Master Gardeners spark memories through dementia-friendly activities
The Memory Cafe began when a social worker approached Master Gardener Mary Pettit, asking what garden programming might look like for individuals with dementia. Pettit quickly found field trips could be disorienting. Instead, she and her team brought the outdoors indoors.
Each Memory Cafe activity is designed to be dementia-friendly. While caregivers step away for their own support session, Pettit and her team engage participants in hands-on, garden-themed activities like painting clay pots, planting marigold seeds and making bird feeders with peanut butter. The activities spark conversation and memories. “It’s very healthy for them to tap into what was so meaningful to them and talk openly about the past,” said Pettit. “So many of them had gardens.”
Pictured: Marcie O’Neill, an Extension Master Gardener, volunteers with a Memory Cafe participant at the Crow River Senior Center in St. Michael. This photo captures them painting a planter pot, just one of many simple ways the volunteers bring gardening indoors.
Highlights
- Extension’s equine team delivered education on mud management, emerging diseases and horse property risk assessment in Annandale.
- Gwyneth B. is one of 26 4-H youth from across Minnesota to be named as 4-H Agricultural Ambassadors for 2025-26. Sophie S. is a Minnesota 4-H State Ambassador.
- U of M Farm Family of the Year: The Matter family farm began as a simple dairy farm, but now also raises beef cattle, grows row crops and produces maple syrup on a commercial scale.
- Minnesota Master Naturalist training: Prairies and Potholes biome (Dayton)
- SuperShelf locations: Buffalo Food Shelf, Delano Helping Hands, Monticello Help Center, Riverworks Food Shelf
- Residents across Wright County used the Climate Adaptation Partnership’s climate mapping and data tool, MN CliMAT, to access local climate projections for their communities.
- The Alternative Forages Field Day hosted by Extension, Wright County SWCD and Centra Sota highlighted cover crops as an option for livestock forages. Demonstrations of in-field soil health assessments and drone seeding of cover crops rounded out the day.
Wright County office
Extension has 14 regional offices supporting all 87 counties in Minnesota.
Wright County partners with Extension to deliver practical education and research you can use at home, at work and in your community. More about Extension in our county.
About the Minnesota 87 project
Spend time in any Minnesota county, and you will almost certainly encounter University of Minnesota Extension. Our faculty and staff, volunteers, participants, alumni and partners are woven into the fabric of rural, urban and suburban Minnesota life. This project showcases Extension in action through photos, stories and a sampling of the many ways Extension has touched the lives of people in every county.