BROOKINGS – Master Gardener Diane (Borgen) Kinney, mother of four grown children and grandmother of seven and a resident of White where she owns and operates Health Through Massage, spends lot of time teaching and entertaining children outdoors at McCrory Gardens.
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BROOKINGS – Master Gardener Diane (Borgen) Kinney, mother of four grown children and grandmother of seven and a resident of White where she owns and operates Health Through Massage, spends lot of time teaching and entertaining children outdoors at McCrory Gardens. When she does, she gets a lot of help from Fred, Sunny Daze and Little Blossom. But she does the work for the trio: she’s their puppeteer and ventriloquist.
A native of Veblen with four siblings, she “grew up on a milking farm, a small farm with every animal there was: (35) cows, the horses, the sheep, the pigs, chickens. It started out as a chicken ranch. My grandma did that, way back in the day. We had chickens roaming around in the pastures.”
She graduated from Veblen High School in 1979 in a class of 15 students. That same year, right after gradation, she got married and moved to North Dakota where she lived “in different places for 18 years.”
After raising her children, she went into the workforce and took training to become a certified nurse’s aide. However, more education lay ahead: From 1993 to 1996, she attended North Dakota State College of Science. That’s when she got started with puppetry.
A new teaching tool
“It was an extra class you could take in the curriculum for teaching children in grade schools with disabilities,” Kinney explained. She and a classmate went around to different schools with their puppets and taught them that people with disabilities, such as those using wheelchairs “could get around, just in a different way, but still could do some of the same things as a kid who could run with their feet. I used a puppet that had cerebral palsy.”
She graduated in 1996 with a degree in occupational therapy. That brought her to Brookings, where she worked at the Brookings hospital for about 13 years. Kinney noted that her office manager was a gifted gardener and “put it in my genes to become (a Master Gardner).” The title can be earned via a program offered by South Dakota State University Extension. It would take Kinney awhile to get there.
In 2006, she started a massage business in Volga, while she continued working at the hospital for several years.
“In 2013, finally, with just my massage business, I could go over to do what I dreamed about: coming to Brookings to work at McCrory Gardens somehow,” Kinney said. “And with Master Gardening, you have to have teaching, education and 50 hours of volunteer serviceto become a Master Gardener in two years.