Jillian Patrie

Nancy Edmonds Hanson

Got a question about that garden your fingers are itching to plant? Jillian Patrie can help you find the answer.
For the past two un-winter like months, Jillian has been settling in as University of Minnesota Extension’s new Clay County horticultural educator. The St. Cloud native, who has spent the past 20-odd years in Moorhead, assumed her new role in January. She replaces former horticulturist Randy Nelson, now an assistant professor of agriculture and natural resources at the University of Minnesota-Crookston.
Jillian’s mission, she says, is to educate all ages. That was her favorite part of the 10 years she spent with Baker Garden and Gift – not working with customers of the big local purveyor of plants, but managing the production side of the business at its greenhouses on the south edge of Fargo. There, she made decisions that would help determine what home gardeners raised in the coming season. “I picked out the flowers and vegetables for the years ahead,” she says. “Some — like marigolds, zinnias, vegetables and herbs – we started as seeds. We ordered plugs – like little babies – for many of the others.”
Her own professional roots started far from the garden. When she enrolled at Minnesota State University Moorhead in 2005, she came to study geology and play soccer. While she played on MSUM’s varsity team for all four years, her major shifted to geoscience, focusing on GIS (geographic information systems, combining data points from GPS for engineering and surveying purposes.
She applied those skills to creating an inventory of trees for the Fargo Park Department, then worked in quality control with sugarbeet seed producer SESVanderHave, a Belgian company with facilities in Fargo. “At that point, I went back to NDSU to learn to produce plants, operate a greenhouse and handle the business side of plant production,” Jillian recounts. She completed a degree in horticulture production business, then joined Baker’s.
Her favorite part of the job, then and now, is the education angle. “I like teaching people to grow plants, but there’s only so much of that in the retail world,” she says. The opportunity with the extension service opened the door to doing more of what she loves.
Her own basement is crowded with grow lights, trays of tiny pots and humidity domes as she looks forward to another summer of planting, watering, weeding and harvesting with her two sons, Jack, 8, and Orion, 11. She maintains a relatively modest 10-by-20-foot garden in their Moorhead yard, so much of her at-home growing focuses on plants in pots.
“The kids like to plant as much as I do,” she reports. “They get to pick out the seeds – cucumbers, carrots, green beans, and maybe some random watermelon or cantaloupe. We do start a lot of seeds – sometimes so many that we don’t even know where to plant them.”
Jillian and her husband Ben, who teaches 8th grade language arts at Horizon Middle School and coaches boys soccer, met on the soccer fields at MSUM. They’ve passed on that love to their sons; the whole family is involved with Tri-City Soccer.
The new county horticulturist will be presenting tips for those with (and without) green thumbs at number of upcoming events:

• Gardening 101 – March 25, 6 p.m., at the Moorhead Public Library; and April 6, 10 a.m.-noon, Hawley High School.

• Emerald Ash Borer: Defend and Grow – April 22, 7:30 p.m., with Moorhead forester Trent Wise, Moorhead Library.

• Rain Garden Workshop – April 25, 6 p.m. Moorhead Community Education, Vista Center.

• Yard and Garden Palooza – April 27, 9 a.m.-3 p.m., Shanley High School.