EDINBURG – When retired high school teacher Ricardo Carranza decided to hone his gardening skills, he sought out Barbara Storz, a Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service horticulturist in Hidalgo County.
Mariachis serenade Barbara Storz at her recent retirement dinner in Edinburg. Seated next to Storz is her husband, Edwin. (AgriLife Communications photo by Rod Santa Ana)
“I’d heard of Barbara and thought this would be the opportunity to learn from the best,” Carranza said. “Turns out, it paid off royally!”
Carranza was one of hundreds, if not thousands, of South Texas residents charmed by Storz’ teaching style before she retired recently.
Carranza first met Storz in early 2010 when he signed up for her Gardening 101 class, and his life has never been the same, he said. By 2012, Carranza had become a certified Master Gardener, was the local group’s president and helped plan the highly successful 2013 State Master Gardener Conference in McAllen.
“Barbara just has a personality that attracts people and has them gyrating around her, working as busily as she works,” Carranza said. “Wherever we are, whether it’s at the AgriLife Extension office in Edinburg, our farmers market or at a meeting, people are always asking for her. They want to meet her, chat with her and ask questions about gardening.”
Storz came to the Lower Rio Grande Valley in 1995 to complete a summer internship at the Texas A&M-Kingsville Citrus Center at Weslaco. The following semester, she completed her bachelor’s degree in agronomy and horticulture atSam Houston State University in Huntsville.
“I returned to the Valley once again in 1996 to start my graduate studies at the Citrus Center and graduated with a master’s degree in 1998 from Texas A&M,” she said. “I had already fallen in love with South Texas and began my tenure as AgriLife Extension horticulturist here on July 1, 1998.”
Storz was no stranger to agriculture, having grown up on her father’s cattle and sugarcane operation in Louisiana.
“We grew everything we ate,” she said. “Our family kept a large vegetable garden with about 30 different vegetables and several kinds of fruit trees. I planted my first crop, speckled butter beans, when I was just 3 years old. Even as a young adult, regardless of where I lived, I have always had a vegetable garden, even when the only way to do it was in flower pots.”
Once on the job as an AgriLife Extension horticulturist, Storz wasted no time in attracting the people she needed to promote healthy living and gardening.
Her partners included politicians, Texas A&M AgriLife Research scientists, AgriLife Extension specialists and agents, community movers and shakers, and people from all walks of life — rich and poor, young and old.
She used her abundant love of science, charismatic personality and uncanny ability to obtain the grants and resources she needed to reach thousands of children and adults, Carranza said.
“Her teaching style always draws huge crowds at her gardening classes, and she always gets high praises from class participants,” he said. “Barbara exemplifies the perfect AgriLife Extension agent. She is totally selfless and seems to never run out of energy as she creates and takes on project after project.”
Storz’ horticultural outreach in South Texas, which eventually spread as far as Central America, began in 1999. She developed the JuniorMaster Gardener Program here, a horticulture program for children and teachers. She eventually trained AmeriCorps volunteers to take the new program to schools throughout the Rio Grande Valley.
By 2000, Storz had begun the JuniorMaster Gardener Teacher Training program, showing teachers how to conduct outdoor classrooms to teach children hands-on science and math activities as they grow their own gardens. Some 800 teachers have helped over 13,000 children become certified as Junior Master Gardeners.
“Several graduate students at Texas A&M University in College Station worked with our teachers and published a study that showed that children in our program improved their intake of fruits and vegetables because of the curriculum and the gardens they were building,” Storz said.
Adults in Storz’ Master Gardener program then teamed up with school children to glean produce from commercial fields that was then donated to the Food Bank of the Rio Grande Valley, Storz said. Between 2000 and 2010, 10,000 to 14,000 pounds of produce was donated yearly.
These efforts led to just one of the many awards Storz has received over the years, the Food Bank’s Hunger Champion Award.
Another Master Gardener volunteer, Norma Santos-Sanchez, made 14 trips to Central America between 2006 and 2013 under Storz’ guidance to provide the Junior Master Gardener training to teachers and students there.
In 2005, Storz began what Carranza considers the first and most enduring farmers market in the area.
“Typical of Barbara’s style, she found a horticultural vacuum in our area and rushed in to fill it,” he said. “Before Barbara, despite our vast commercial production of vegetables, there was no farmers market here. Consumers had to buy whatever vegetables were available at supermarkets or the handful of fruit stands.”
In 2002, Storz said, she had been getting phone calls from people new to the area who could not find a farmers market. After polling vegetable farmers, she realized that while they wanted to sell to the public, their farming chores left them no time to do so.
“I realized we had to grow our own growers, so that’s what we called it, the ‘Grow’n Growers Educational Program,’” she said. “It would take non-commercial growers who planted the same crops every few weeks to provide a long harvest to supply a farmers market.”
Using facilities provided by then-Hidalgo County commissioner Hector “Tito” Palacios, Storz said she began teaching housewives in the San Juan area how to raise vegetables organically, prepare foods in a healthy way and improve family nutrition.
Other lessons included marketing and food safety.
“In early 2008, we opened a farmers market in the North San Juan Park run by class members,” she recalled. “The classes continued and we eventually moved the Grow’n Growers farmers market to Firemen’s Park in McAllen, where it continues to thrive every Saturday morning.”
Storz eventually moved on to help people throughout the Valley use small acreage to start small farming operations as a hobby and/or income generator.
Her outreach to help South Texans included a weekly newspaper column in The Monitor in McAllen as well as a weekly radio program, “Agronomically Speaking,” on News Talk KURV 710. She’s referred to on the air as The Garden Gal.
“I plan to continue both the newspaper column and my radio program in my retirement, as well as working with the Grow’n Growers farmers market,” Storz said. “I will continue spreading horticultural education as opportunities arise, but I’ll be doing them at my pace, at my leisure,” she said. “Horticulture has always been an important part of my life and I don’t think that will ever change.”