Cultivating Place

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.

K joins Cultivating Place this week to delve into the long view and deep relationships born of the generosity of seed – and seed people - in our garden lives. Ken Greene – who goes by K - is a seed person. He is the co-founder of the Hudson Valley Seed Library, which in 2004 became the first public library-based seed lending library in the US; in 2008 he went on to co-found with his partner Doug Muller, Hudson Valley Seed Company, a seed, and art company focused on heirloom and open-pollinated vegetable, flower and herb seed. Ever more interested in seed literacy, sovereignty, and cultural seed rematriation, in 2016, K and Shanyn Siegel, a seed work colleague, founded the now dormant non-profit, Seedshed devoted to sharing and supporting the cultural, agricultural, and ecological diversity of seed. 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 is really and truly summer now Happy Summer Solstice Season in the Northern Hemisphere. Are your gardens and parks full of the sound and movements of winged life – the fluttering of moths at your white flowers, at the porch or street light each evening? Dragonflies, mosquitos, bumblebees, and flower flies dancing across your flowers and grasses by day? National Pollinator Week is June 20 – 26, and this week we’re in conversation with Dr. Monika Egerer, pollination ecologist at the Technical University of Munich sharing more about the importance of well-designed urban gardens for pollinator support. Monika researches the ecology and management of production-oriented ecosystems in and around cities. She pursues an interdisciplinary research approach that analyzes connections between biodiversity, environmental and climate protection, ecosystem services and social-ecological issues in urban agricultural systems. A strong focus of her work is the role of insects and plant biodiversity in urban ecosystems, specifically in the context of habitat management, urbanization and climate change. Seems that our gardens as contributions to urban biodiversity depend on our viewing them as habitats and our embrace of an “agroecological” in which the focus on production for our needs (food, flowers, control) and the needs of other lives (ecology) is key. As is a little more wildness... Enjoy! 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.

Teresa J Speight is a Washington DC-based gardener, garden historian, and podcaster under the name of Cottage in the Court. Teri’s new book out from Bloom! Imprint is BLACK FLORA – a gorgeous look into transformative humans of color and creativity at work with flowers. Enjoy! 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.