This is the thirteenth edition of JTPL Stories: a series of interviews with library patrons, staff, and partners. Continue below to meet the faces of JTPL with our Outreach Coordinator, Aliya! Click Here to read the entire series.
On a Saturday afternoon, Heidi Potter led a dozen JTPL patrons through planting their own basil and radishes in little soil pots at our Clarksville location. Her programs are always some of our most popular, and this week she stayed late to answer patrons’ questions about their own gardening problems.
After she helped a patron with the budding apple seed in his fridge, I got the chance to speak with Heidi for a few minutes. Read below to learn about her love for plants, learning, and building a greener Clark County!
At Heidi’s last program, patrons had the chance to plant and take home their own herbs!
Heidi grew up in Oregon, where her grandparents had a farm, but she wasn’t very involved in farming until she moved to the upper peninsula of Michigan with her spouse. There, they lived in a 350-square-foot cabin and maintained their own land.
“I just loved it,” Heidi told me. “I love to learn, and there was a very steep learning curve: how to raise chickens, learning to grow vegetables. And then my husband got a job transfer to Louisville, so we moved down here and brought the farm down with us.”
They’ve now been in Southern Indiana for over a decade.
Here in Clark County, Heidi works as Purdue Extension’s agriculture & natural resources educator. It’s a multifaceted job, she says. One day, she may be examining a Charlestown resident’s leaf clipping for parasites, and the next she could be helping a Jeffersonville business owner grow a garden with their excess water runoff.
“I do love that every day is different,” Heidi told me. “I never know who’s going to walk into my office.”
At its heart, Heidi’s job is to make expert agricultural knowledge and research available to the public. Her office (and email) is open to anyone with a plant-related question, whether you’re a seasoned farmer with insect problems or you’re worried about your first succulent.
In fact, there are Purdue Extension offices in every county in the state. And Heidi’s office includes both health and 4-H youth development educators as well.
If you’re unsure whether to trust your Google results or the answer ChatGPT gave you, you can ask someone at Purdue Extension to help out. And if they don’t know the answer to your question right away, they have the skills and resources to find out.
Heidi told me: “We’re helping people be lifelong learners. It’s really important that we’re always learning something new and expanding our perspectives.”
“If I can make a mistake and learn from it, and give you a warning about what that mistake was, then I’m taking my experiences and being able to help other people.”
In an AI-saturated world that makes it easy to get quick answers to our questions, growing plants still takes dedication and resilience. It’s a type of learning that Heidi is dedicated to spreading further throughout our community.
“There’s a different level of investment,” Heidi says, when you grow a plant from its seed. “There’s hope, and there’s anticipation even. And three months from now, if that plant is still alive, then that’s three of some of the best months. But if it dies, you feel that maybe a bit more than a plant you went and bought at Home Depot.”
It’s that deeper, more experiential learning that both Heidi and Purdue Extension love to be a part of. They plan to continue cultivating it in Clark County for years to come.
You can find out more about Heidi and Purdue Extension on their website. Or be on the look out for more gardening programs from them at the library!