Cultivating Place

Nadia Ruffin is an entomologist, gardener, and educator. She is the founder of Agricademy Inc and Urban Farm Sista based in Cincinnati, Ohio. A lover of bugs and all insects and life forms since she was very young, Nadia loves sharing this admiration and curiosity, with youth especially. In 2018 the Cincinnati City Council honored Nadia’s farming and agriculture initiatives, the primary focus of which is to share her knowledge and passion for the biological world and all that it offers to us in the way of endless and healthy wonder, food, beauty, and learning. It's National Pollinator Week and this week we revisit our 2019 conversation with Nadia to explore this wonder and this work. As a bonus - we talk about the importance of meeting and managing our own irrational fears. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

June is traditionally a month in which many, many weddings are celebrated with family, food, and FLOWERS. With many of these weddings on hold this year due to Covid-19, we catch up with floral creative Philippa Craddock to talk about the business of floristry, the sustainability of it on several levels, and to reminisce about the lovely florals - from epic arches to the most romantic of bouquets which Philippa designed for the Lovely Meghan Markle and her Prince Harry, now the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. The world was watching this wedding for a variety of reasons, I was watching for the flowers and they did not disappoint. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Ross Gay is a gardener - he is also an award-winning poet and a professor. A founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a food justice and joy project, Ross joins Cultivating Place this day of Thanksgiving to share more about his garden life journey, the structure of care it represents, and the unabashed gratitude and delight it brings him daily. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Melanie Falick is a maker of many things by hand, and in her work from knitting to gardening, welding to baking, she explores the connection between what we do with our hands in our own lives and our quality of life and sense of wellbeing. In 2015, Melanie left her 15-year corporate career in the publishing world without a completely clear sense of what she would - or wanted to do- next. Her intuition told her that whatever it was, it would involve engagement with the handwork – knitting, sewing, time in the garden – that she loved, but that she had moved away from personal direct contact within her career. In the course of making many things following her “retirement" of sorts, it while crafting a simple folded paper box, a box of incredibly basic utility, that she had an epiphany: “in a circuitous way” in all her creative making, she was trying to connect to her own survival – and that impulse was tied inextricably to her own sense of self, capability, and connection to others – ancestors, descendants, community. In these past few months of shelter in place, I think many of us, male, female, old, and young across the globe, have had a renaissance in our own psyches of this same impulse. Melanie and I actually chatted in February, before the shut-down, which seems prescient somehow in hindsight, and I think speaks to the fact that this growing global dissatisfaction with what we have been told “success” is, has been in the making for a very long time. Enjoy this conversation about her newest book, “Making a Life, Working by Hand and Discovering the Life You Are Meant to Live” (Artisan Press, 2019), in which she explores how others have been manifesting this impulse and leading lives of great connection and meaning long before Covid-19, and how they might be role models for anyone of us in making our own lives. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Johanna Silver is a gardener, writer and editor, formerly the garden editor at Sunset Magazine and regular contributor to Martha Stewart Living, Better Homes & Gardens, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She is the author of The Bold Dry Garden, on the garden and legacy of famed California famed plantswoman Ruth Bancroft. This week she joins us to talk about her newest book: Growing Weed in the Garden, a No-Fuss, Seed-to-Stash Guide to Outdoor Cannabis Cultivation out now from Abrams Press. Cannabis has been legal for medicinal purposes in California since the late 1990s, and in late 2016, California voters approved the Adult Use of Marijuana Act, thereby legalizing the recreational use of cannabis. The use, sale, and possession of cannabis over .03% THC remains illegal under federal law, however. That said, according to a recent report on NPR: Thirty-three US states currently allow for some form of sale and consumption of marijuana. And of those, more than 20 states have designated the cannabis industry as essential during the coronavirus outbreak. Cannabis sativa is a plant which is equally loved and reviled, common and commonly misunderstood. As the rest of our warm season crops – tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and the like come online in the garden – this week we’re joined by Johanna to help us demystify this warm season crop and very specific Weed. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Fallon Shea is a self-described rose devotee and roseologist currently making her life with roses in Southern California as a grower, designer, artist, and writer. She says that roses found her when she was lost at the age of 19, “tricked her into gardening” then, and have kept her happily under their spell as their devoted student ever since from pruning 10,000 roses in the field, to savoring their tart hips, to incorporating all stages of them into her floral designs and all parts of them into her artwork. She joins us this week to talk about some specific roses she loves, general rose care, their enigmatic colors, and the magic of them in any diverse and lively garden. Join Cultivating Place this week for all this and more. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Cultivating Place kicks off the month of May - with two-episodes focused on ROSES – we start off this week before Mother’s Day here in the U.S., with a visit to David Austin Roses in conversation with Michael Marriott, senior rosarian and at David Austin for more than 35 years. He considers the rose among the most beloved of garden plants and as such a very conduit for awareness and care of gardens, plants, and our world more generally. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit cultivatingplace.com.

Uli Lorimer is the director of Horticulture for the Native Plant Trust in Massachusetts. His work as a native plant and biodiversity advocate is informed by years of work in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Native Flora Garden, in the woodland garden at Wave Hill in the Bronx and even earlier at the US Botanic Garden. Uli and I met just after we recorded this conversation during the annual conference of the Ecological Landscape Alliance in Amherst Mass where I was the keynote speaker, and now these long weeks later Uli reports that the pandemic has not only brought people to gardening, but an increased interest in native plants, the climate, and an understanding that among what we deem essential at this time – biodiversity and a wholistic resilience are key. His is a garden life journey in which he navigates with plants as his landmarks and it is earth day every day - He joins Cultivating Place this week to share 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 Play, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Rebecca Burgess is a gardener, weaver and natural dyer. She is the executive director of Fibershed, the chair of the Carbon Cycle Institute, and the author of two books - her newest is FIBERSHED: Growing a Movement of Farmers, Fashion Activists, and Makers for a New Textile Economy (Chelsea Green, 2019). She joins Cultivating Place this week to share more about her vision behind the cooperative, community-based Fibershed movement she is helping to grow for an innovative and integrated approach to textiles, our environments, and economies. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place, a BEST OF in which we revisit our seedkeeping series. IN this one, we’re joined by plantswoman, seed advocate, farmer and author Ira Wallace of the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and the Heritage Harvest Festival in Charlottesville VA. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.