If you ask me, the independent nurseries and growers of our world – especially those focused on helping us as gardeners create not only beautiful gardens but also gardens that contribute to the ecologies of our places, are some of our great national treasures. This week following Labor Day, we celebrate these treasures wherever they may be in conversation with one: Barton Springs Nursery in Austin, TX, where since 1986 the owners and staff having been raising both plants and gardeners right. In 2021, Barton Springs Nursery succeeded from the founders Conrad and Bernadine Bering into the skillful and passionate hands of garden designer Amy Hovis, and horticulturist William Glenn and photographer and systems designer Greg Thomas. The three, plus their dedicated and knowledgeable staff continue the long and beautiful Barton Springs Nursery legacy of offering in-house, seed-grown, native and climate adapted plants (without the use of toxic chemicals), inspiring display gardens, and garden education ensuring low-impact, high contribution - and even higher joy - gardening for Austin – and the planet. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit cultivatingplace.com.

Pam Penick is the gardener behind the well-known long-time garden blog known as Diggi ng. Based in Austin, Texas, Pam is an avid and audacious gardener and garden writer. She is also a determined garden community builder in all that she does from digging, to writing, to organizing gatherings like the Garden Bloggers Fling, a convening of garden communicators in a different city or gardening region of the US each year. In 2017, she dug in deeper and began organizing and hosting a garden design speaker series called Garden Spark, to facilitate bringing some of the best voices in gardening for the benefit and expansion of her garden region. Pam joins Cultivating Place this week to share more about life in a hot & dry climate as a thinking gardener. Join us! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Still in the Dog Days of Summer - the heat it hot, the days are long, and garden maintenance in the form of watering, weeding, and perhaps mowing and blowing (especially in the dry and droughty parts of the country right now) might be wearing thin….especially with the relentless watering/mowing/blowing of a thirsty lawn. Maybe you’re rethinking your lawn? Wanting to water/mow less and see butterflies, hummingbirds, and fireflies more? With just this in mind, this week on CP, we revisit a Best of Conversation with Owen Wormser inspiring us to transform our lawns (or some portion of them) into meadows! Enjoy - At a time when our gardens large and small often feel more important than ever, I think our focus on exactly what our gardens contain and consist of is also more important than ever.   I’m pleased to be speaking about just this with Owen Wormser. Based in Western Massachusetts, Owen is the founder of Abound Design, providing design & consulting for regenerative, sustainability-focused landscapes. He is also the co-founder with traditional and clinical herbalist Chris Marano, of the non-profit Local Harmony, focused on encouraging and creating community driven regeneration. Finally, Owen is the author of a new book entitled "Lawns into Meadows, Growing a Regenerative Landscape", out now from Stone Pier Press.  Owen joins us to share more on his deep belief in the planet’s tendency towards abundance. Listen in. Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

In our ongoing exploration of where gardeners are and what they are doing in our world right now, we head pretty far north on Cultivating Place this week in conversation with Canadian gardener Janet Melrose.  Janet is known in Calgary, Alberta as the Cottage Gardener, she is also an urban farming spokesperson and leader, a horticultural therapist, and co-author with fellow gardener Sheryl Normandeau of a series known as the Prairie Gardener’s Go-To guides - the first of those guides was published in March 2020 by Touchwood Editions and two additional guides have been released every year since. The series is up-to-date Q & As for gardening in Janet’s specific northern prairie place on everything from vegetables to soil, seeds to garden pest management, trees, and shrubs to perennials, but Janet is deeply embedded in her garden community in a wide variety of ways. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place, we’re in conversation with Jenny Jones and Jen Toy. They are gardeners, landscape architects, and caring humans who are taking the idea of a test plot to the community level. A test plot is a traditional term used in botany and land reclamation work. It describes a smaller piece of land on which outcomes are observed and tested in order to apply an appropriate treatment or formulate a realistic expectation for larger piece of land – whether for reclamation needs, the land’s seed bank, for soil health, or the like. But Jenny and Jen’s idea, that they call Test Plot is to create an ongoing, hands-on experiment in ecological restoration that engages the community. Initially a more casual project of the Terremoto LA design firm, Jenny and Jen’s purpose for Test Plot is to celebrate the labor involved in land care and to build a stronger land and community-based land stewardship ethic, starting from their own community of Los Angeles. Soon enough, they hope to be growing somewhere close to you! Listen in. Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

David Godshall is a landscape architect, gardener, and meta-garden philosopher making his way with his young family and his Terremoto Landscape Architecture design studio team in Los Angeles. The Terremoto team was featured as one of Elle Décor’s A List of designers in 2021. David’s LA home garden and his perspective on adventurous gardening and design are featured in Under Western Skies, on which I collaborated with photographer Caitlin Atkinson. This week we revisit David’s conversation with Cultivating Place last year, and as he shares in our conversation: "Garden building is civilization building,” it should be done with creativity and integrity at all levels. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

It’s the height of warm season crops in our gardens here in the Northern Hemisphere, and this week Cultivating Place is joined by Jeff Quattrone – graphic artist, gardener, and heirloom vegetable and seed advocate based in Salem County, New Jersey. Jeff is particularly dedicated to the preservation and sharing forward of the histories and genetics of historic, culturally, and economically important Jersey Tomatoes – born and bred right there in his region for more than a century. In 2014 Jeff founded the Library Seed Bank, which grew into a Southern New Jersey seed library network. Having work with Seed Savers Exchange and served as a Slow Food Ark of Taste’s regional representative and for Slow Food International’s Seed Working Group in 2021, Jeff was the keynote speaker for the Seed Library Summit as well as an organizer of Slow Food’s Seed Summit. Through his heirloom seed and food activism, Jeff’s work is most broadly a deep commitment to seed and food sovereignty for all. Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

It’s the height of summer farmers' markets as community hubs, and this week we're in conversation with Cheetah Tchudi co-founder with his wife Sami and his parents, Susan and Steve Tchudi, of Turkeytail Farm, a small diversified organic family farm serving the community of Butte County California.  Cheetah is also the founder and Program Director of Butte Remediation, providing support to home and property owners by testing soils for contamination, targeting the contaminants with fungi capable of remediating those toxins, and measuring success with follow-up fungal tissue and soil sampling. Cheetah, passionate about mushrooms and fungal life, devised this kind of bioremediation support for his region following the devastation of the Campfire of 2018, which burned much of his farm and farm buildings.  Cheetah joins Cultivating Place for a conversation about the importance of small family farms supporting their communities and connection and diversity as strength from a land perspective. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years, and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

In a month where there is a lot of talk about what it means to be a citizen of this country – this world even – this week we follow last week’s urban garden conversation with another, this time with Karen Kahle Executive Director of the Civic Garden Center of Greater Cincinnati, where for 80 years the Center has empowered gardeners, grown food, habitat, educational programs, and community in abundance. A very Happy first Octogenarian Birthday to the Civic Garden Center - here’s to many more. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

San Francisco Bay Area’s Greenhouse Project is a cultural and economic restoration garden project making use of what we have and growing on it. This week Cultivating Place is joined by Caitlyn Galloway who shares more about the firm belief of this project that Urban Agriculture is essential to building a sustainable future wherever you might live. The Greenhouse Project is an urban agriculture initiative working to restore and repurpose a historic 2.2-acre agricultural site lined with abandoned agricultural greenhouses in the city’s Portola community into a collaborative, visionary hub for food production, education, connection, and environmental stewardship. Caitlyn Galloway is an artist and a gardener, having been involved in urban agricultural projects for the past 15 years in San Francisco, she is the vision and strategy lead for the Greenhouse Project. Listen in! Bio photos of Caitlyn at the Greenhouse Project Site by Jeff Hunt, Storied: San Francisco, all rights reserved. Photos of 770 Woolsey Street, site of the Greenhouse Project courtesy of the Greenhouse Project, all rights reserved. Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.