IF YOU DON’T KNOW Jennifer Jewell’s ‘Cultivating Place’ podcast, you’re in for a treat. It is produced at an NPR station in Northern California though focused not on her local area alone, but instead delivering “conversations on natural history and the human impulse to garden” from around the country and even world.
I was flattered to be invited to be a guest recently in this episode (I’ve embedded the player below if you wish to listen right here and now, or you can click over to learn more at Jennifer’s site), but I encourage you to browse Jennifer’s archive.
“Through thoughtful conversations with growers, gardeners, naturalists, scientists, artists and thinkers,” Jennifer says in her mission statement, “’Cultivating Place’ illustrates the many ways in which gardens and gardening are integral to our natural and cultural literacy–on par with Art, Science, Literature, Music, Religion.” A new episode launches every Thursday.
It is always a pleasure to hear your interviews. I so agree that there needs to be a way to reach young people. So many care not a thing about where their food comes from or simply in the pleasures of creating a space in which to live beyond the Ikea sofa. I am hopeful that this will change with all the talk about climate change etc.
My kids grew up living in the same house with a big yard and garden. They spent every season of every year out in the yard, observing and helping out. Now they’re grown in their early 30’s, they don’t have their own places. They’ve spent years in graduate school, then moving around for jobs. They seriously long for a place to make a garden, put down roots, cultivate a garden of their own and belong to a community. They have student loans to pay off, and working along with significant others and sharing their paths. I really don’t think it’s that we haven’t somehow ‘taught’ young people, we just haven’t done much to pass along the access to a ‘place to garden.’ When they get a chance to travel and visit me in my new place since I retired, they love to garden along with me, feed the chickens and make thoughtful suggestions. You don’t see young faces of gardeners at your symposiums because so many of them don’t have gardens and who knows if they ever will.
There are places, to rent and to buy. But they are not ideal. Student slums, where speculators have hold., small towns with no jobs.
You have to walk and bicycle around places and check out weekend activity. One can always. Trash pick while looking. Look for hollow stumps for planters. . Places with alleys or allees or byways can be interesting. I see houses from the 1600s that are generally married buildings. Look at foundations and the insect population.There seem to be a lot of vacancies. The businessnews papers fib. There are so many plans to put in crowded buildings with not enough parking. Theseimpact on those already there.
You can join a community garden and observe those in charge, maybe before you join.