Jack's Bio

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jack oostenbrink
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Joined: Fri 17-Dec-2021, 21:48
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Greetings! My name is Jack and I am one of the instructors in the gardening course. I am looking forward to meeting you on this site and chatting about my farvorite topic, gardening! I garden in zone 7 of the Pacific Northwest.

My horticulture career began when I was 12 with my first job at Minter Country Garden, a local garden center. In no time at all, I was hooked. I loved the smell and feel of the sun heated soil, I loved to see plants pushing out of the ground in spring, and I loved to learn about every plant I came in contact with. During my teen years I gardened in my spare time (of course I kept it a closely guarded secret from my peers). My training in horticulture was through Old's College where I earned a greenhouse management diploma. As things go in life, my subsequent career never took me into a greenhouse.

My interests soon took me into the realm of landscape gardening and landscape design. For several years I operated a landscape design and build company in the Fraser Valley. Success is often measured by income, or by how much work we generate and perform; and by those standards I was successful. But if success were to be measured by how one cultivates and nurtures family relationships and is available to the community at large, I was a failure! After a great deal of contemplation I gave up my landscape business to solely create landscape designs and grow and sell plants from our home nursery. A significant spin off benefit to this was that I now had more time to devote to food gardening.

In our home garden we aim to feed our family of 7 people from our own garden all year round.
robyn
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I really appreciate these little insights into who you were and who you're becoming.
And until you mentioned it, I never thought it was possible to garden and feed my family all year round!
I've watched a few of the videos already and I love your property and am super excited about the fruit trees you have, where you can actually reach the fruit and how they create borders. So glad you're a part of this course as I'm learning so much about how I can not only have a functional garden, but also a beautiful one that can feed my soul as well!
Thanks so much!
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