Brush Prairie resident teaches agricultural workshops

Brush Prairie resident Carol Stiff earned her master’s degree and Ph.D. in plant tissue culture and has been involved in the field since 1976. Her company, Kitchen Culture Kits, recently celebrated its Sweet 16th Anniversary and she has a goal of bringing her interest to area classrooms.

While Stiff has been promoting Kitchen Culture Kits for quite some time, she’s found it challenging to connect on a community level due to frequent moves over the years. Her husband, Chuck, has a Ph.D. in forest biometrics and they’ve lived in Wisconsin, Texas and Idaho, which is where the company began.

Stiff teaches agricultural workshops all over the country, has one coming up in Wisconsin in June and is looking to conduct a workshop at the Portland Nursery this summer. Stiff maintains that working with cultures is great for kids from kindergarten on up and hobbyists into their 90s. She notes that there’s a lot of closet plant lovers and has quite a few customers in the computer/IT field in particular.

When asked why she’s so passionate about working with plant tissue cultures, Stiff replied, “‘Cause it’s just so cool. You put a small piece of plant in a sterile environment and see so many plants come out of it.”

Stiff says a lot of people have told her that what she’s touting can’t be done, that growing plants from tissue cultures can only be accomplished in a laboratory. Stiff says people are afraid of things they don’t understand and it’s her desire to educate interested residents on what so many of her customers already know.

The process of working with cultures is most useful with seeds that don’t germinate well on their own. A piece is taken from that plant, grown in a sterile environment and able to be mass produced. Different plants require different nutrients and hormones to induce continued growth.

Stiff offers that a heritage tomato or an endangered species are perfect candidates. A valuable orchid that someone would want to produce more of and more quickly would be another example. There are area farmers looking to expand sweet potato cultures and organizations working with Third World countries to strengthen their crop productions.

Stiff has a client in Korea who’s working with schools and other farmers. A man in Bulgaria is experimenting with roses and sending Stiff pictures of a lab he’s set up there. A berry expert located in Romania is focusing on several varietals, like blueberries and raspberries. There’s also the gentleman from Cairo who sent her a picture of him standing in the middle of his greenhouse surrounded by banana plants. She has customers from Antarctica to Australia, the United Kingdom to Africa, Germany to Malaysia and even ships successfully to Nigeria.

With schools, Stiff sees it as another learning tool. She says it inspires people and is a fun hands-on activity. She’s had a couple of teachers in past area workshops but would like to do a teachers-only workshop to show them how simple the process is to integrate into a classroom setting. All that’s needed is a room with tables and no carpeting. Stiff promotes using cheap supplies and scavenging to save money. Things like baby food jars, PVC piping, plants, jam jars and mason jars can be used, and she gives out free samples provided by vendors to help educators grow basic tissue cultures at a nominal expense.

“There’s several kits out there that are pretty poor but if you show them how easy it is to do this way it would help,” Stiff said.

For workshop information or kit inquiries, contact Carol Stiff at (608) 302-2750, go to www.kitchenculturekit.com or find Kitchen Culture Kits on Facebook.