Tag Archives: podcast

Podcast #7 – Permaculture: Everything Counts

Permaculture has to be one of the most interesting gardening movements I’ve discovered recently, and I have to thank Jerome Osentowski and Kareen Erbe hugely for letting me interview them about it. The idea of perennial food gardens delights me, and in permaculture that’s just part of the picture: it’s a whole philosophy of living sustainably, and of getting as much of what you need from your own plot of land as possible. I’m all for that, and as I mention part way through—well, both interviews , I think—it’s given me a name for something I’m already trying to do.

I’m honestly not sure what I was up to when I stumbled onto Jerome Osentowski’s Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute, which more or less blew my mind. Four greenhouses, and no power needed from off-site? Figs and passion fruit growing at over 7,000 feet? Hello? Continue reading

The Manic Gardener PODCAST

Want to know where I’ve been? I’ll tell you: podcasting. Yes, the Manic has gone live, and it’s been a steep learning curve. Hence my utter absence from the blog.

The show is an hour a week on organic and sustainable gardening, (you can find it here) interviewing everyone from a neighbor to Linda Chalker-Scott, one of the esteemed Garden Professors and former science editor of the alas now defunct Master Gardener Magazine. No one’s safe: not the local organic potato farmer, not his wife, not a Bokashi blogger in Switzerland.

And yet, I like to pretend, at least to myself, that there is some sort of organization behind it all, or underneath. After a certain amount of delving, here are the five major foci I’ve unearthed:
Continue reading

Podcast #3— Steps Towards Sustainability

Windrower and tractor, Wada Farms, Idaho

The Show

What first took me out to the Kimm’s farm was the fact that they grow organic seed potatoes. That operation, run by Yvonne Kimm, became the topic of “No Small Potatoes,” my second podcast.

But at least as interesting to me was what her husband, Jason, has done on the conventional fields to make them more sustainable. After all, no large operation can go organic overnight, and so the question arises: what can a conventional farm do to move away from the overuse of pesticides, herbicides, and even water? Continue reading