The following is an original production of AZPM News.

(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, meet a woman who proves you can grow your yard into a bountiful garden.

(Angela) Anything that I was learning, I wanted to tell that old me to say you can do this.

(Tom) And we'll show you what community resources she used to get started.

(Celeste) You have gardening and there's this amazing sense of community and mental health benefits that come with being outside.

(Tom) Plus meet a family that helped popularize straw bale building techniques.

(Athena) There's an empowerment that comes with being able to create your own space.

(Tom) And the unusual and captivating sculptures of Curt Brill.

(Curt) To think about realism, we all see things differently.

We all respond to things differently.

Hi and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara and we're joining you from here at the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension Garden near River and Campbell.

I'm sure you know the place.

It's beautiful.

There's a lot to show you here, a lot to see and do.

We'll get to that shortly.

But first, we have the story of a woman who was inspired by the U of A Master Gardener program.

And she went on to transform her yard and grow a massive presence on YouTube.

♪ SPIRITED STRINGS MUSIC My name is Angela Judd and I love teaching people how to garden.

Whether that means through my website, in person, on YouTube, I want to teach people how to garden successfully here in the low desert.

[ CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS ] We moved here to Mesa in 2008 and I finally had room to start a garden.

When I started gardening, I really wanted to learn how to grow my own food.

I had a family, I loved to cook and I was trying to grow fruits and vegetables and some flowers to feed my family and add beauty and I struggled.

♪ MUSIC CONTINUES Gardening here in the low desert is challenging.

You look on the back of a seed packet, that's not the right information.

I would have some success, things would sprout and then it would get hot and everything would die.

And so I wouldn't actually come to harvest.

In 2015, I took the Master Gardener classes from the University of Arizona Extension Office and loved those.

[ METAL CLANKS ] It was really empowering to be taught these classes in person by someone who knew exactly what they were talking about.

(Pam) Sprinkle these guys, they only need to be covered with about half to three quarters of an inch.

I would just be up front asking questions, trying to learn as much as I could.

My other favorite part of that experience was working in the demonstration garden.

You know, Pam Perry is a local Arizona gardening legend.

(Pam) And we'll wrap this guy with the frost cloth, just like the other one was.

I found Master Gardeners through fellow volunteers at the Denver Botanic Garden in Denver.

It was a new program that was being introduced back in the mid 80s.

And I would just be ready to just, okay, put me to work.

She's like, "Just, it's okay.

We're just going to walk around and enjoy and learn and kind of observe the garden first."

And that was my first real lesson from Pam.

I learned so many things, but just spending time in your garden every day and observing what is going on before we just come in and take action.

[ MALLET WHACKING ] - All right.

- Okay.

(Pam) The Master Gardeners work in this garden.

It's a once a week garden.

I have a great core group of committed people who come week, after week, after week and keep track of the composting and the harvesting and the watering and the debugging.

And the walk through the garden and the weeding.

Then I started writing for the Master Gardeners.

They have a monthly publication, Roots and Shoots.

I would write a monthly "How to Grow Beans, How to Grow Swish Chard."

I had these articles and my sister-in-law encouraged me to start a blog.

And that appealed to me, because I remember that new gardener in me who struggled.

I really didn't know what I was doing.

And so I felt like anything that I was learning, I wanted to tell that old me to say, "You can do this.

You can do it.

There's just a few principles that you need to do."

And so I try to make the articles accessible.

You know, here's five tips for growing this.

♪ CHEERY ACOUSTIC GUITAR MUSIC ♪ [ BACKGROUND CHATTER ] (Pam) This garden provides a launching place for gardeners who didn't even know they wanted to be gardeners a lot of times.

I have met people in this garden who never picked up a shovel.

Angela took the training and has definitely found a niche.

She's out in the East Valley.

She is able to reach a whole other community out there.

I discovered the program, funny enough, by watching some YouTube videos from Angela Judd.

And learned about her experience with the Master Gardener program.

And I've always had a love and a passion for gardening that started when I was a little kid in my grandparents' gardens in Idaho.

Going out and, as my wife says, touching dirt helps heal me and helps me to decompress.

There are four fundamentals to be successful gardening.

I would say anywhere.

The first thing I would say is timing.

Here in the low desert, we have several different seasons.

And most things can grow here if you plant them at the right time.

Number two, focus on your soil.

Your garden will only be as good as your soil.

Sunlight is another fundamental.

We need to make sure that we are managing the sunlight.

We have abundant sunlight, which is a huge blessing.

But morning sunlight, afternoon shade, almost any plant is going to be happy.

Full sun with a block wall.

There's only a few, just a handful of plants that can take that kind of condition.

And then finally, watering.

Watering is the other one.

A lot of problems traced back to incorrect watering.

Often, too much water.

We're giving the plants a little bit of water every day instead of nice, deep soakings that encourage those roots to grow really deep.

And that's when you're going to have those tough plants that can withstand kind of the tough conditions we're asking those plants to grow in.

♪ CALM PIANO PLAYS When you're first starting out, I would say learn about the crops you want to grow.

If you want to grow tomatoes, and that's what is important to you, learn about it.

Don't be afraid to start.

Vegetable, herb, flower, learn about those three things.

Get them planted.

And then when you're ready for more, start adding and you'll have a successful garden.

So my background is as an artist.

But I think those early memories of time spent in my grandparents' garden in Indiana, it felt immense.

It felt so big.

And I remember, you know, picking the beans, spending time with my grandpa, having him point things out to me.

Those left an impact.

And now I feel close to my grandpa when I'm in the garden.

You know, there's a tradition there, and I'm so happy that I've been able to continue that.

(Pam) It's the sense of community, I think.

A place for people who share similar interests and a sense of inquiry, whether it's a new insect, whether it is a new fruit, a new veg.

We'd talk recipes and we'd share ideas on what to do with the produce.

It's just empowering everybody to do stuff.

I'm passionate about helping other people realize that they can do this too.

You know, there's just a little bit of things they need to learn, but I know this is what I'm supposed to be doing.

Teaching people how to garden, I love sitting down to write an article, hitting publish, and just the feeling of, this is what I'm supposed to do.

♪ CHEERY MUSIC FADES Well, if you've ever driven down Campbell Avenue south of River and you look on the east side of the road, you see this beautiful garden.

You may have seen it in passing.

Part of that whole beautiful University of Arizona complex.

And joining me now is Celeste Gambill, who's the manager of the Master Gardener Program here at the co-op.

Nice to see you.

One of the things we've noticed over time is whenever we come the enthusiasm, there are people here all ages, all stages of gardening expertise and they have a passion about it.

Why is that?

Well, I think you have gardening and there's this amazing sense of community and mental health benefits that come with being outside, getting your hands in the dirt, getting dirty.

And the Master Gardener Program is a really lovely community where we all get to come together.

We all love gardening.

So we get, you know, we have the privilege of maintaining this land, you know, which is part of the land-grant University system with the U of A. And we get to share this with the community and maintain it for them and educate them.

So, it's really a group of passionate volunteers and we just try to bring in as many people who want to hear about gardening and the extension and so.

And you yourself started out here as a bit of a newbie gardener and you've risen up to the manager of this program.

I did.

I moved here from Canada and I, Canada does not have the cooperative extension system and I came here, I bought a grapefruit tree.

It was, I was like, oh, this is amazing.

I can grow citrus and I bought a grapefruit tree from Costco and planted it in my backyard and it wasn't doing well.

And I went online, was Googling and a master gardener library talk came up and I was like, they're giving a free talk at the library on how to diagnose citrus problems and treat your citrus trees.

And I was like, great.

So I went to my local library, took the class.

I'm like, this was awesome.

My grapefruit tree is thriving to this day.

And that was my introduction into the program.

And I was so impressed with the presenters and the education.

I was like, I would love to get involved.

And so then I applied to be a master gardener.

I went through the course.

It's essentially a college course.

We follow kind of the same semester.

And then all of our volunteers volunteer 50 hours a year and do 10 hours each year of continuing education here in Pima County.

I love working with the master gardeners.

I was one.

I loved being one.

I loved volunteering, working with the public.

So when this spot opened up, I was like, well, it sounds like a perfect fit.

Grapefruit tree changed your life.

And you mentioned it did for the better.

And you mentioned the co-op now.

This program is accessible to folks who don't necessarily live in Pima County or somewhere close to the Metro.

The Cooperative Extension is a network of, you know, professionals, university professionals across the United States.

And it has the most kind of lovely history, starting with President Lincoln, who established the land grant universities with the Morrill Acts.

And then in 1914, with the Smith-Lever Act, the Cooperative Extension was formed.

And that is one third of every land grant university's mission.

And here in Arizona, the University of Arizona is our land grant university.

And our Extension's mission is to take university knowledge and research and extend that out to the public.

And we have a variety of programs that does that.

The Master Gardeners is just one of many programs.

And it's interesting to see the history and how its changed throughout the years to meet the demand and the public education.

Early on, it focused largely on agriculture and farming.

But now we have STEM programs and 4-H.

And there's, you know, health and nutrition and all of these different programs and all of these professionals and experts coming together to share resources and educate the public.

So, it's really an amazing program.

Angela Judd was in our story.

And she's probably an excellent example of someone who maybe didn't start out with a green thumb but caught that gardening fever.

(Celeste) She is an amazing woman.

And we see that all throughout the program where, you know, you really get inspired.

Celeste, no matter where you live, if you want to get involved in a Master Gardener Program, how do you go about it?

(Celeste) It's really simple.

So if you actually just Google the Master Gardener, Pima County Master Gardener or whatever county Master Gardener Program is associated with the county you live in, that will take you directly to their website.

And we have information on how to apply to the program and a whole lot more.

There are a ton of resources.

There's publications.

You'll be able to see our library talks, our Zoom lectures.

So check out our website.

It's got a ton of resources.

Well, Celeste, thank you so much for having us back and best of luck with the program.

Thank you so much.

Thanks for coming out.

We really appreciate you guys letting us share our story and our garden.

Next, we take you to Sonoita to meet a family that's helping to popularize straw bale building techniques.

In fact, they've written books on these unusual, beautiful and highly insulated structures.

And they host workshops where people come from all over the world to learn.

♪ SOFT GUITAR MUSIC My name is Athena Steen.

I'm part of the Canelo Project here in southeastern Arizona.

(Bill) I'm Bill Steen.

The Canelo Project sort of grew out of a vague dream.

Officially on paper it goes back to 1989.

There's a history here.

This home goes back to, oh gosh, 1900s somewhere around there.

(Athena) He came to do an article on straw bales and he needed some photographs.

(Bill) We balance each other, right?

We each do things that the other can't do and through what this is now, I couldn't have done it alone.

(Athena) He found his way through the permaculture grapevine to find, heard about my little house.

I took him out to the place.

So that's how Bill and I's paths crossed.

Came out here and then still no money, still nothing to do.

We're like, well, more kids and you're like, well, how do we make a living?

And so we'll bring the world here and we'll do a workshop.

There were no books, nothing written.

So we ended up doing "The Straw Bale House" book.

(Bill) Mother Earth News magazine called one day for an interview.

I wasn't here and they got Athena.

Of course, she can sell anybody just about anything.

(Athena) And they got me on the phone and did a quick interview.

They ran an article, Mother Earth News, so that got the word out about straw bale and you could sort of feel a buzz about it.

(Bill) At the very end it said we had this booklet for $10.

Well, one day I went to the mailbox and they're just full of envelopes.

Together all these pieces fit like a, you know, it's this big puzzle and they get all entangled and intertwined and right.

You get what you see when you come here now.

(Athena) We literally flipped a coin.

Are we staying or are we going?

Right.

And it's flipped and said, okay, we're staying.

Okay, what do you do when you're staying somewhere?

You start building.

♪ SOFT GUITAR MUSIC (Bill) When we formed the Canelo Project, the phrase was connecting people, culture and nature.

But it was more a place to bring people together, bring different cultures together.

I mean, we've had people here from all over the world and that's been magical.

This is another pure pottery quite here.

This is a kale and a nuts of bentonite and we're just gonna mix these bolts.

(Athena) So the bales are actually fiber.

Usually it could be any kind of grain, leftover dry material.

You could make a paper bale, you could make cardboard box bale, a stick bale, a corn bale.

But usually, Arizona grows a lot of wheat.

So they're like four feet by two feet by foot and a half.

So that's a giant Lego blocks.

So it only takes four courses and you've got eight feet tall and tie the corners together and you've got a highly insulated wall because there's not any stone or sand, all making thermal mass.

It's all lightweight material.

There were some done by the Nebraskans over a hundred years- you know, many years ago, they were doing as soon as the baling machine was invented.

And then there's several that were patented even and showed up in some in Georgia.

There were some historical, quite a few of handful of historical buildings.

I'm not thinking straw bale all the time and every time I think of it started, I go, "Oh yeah, this is still a good idea."

There's a lot of qualities that people want the quietness inside.

It'll take an earthquake if you build it correctly.

There's an empowerment that comes with being able to create your own space.

And if you're buying all the ingredients, if you're hiring everybody to do it for you, there's a sole satisfaction that is greatly missing.

It can only come when you're in that deep of relationship with the materials, when your hands are touching- your hands, not someone else's hands, your hands.

And you can't buy that experience.

(Bill) When they come to the workshop, it's they're coming to our home.

They come into our lives.

And right now there's two grandkids running around the floor.

Our sons are here.

The one building material that's here is dirt.

Truly marvelous material when you work with it, especially when it's in your hands.

(Athena) Building is hard work.

There's different materials that are just beautiful materials and they have a lot to teach you, right?

And so it is all about connection and relationship.

And you see in workshop settings that get people mixing with their hands in the mud and they don't even have to speak the same language.

They don't have to believe in the same thing.

They don't have to agree on who's running the country, whatever.

(Bill) It's a certain beauty to just taking the material out of the ground and clay is alive.

You know, there's a real magic to it, but truly when you put your hands in it and you start to work with it and you see all the things you can do.

And look at these people.

You know, we've got a whole group of people here for a workshop right now.

Probably get it really, really nice looking.

(Athena) Someone that just came back here, their partner had been to a workshop of ours 25 years ago and they still have the book on their shelf.

(Bill) Pope Francis, he said it's good to be happy, right?

That's much better to be happy because you made other people happy.

♪ SOFT CHIMES Curt Brill is a Tucson based sculptor.

Since the 1970s, his work has been widely collected across the U.S.

and Europe and Japan.

He's inspired by movement, humor and the human spirit.

First comes movement, he says, then humor and finally a sense of peace.

♪ SOFT AMBIENCE (Curt) If you come at art with the attitude of that realism is this exact reproduction, then art never measures up because the real thing would convey itself much better.

So the art has to go further and be something of its own.

Usually if I do a portrait or do a figure, there is something about it that is so intriguing to me that I wanna be able to convey to a viewer what it is that I see.

My mother was a painter and my father was a truck driver.

And from an early age, I always got art materials for birthdays.

My first experiences were with clay, making dinosaurs.

Almost every culture has had clay as a way of expressing themselves.

So in our modern society, we are dependent on so many electronics, primitive cultures made pottery.

There's just something, I don't know, primal about clay.

And I just felt very comfortable with clay.

I had always wanted to hike.

So I came out and hiked the Grand Canyon and then built a pottery wheel and started off thinking I was gonna be a functional potter.

But I didn't last long as a functional potter.

♪ SOFT AMBIENCE (Dr.

Sasse) Of course he does his Japanese tea bowls.

And that's because he's had a long interest in Japanese art, Japanese culture.

He's gone back as a scholar, artist in residence in Japan.

And so there's elements of that Japanese simplicity and beauty and form that still informs his work today.

[ MOTOR SPINNING ] (Curt) I'm unclear—inquisitive about the nature of being human, but there are some common things that seem to weave their way through our lives.

And I'm not sure what they are.

It's a constant exploration for me.

And, that's part of the reason I got into figural sculpting.

(Dr.

Sasse) When you look at his bronzes, they might have lots of movement as if you can just feel the clay that he's working with to create the form.

It comes to mind, for me, Willem de Kooning's very expressive three-dimensional form, or Rodin.

Feeling of motion in his work, in his figurative studies and in his landscapes, it's always there, a sense of being in the moment.

They are about to move or about to turn over and look at you.

And I think that's very intriguing and not easy to capture like that.

(Curt) When I first started, the first pieces I did were these sort of odd, very big-hipped, little-headed things.

I would find the most interesting things when models were on break.

I would do quick sketches.

I never posed my models, so the model was just sitting as if on break.

And that's when I do most of my work.

So this was a quick study of someone seated, and this was the size of it.

This was one of the first monumental scale pieces I did.

Bronze casting process is a labor-intensive process with many steps.

So without going into all the details, basically, this was the original intent.

And what I wanted was to produce a piece like this that was bigger than human scale.

So, when you approached it, it had some other life form to it.

(Andrew) We all know him through his work.

I've never seen anything he's done that doesn't make me think about, in new ways— about what sculpture's about.

One time he entered and got into the Arizona Biennial life-size figure made out of sisal.

And so it looked like a big hairy beast, but it sort of had the feeling of an African ritual dance.

Recently, he's returned to sculpture in the form of ceramic portraits.

To think about realism, we all see things differently, and we all respond to things differently.

A lot of times what happens is that we get so caught up in trying to reproduce the technology we have now, We can scan.

So if you wanted someone's portrait to be realistic, you could take a mold or do a scan.

But there is something more in each person.

And I think that a good portrait actually does more.

Somehow you have to bring life back into an inanimate object.

[ WHEEL SPINNING ] I've always seen my artwork as just part of my life.

♪ SOFT AMBIENCE And I realized that all cultures had art going on.

Before we had big screen TVs, before we had powerful stereo systems and cars.

Every culture had their artwork.

A lot of it was, a lot of times, was clay.

So someplace in our nature is the desire, the drive to create.

So I thought about art as therapy, more than art.

It's also can be rehabilitative.

But as I taught classes, I realized that people just— they'd fall into a zone, and time would stop and their troubles would stop and they got involved in doing artwork.

And I believe that's been part of it for me all along anyhow without knowing it.

Thank you for joining us for Arizona Illustrated from here at the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension Gardens.

We urge you to visit.

It's a special place.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll see you again next week.