office has been incredibly welcoming and supportive. The one challenge I've run into, surprisingly, has been finding things to do when there aren't any major projects or events scheduled. It might sound like I always have something going on, but there are definitely slower days where I have to find work to fill my time. Even so, I'm really enjoying the internship, and I'm excited to see what the second half has in store.