Workshops

Kate Galarza

Kate is an educator, herbalist, and maker. She hails from the City of Brotherly Love, but has made her home in New Jersey, Vermont, and now Salt Lake City. While in Vermont, she spearheaded a garden education program for people in transition from mental health facilities, drug rehabs and homeless shelters. Before joining the WCG staff in 2015, Kate worked at Red Butte Garden as a youth educator where she deepened her love of teaching children about plants. Kate received a BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Lycoming College in Pennsylvania, and a certificate in Clinical Herbalism from the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism. In her free time, she enjoys cooking, woodworking, medicine-making, metalsmithing, and countless other ways to express herself and share that expression with others.

Liz Hamilton

Liz Hamilton has been a plant nut her whole life.  Growing up in the D.C. metro area, she spent her childhood visiting the historic gardens and parks of the East Coast.  While in college, she spent her summers on Capitol Hill working at the United States Botanical Gardens, and the US National Arboretum as a horticultural assistant.  She has a BS & MS in Parks Management, and after moving to the Salt Lake Valley in 2007, completed an additional BS in Horticulture from Utah State University.   The last four years Liz has worked as a Horticulturist for Salt Lake County stationed out of Wheeler Historic Farm managing the grounds care of several different park locations totaling around 100 acres.  From fruit tree pruning and vegetable gardening to native habitat restoration and design, she has worn a lot of different hats in the field but is most passionate about edible landscaping and unusual species.   In 2018 she started a small horticulture consulting business that lets her spend more time with her two little girls at home while still being firmly rooted in the SLV gardening community.

Celia Bell

Celia Bell has been an organic gardener in the Salt Lake Valley since the late 1990s and has a degree from Weber State in zoology with minors in botany and chemistry and additional horticulture training from Utah State.  If that’s not enough to knock your socks off, she also farms an amazing homestead with cover crops, high tunnel hoop houses, chickens, and the most abundant winter squash, tomato, onion and garlic harvests around!  She also cans, dehydrates, pickles, and ferments the fabulous produce she grows, all in her wonderfully-rich, perfectly loamy soil that she’s been developing over the past 20 years.  Celia is the person to teach you about understanding and improving the soil in your garden!! 

Adam Brewerton

Adam Brewerton is the Wildlife Conservation Biologist for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources' Northern Region. He is responsible for the management and monitoring of the birds and mammals with special conservation concerns. Adam has been working with the Division for 10 years conducting bird surveys, small mammal trapping and bat surveys, currently serving as chair of the Utah Bat Conservation Cooperative. He grew up in northern Utah and has been interested and studying the wildlife of Utah for his whole life. He got his degree in Avian Ecology from Utah State University studying the bird community of the sagebrush desert in west-central Utah. He loves the outdoors, hiking, biking, rafting, and can't imagine a better job.

Laura Horn

Laura has been chasing wild bees for 20 years. With so many reasonable people running away from bees and screaming, she started the Wild Bee Project in 2015 to teach that wild bees don't sting. "Gardening for bees" became her go-to workshop as she discovered all the wonderful garden people in Salt Lake who are curious about wild bees and seeing more bees in their gardens. The Wild Bee Project now focuses on habitat, helping urban vegetable growers set aside and landscape parts of the farm to retain wild pollinators and other beneficial insects, with funding from USDA. 

JoDeane Condrat

JoDeane Condrat first encountered the plant world at the tender age of 12.  She worked at the local small town greenhouse earning 50 cents an hour to transplant seedlings into celled flats.  “I had only a modicum of hope that any of those spindly plantlets would survive the rigors of my clumsy, inexperienced fingers”.  But miracles do happen and that first-taste marvelous phenomenon of witnessing plant growth was experienced.   Years passed and the small town girl grew up.  

JoDeane married, graduated college, worked as a Radiological Technologist and raised two sons.  Life was good!  However, her desire to learn more about plants intensified.  She enrolled in the Utah State University Master Gardener Volunteer Program hoping to become garden savvy.  Every lesson was savored, yet stirred cravings for more. Thousands of volunteer hours were donated between organizations such as USU Extension, Thanksgiving Point Gardens and Wasatch Community Gardens.  We’re talking nothing short of an obsessive addiction here!

More years passed and her pursuit led her deeper into her horticulture studies resulting in a degree in Plant Science from USU.  After graduation, fortune came her way when USU employed her as the Horticultural Diagnostician, Educator and Master Gardener Volunteer Coordinator, a job JoDeane loved yet recently retired from.  She continues to enjoy growing and harvesting delectable edibles from her backyard garden alongside her husband and two dog companions, and marvels as each newly planted seed germinates from the fertile earth and matures into a living wonder. 

Kat Jones

Being raised by a health nut raw foodist mother;  Kat has grown up growing sprouts and wheatgrass.  She had her first business experience as a preteen with a juice bar in her mom’s greenhouse where all the locals came for wheatgrass shots. She started her second business selling organic seeds and kits while in business school.  Her small garage business kept growing and she joined forces with Mountain Valley Seed in 2014 to expand to microgreen, vegetable, and flower seeds.  She lives, works and sprouts in South Jordan with her husband, four kiddos, dog Butterscotch and wild bunny Cookie. 

Emmett Wilson

Emmett (they/them pronouns) is a gardener and movement artist from Houston. Since the spring of 2017, they've worked at the Salt Lake City Public Library as the The Plot Garden Coordinator-- the Main library's community garden. Emmett was formerly the Compost Steward at the University of Utah's Edible Campus Gardens where they worked while pursuing a BFA in Modern Dance with minors in Environmental Studies and Portuguese. Emmett strives to reciprocate support to their community of people and plant allies with both their artistic and environmental work. 

Jerry Sawyer

Raised in rural southern Utah, Jerry was bitten by the growing bug early, mainly as a result of his wonderful grandmother.  She was an avid gardener with multiple gardens and a glassed in porch that they used as a greenhouse.  Jerry attended Dixie College then USU where he studied plant science.  It was not long after that that he went to work at a small nursery in Logan that eventually became Mountain Valley Seeds.  They, in turn, eventually became True Leaf Market, so he really has been working for the same company since the 80’s. Jerry has always been a grower, even when he only had a windowsill or light garden to grow in, but now lives in West Jordan and works hard to keep up with the bigger garden space!

Jo Hartman

Jo started working for Mountain Valley Seed in February of 2016. She heads up germ testing, answering lots of questions and testing grow micros and sprouts for what is now True Leaf Market. She loves working with seed.  The potential, surprise, learning, self-discovery and belonging never end.  A Master Gardener from way back, she has worked in the industry for 30 years and has lived and gardened on the same half acre for 20 years in an old part of the city called Highland Acres.  She lives with her husband Al, a retired Salt Lake Tribune photographer, who is now a terrific gardener himself, their lovely dog Lucy and a very old cat named Sam. She can never get enough of the plant world.   In the winter she knits and dreams.

Katie Lawson

Katie Lawson has been working on organic farms for eight years. Farming took her all over the country,
from Oregon to Georgia, Maine, and eventually Utah. While growing vegetables was her first agricultural
love, she now focuses on mushroom cultivation, soil fungus health, and teaching mycology workshops.
Katie has been avidly studying mycology for over 3 years, and recently formed Fungal Focus, LLC.