Cultivating Place

On Cultivating Place this week, as we revisit a Best Of conversation with Vivien Sansour, the heart and head behind The Palestine Heirloom Seed Library aiming to revive and share forward Palestinian seed heritage and a culture of care and gratitude. Vivien was born in Palestine and spent her early childhood in Bethlehem before she and her family immigrated to North Carolina when she was ten. She writes: “The seed, the seed, the seed….for what is it but a continuation of ourselves? Aren’t we all seeds?" – Vivien Sansour 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.

As seed catalogues continue to arrive in our mailboxes and in-boxes daily, filling our notebooks and dreams, we take a behind the scenes look at an independent seed source well-known to gardeners and market growers throughout North America: Johnny’s Selected Seeds. We are in conversation with current CEO Dave Melhorn and Lauren Giroux, Director of Product Selection and Trialing Research. Johnny’s stewards one of the largest in-ground seed-trialing programs in the United States. For over 48 years Johnny's Selected Seeds has dedicated to "helping families and friends to feed one another.” Now 100% employee-owned, Johnny’s offers organic seed, F1 hybrid, open-pollinated, and heirloom seed varieties. "Johnny's does not knowingly sell genetically modified seeds"; nor do they "breed new varieties using genetic engineering." Their breeders use "traditional, painstaking methods of natural crossing to create hybrid seeds that are healthy and safe.” They are proud to be "one of the nine original signers of the Safe Seed Pledge,” in 1999, an initiative of the Council for Responsible Genetics. Listen in this week! 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.

To welcome the new year, Cultivating Place stays with the theme of seeds – this time focusing on seeding our imaginations in conversation with Diane Wilson writer, gardener, emeritus executive director of Dream of Wild Health and, more recently, emeritus executive director of The Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance. Diane has long interwoven her gardening and her advocacy work with her writing, and her first novel, The Seed Keeper, was published by Milkweed press in 2021. Join us for more about Diane’s journey of discovering, sharing, and celebrating seeds and Indigenous cultural recovery through the knowledge and history that seeds hold, and the future they make possible. 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.

As a farewell to the calendar year that has been, and a welcome/seeding for the new year that will be, I am joined by seed person and agent of growing transformational change - Kellee Matsushita-Tseng. Known as Brave New Seed online, Kellee is a Yonsei (fourth generation) queer, Japanese-Chinese American, as well as the farm-garden assistant manager at the UC Santa Cruz Center for AgroEcology, and a member of the seed research and growing collective Second Generation Seeds, which specializes in seeds of the Asian Diaspora. Kellee’s work focuses on sharing, education, and building a movement towards seed sovereignty as a means of cultivating community health and working for collective liberation. Kellee serves on the board of directors at the National Young Farmers Coalition and also organizes with the Asian American Farmers Alliance. Her leadership voice is one of clarity, integrity, and communal intention for a new year - and growing the world we want to live 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.

Gary Paul Nabhan is a gardener, an agricultural ecologist, an ethnobotanist, and an ecumenical Franciscan Brother based in Patagonia, Arizona. He is the author of a host of books covering a diversity of plant-relationship topics – from pollinators to food policy, to love letters to his favorite landscapes. The heart of his work is fed by his own lifelong enchantment with the world – and his nearly lifelong commitment to healing wounded landscapes from a primary objective of consciously conserving healthy relationships on all levels and planes. In all he does, Gary examines our human relationships to plants and places not just as a matter of important pragmatics but as a matter of generosity, spirit, and poetics - I cannot think of a better time of year to share forward that exact kind of enchantment and hopeful work. Gary Paul Nabhan joins Cultivating Place this week - 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.

Winter in the Northern Hemisphere is a time of dormancy for the plant and animal kingdoms alike. While it may look relatively still and quiet, it is in fact a period of unseen activity worth looking at and learning from – for perspective and possibilities. This is our final offering for your garden-based preparations for the Winter Solstice officially occurring on December 21st at a little before 8 am Pacific/11 am Eastern time. The Solstice is not just a date and time, but a turning and inflection point in our annual cycle of growth. In honor of that cycle, and its periods of rest – daily, weekly, annually, and throughout cycles of years - we’re joined today in conversation with farmer, gardener and community advocate, Devorah Brous – with whom we explore the importance of rest, dormancy and sabbatical as a way to refuel, to rethink, and to rejuvenate in all health and creativity for our work and cycles ahead. 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.

As another offering to all of you in your gardens tending toward the Solstice in just a few weeks on December 21st, this week we are in conversation with award-winning poet and life-long home gardener Camille Dungy. Camille is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award, and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (W.W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Camille is also a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado. In our conversation, we explore the intertwining of poetry, gardening, life, and trophic cascades in each of them. 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.

Mike Sullivan is the author of "The trees in San Francisco", Jason Dewees is a horticulturist and author of "Designing with Palms", and Richard Turner is a designer, consultant, the Emeritus Editor of Pacific Horticulture, and co-editor of "Trees of Golden Gate Park". The three men got together in the early days of the Pandemic and put their imaginations and frustrations to work creating self-guided, pop-up, sidewalk-chalked, walking tours of the trees of the various neighborhoods of San Francisco. In the process, and at a time of high rates of emotional isolation for many, the three tree geeks got a city of people outside into the fresh air to meet and know better their tree neighbors all around them. With a whole new winter of pandemic complications and complexities in front of us, and in introducing urban-dwelling humans to their trees, and these trees to their people, the "three tree geeks of San Francisco” - and all our other knowledgeable tree folk doing likeminded work in the world – provide us a journey lesson on looking, listening and living. 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 I’m thankful for my own garden, of course, but also for the good fresh food grown for all of us by so many hard-working souls wherever you are, from San Francisco to Cincinnati to Syracuse, and here where I am. Pyramid Farms is a small organic, integrated family farm of humans led by Matthew Martin and Lisa Carle. Famous for the carrots, and also growing more than 30 varieties of fresh produce and flowers year-round, living with the soil, with flora and fauna and the seasons of their place, and with the 365 days a year of hard work that farming is. They wouldn’t do life any other way, and as Matthew and Lisa say – you can taste the love. It’s a good week for this kind of gratitude. Listen in! Photos courtesy of Pyramid Farms, 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.

As a gardener and a human in this exact time on our planet, and in this specific season of the year - a season of communal gathering and thankfulness at the tail end of the growing season in the Northern Hemisphere, this week we celebrate Family, Kin, & Kinship. We are joined in this conversational celebration by Gavin Van Horn and Rowen White sharing with us about a new multi-volume collection of written voices entitled "Kinship Belonging in a World of Relations" out now from the Center for Humans and Nature, based in Chicago. Gavin is the creative and executive director for the Center for Humans and Nature and served as co-editor on the Kinship series with Robin Wall Kimmerer and John Hausdoerffer. Rowen is a seed keeper, a mother, and a farmer from the Mohawk community as well as being a passionate activist for Indigenous seed and food sovereignty. She is the educational director and lead mentor of Sierra Seeds an innovative Indigenous seed bank and land-based educational organization located in Nevada city, California. Rowen is the founder of the Indigenous Seedkeepers Network and her essay "Sky Woman’s Garden" appears in Partners the third volume of the five-volume Kinship series. Just like all kinds of gardens, these voices raised together in this uplifting series is all about growing together in this world. 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.