gardening

This week on Cultivating Place we’re in delicious conversation with Chef Dave Smoke McCluskey, founder of Corn Mafia, and a grower/producer of such traditional corn products as Longhouse Selections’ hominy, masa, and grits.

As we enter the season of seed saving, of easing into dormancy, beginning to consider next season through the lens of the last season, of forward planning, this week Cultivating Place explores some big thinking for our shared future in conversation with Severine Von Tscharner Fleming, one of the women featured in The Earth in Her Hands, 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants.

In our second episode focusing on the inspiring beauty of dry gardens and the plants and people who love them, Cultivating Place is joined this week by photojournalist Saxon Holt.

As we near the close of a dry, dry season in the generally dry climates of much of the US west, this week Cultivating Place has the first of a two-episode focus on the inspiring beauty of dry gardens and the plants and people who love them.

Ernesto Alvarado is a Mexican-born, Southern California-based native plant and seed teacher and student. He is currently the Native Plant Nursery Assistant at the Riverside Corona Resource Conservation District. Listen in!

This week Cultivating Place offers out the first in a two-part series on the sacred of the everyday in our seasonal garden lives, the first in conversation with London-based photographer, artist, and Vicar's wife Kristin Perers, whose works and days are intentionally grounded in bits of nature and color all around her.

On Cultivating Place this week we celebrate (and say farewell) to the fullness of summer at its calendar-end with Labor Day weekend in full view here in the US.

In our final episode focusing specifically on ecologically rich and contributing gardens, we learn some innovative lessons in built ecology. Literally.

In this second in a three-part celebration of gardens that offer back more than they consume, I’m pleased to be speaking this week with Owen Wormser. Based in Western Massachusetts, Owen is the founder of Abound Design, providing design & consulting for regenerative, sustainability-focused landscapes.

In the heat of the dog days of summer, Cultivating Place celebrates the farms and gardens striving to not draw down resources but to contribute resources back into the world's flow of energy: fro providing shade, food, and retreat, these kinds of gardens are also replenishing rather than drawing down or polluting groundwater, they are sequestering carbon rather than spewing it, they are growing soil and mending the torn fabric of habitat corridors one urban, suburban, and rural home garden at a time.