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Cultivating Place: Test Plot, a celebration of labor & community-based ecological restoration, a conversation with Jen Toy & Jenny Jones

All photos courtesy of Jenny Jones, Jen Toy & Test Plot. All rights reserved.
All photos courtesy of Jenny Jones, Jen Toy & Test Plot. All rights reserved.

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.

All photos courtesy of Jenny Jones, Jen Toy & Test Plot. All rights reserved.
All photos courtesy of Jenny Jones, Jen Toy & Test Plot. All rights reserved.

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.

All photos courtesy of Jenny Jones, Jen Toy & Test Plot. All rights reserved.
All photos courtesy of Jenny Jones, Jen Toy & Test Plot. 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 onSoundCloud,iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit cultivatingplace.com.

All photos courtesy of Jenny Jones, Jen Toy & Test Plot. All rights reserved.

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Jennifer Jewell is the creator and host of the national award-winning, weekly public radio program and podcast, Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History & the Human Impulse to Garden, Jennifer Jewell is a gardener, garden writer, and gardening educator and advocate. Particularly interested in the intersections between gardens, the native plant environments around them, and human culture, she is the daughter of garden and floral designing mother and a wildlife biologist father.
Matt Fidler is a producer and sound designer with over 15 years’ experience producing nationally distributed public radio programs. He has worked for shows such as Freakonomics Radio, Selected Shorts, Studio 360, The New Yorker Radio Hour and The Takeaway. In 2017, Matt launched the language podcast Very Bad Words, hitting the #28 spot in the iTunes podcast charts.